The atmospheric attunement of diversity interventions: learnings from a dance performance

Abstract

Since the start of diversity management in organizations, interventions have been primarily oriented toward altering individuals’ cognition, missing out on the potential of the embodied and materially mediated character of learning and interacting as experimented with in arts-based interventions. In this study, through ethnographically exploring a dance performance, whose main purpose is to create a community between a diverse cast and audience, we aim to rethink interventions around diversity. In particular, we turn to the notion of atmospheric attunement to investigate how, in this artistic context, a diverse group of people learns to relate differently. From this, we theorize two conditions of possibility for thinking differently about diversity interventions: (1) a sentient focus on atmospheric attuning that collectively connects embodied differences, and (2) the material mediation of nonhuman elements that enables the co-creation of these affirmative experiences. Together, both conditions suggest considering diversity intervention as a politics of affirmative experience.

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