Malperformative Inclusion: When Institutions Perform Awareness Without Action

When Institutions Perform Awareness Without Action

Amy Tucker, DSocSci Candidate, Royal Roads University

ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248

For nineteen years I walked past a student lounge on my way to teach. The lounge was beautiful: comfortable seating, good natural light, a wall of windows facing the campus. It appeared in the university’s recruitment materials. It communicated welcome. And almost every time I walked past it, during the evening hours when my international students most needed a place to study, eat, and rest, it was locked.

I noticed this. I kept noticing it. I noted the hours posted on the door, hours that ended before most of my students finished their evening obligations. I noted the recruitment photographs that showed the lounge full of smiling, diverse faces during the hours it was open and available for photography. I noted that nobody seemed to find the locked door remarkable. The lounge existed. The institution had built it. The fact that the people it was ostensibly designed to serve could rarely use it was, somehow, beside the point.

I now have a name for what that locked lounge represents. I call it malperformative inclusion: institutional actions that demonstrate awareness of equity problems while maintaining the structural conditions that produce them. The prefix mal- signals active harm rather than mere failure. The lounge was malperformative because it did something worse than failing to include: it performed inclusion visibly enough to satisfy institutional self-image while withholding the conditions (the hours, the access, the material support) that inclusion requires. It was an answer to a question the institution had already decided the answer to: “Do we care about belonging?” The lounge said yes. The lock said something else entirely.

This page develops that concept through published scholarship and my own experience. It reveals nothing about the empirical findings of my doctoral study, which will be shared following the defence. What it offers is the theoretical architecture of a concept I believe names something the existing literature has identified in fragments yet failed to articulate as a coherent analytical framework: the institutional capacity to perform awareness of exclusion as a mechanism for sustaining it.

Sara Ahmed and the Concept That Got Me Halfway There

The intellectual foundation for malperformative inclusion is Sara Ahmed’s (2012) concept of non-performativity, developed in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Ahmed, drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, argued that institutional diversity statements frequently fail to bring about what they name. The statement substitutes for the action it describes. The diversity policy, the equity committee, the inclusion workshop become what Ahmed calls institutional furniture: objects that demonstrate the institution’s awareness of a problem while functioning as evidence that the problem has been addressed. The statement is the action. The action is the statement. Nothing else follows.

Ahmed’s analysis is incisive and essential. It explains why universities can produce dozens of diversity reports, hire Chief Diversity Officers, launch inclusion task forces, and still sustain the conditions that produce exclusion. The reports and the officers and the task forces are the institutional response. They are performances of awareness that function as substitutes for structural change.

Yet Ahmed’s concept, as powerful as it is, describes a failure. Non-performativity implies that diversity statements misfire: they intend transformation yet produce nothing. My experience suggests something more troubling. The locked lounge was performing. It was doing exactly what the institution needed it to do. It appeared in brochures. It satisfied accreditation criteria. It demonstrated that the university possessed the infrastructure of welcome. The fact that it was locked during the hours when international students most needed it was, from the institution’s operational perspective, irrelevant to its function. The lounge succeeded at its institutional purpose. It failed only at its ostensible one.

This is the distinction that moved me from Ahmed’s non-performativity to my concept of malperformative inclusion. Non-performativity describes equity speech that fails. Malperformative inclusion describes equity actions that succeed at the wrong purpose: they succeed at demonstrating institutional awareness, satisfying audit requirements, generating marketing material, and absorbing critique into bureaucratically safe channels. They fail only at the purpose they claim to serve: creating the conditions for genuine belonging. The failure is where the analysis begins. The success is where the harm resides.

Distinguishing Malperformative Inclusion from Related Concepts

The concept occupies a specific analytical position within a family of related terms. Precision matters here because the existing vocabulary (tokenism, performative inclusion, diversity theatre, non-performativity) each names something real yet something different from what I am describing.

Table 1
Malperformative Inclusion in Relation to Adjacent Concepts

Concept	What It Describes	How Malperformative Inclusion Differs
Tokenism (Kanter, 1977)	Numerical representation without meaningful participation or power. The institution includes members of marginalized groups in visible positions while excluding them from decision-making. Focused on the presence of individuals.	Malperformative inclusion operates at the level of institutional systems rather than individual representation. It attends to how policies, spaces, and structures perform inclusion rather than whether specific individuals are present. A fully diverse workforce can still operate within malperformative structures.
Performative inclusion (general usage)	Surface-level diversity displays without substance. Often used colloquially to describe institutional hypocrisy around equity. Lacks analytical specificity about mechanisms.	Malperformative inclusion specifies the mechanism: institutional actions that succeed at demonstrating awareness while maintaining exclusionary conditions. The analytical precision lies in identifying how the performance itself functions as a governance tool rather than merely labelling it as insincere.
Non-performativity (Ahmed, 2012)	Equity-oriented speech acts that fail to bring about what they name. Diversity statements substitute for the change they describe. Framed as institutional failure: saying replaces doing.	Malperformative inclusion reframes the dynamic from failure to success at an alternative purpose. Non-performativity implies misfiring; malperformative inclusion identifies how equity gestures hit a different target: market positioning, audit compliance, reputational management. The harm is productive rather than inert.
Diversity theatre	Performative equity events and initiatives designed primarily for optics. Often describes one-time events (heritage months, guest lectures) that lack structural follow-through.	Malperformative inclusion is systemic rather than episodic. It describes how equity awareness is embedded into ongoing institutional operations: the permanent lounge that is permanently locked, the policy that is permanently unenforced, the committee that permanently meets without power. The malperformance is structural, continuous, and designed into governance.
Performative silence (Tucker, forthcoming)	Doing without saying: material change that requires no reputational return. The regenerative inversion of non-performativity. Institutions act to dismantle exclusion without announcing, branding, or taking credit for the action.	Performative silence is the conceptual opposite of malperformative inclusion. Where malperformative inclusion performs awareness without action, performative silence enacts change without performance. Together, the two concepts map the spectrum from institutional harm (awareness as substitute for action) to institutional integrity (action as substitute for branding).

