Talking/Not Talking about Race: The Enregisterments of Culture in Higher Education Discourses:
Bonnie Urciuoli
In higher education "diversity" discourses, culture routinely stands in for race, but its use is unevenly enregistered. Examination of three web pages at one college shows contrasting entextualizations of culture: in promotional discourse, culture is loosely associated with diversity; in describing student organizations, culture is variously associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, language, and gender; for multicultural programs, culture is most tightly associated with racial markedness. Culture is most complexly enregistered in spoken discourse among students of color, indexing racial markedness experienced as subjectivity, family, class, and location. Framing all these usages is a neoliberalization of racial markedness, as in the idea of "educating the community." [enregisterment, indexicality, higher education, culture, diversity]