Doing diversity inclusively: 'East Asians' in western universities

This chapter responds to a growing demand for recognition of plural forms of knowledge production in international HE, by drawing attention to the presence of racialised East Asian students in western academia. An often forgotten group, they remain peripheral, despite the joint contribution of anti-imperialist, postcolonial, multiculturalist, feminist, indigenous, and diversity scholars. This marginalisation calls for reflection, and this chapter initiates the conversion by discussing how East Asians are racialised and subject to western racism and coloniality. Ignorance about and misrecognition of this group prohibit diversity agendas from including them on equal, participatory terms. To illustrate this, I contrast two inclusion approaches that co-produce and reproduce the European secular-versus-religious divide. When international students are sorted into differentiated channels of integration, campus diversity keeps intact the shell knowledge structures that readily exclude and illy represent the diverse knowledge embodied within western academia. Besides racial diversification, doing diversity inclusively also incorporates a decolonial epistemological inclusion.