Note. This table maps malperformative inclusion within a conceptual field. The distinctions are analytical: in practice, multiple dynamics often coexist within the same institution. The table’s purpose is to demonstrate that malperformative inclusion names a specific mechanism (the productive deployment of equity awareness for non-equity purposes) that adjacent concepts identify partially yet fail to articulate fully.

Four Mechanisms of Malperformative Inclusion

Malperformative inclusion operates through identifiable mechanisms. I have traced four across my experience, the published literature, and the structural analysis developed in my dissertation. Each mechanism describes how institutional awareness of exclusion functions as a tool for maintaining it.

Mechanism One: Symbolic Curricular Insertion

The institution adds content about marginalized perspectives to curricula without restructuring the pedagogical frameworks, assessment methods, or epistemic assumptions that produced the exclusion. A module on Indigenous business practices is inserted into a course whose grading rubric still privileges Western analytical frameworks. A guest lecture on international perspectives is scheduled as a one-time event within a semester otherwise organized around domestic case studies. The insertion performs awareness. The structure that makes the insertion necessary remains untouched.

I enacted this mechanism myself for years without recognizing it. I added diversity content to my business ethics courses. I invited guest speakers from international backgrounds. I created discussion prompts about cross-cultural communication. And the entire time, the course’s theoretical framework, its assessment criteria, and its implicit definition of what counts as “good business thinking” remained rooted in assumptions that excluded the very knowledge systems I was ostensibly welcoming. What Bourdieu (1991) would recognize as symbolic violence, meaning the imposition of dominant cultural frameworks as though they were neutral, was operating through my syllabus while I decorated its margins with gestures toward inclusion. What Fricker (2007) would identify as hermeneutical injustice, meaning the absence of interpretive resources for marginalized knowers, was embedded in my rubrics while I celebrated the “diverse perspectives” in my classroom. The diversity content was an addition to a structure that required transformation. I was malperforming inclusion in my own classroom.

Mechanism Two: Representational Hiring Without Governance Power

The institution adjusts demographic ratios in visible positions without altering decision-making hierarchies or workload distribution. Faculty of colour are hired into contract positions that lack voting rights in academic governance. International staff are featured in marketing materials while occupying roles without budgetary authority. The representation is real. The power is withheld.

Grimmett (2018) documented how Canadian institutions hire fixed-term instructors for targeted equity initiatives because doing so offers cost-efficient flexibility: the institution meets short-term demographic targets without committing long-term resources. Once audit-cycle needs are met, the contracts can lapse. The malperformance lies in treating labour insecurity as a functional feature: precarious appointments align with cost containment priorities while also serving symbolic equity imperatives calibrated for reputational return.

Mechanism Three: Compliance-Oriented Accessibility

The institution meets legal requirements for accessibility without eliminating the barriers those requirements were designed to address. Ramps are installed yet lead to entrances that require key-card access unavailable to visitors. Captions are added to videos yet course materials remain distributed in formats that screen readers struggle to parse. The compliance is documented. The barrier persists. Wong (2024) describes this as the production of auditable accessibility artefacts that enter official records as fulfilled obligations, then reappear in marketing campaigns as evidence of “universal design,” while the lived experience of navigating the campus with a disability remains unchanged.

Mechanism Four: Discursive Politeness Regimes

The institution softens critical equity discourse into what Liera and Desir (2023) call “happy talk” diversity: language that acknowledges difference without naming power, that celebrates plurality without examining extraction, that invites “dialogue” without tolerating dissent. The politeness regime prevents robust interrogation of structural oppression by framing equity discourse in palatable terms. Critique is reabsorbed into the institution’s own language of care, emerging as “opportunities for growth” or “areas for continued improvement” rather than as evidence of systemic harm.

I experienced this mechanism from the inside. In committee meetings where I raised concerns about contract faculty exclusion from governance, the response was invariably framed in the language of process: “We appreciate you raising this. We will take it to the appropriate body for consideration.” The language performed receptivity. The structure that produced the concern remained intact. The committee thanked me for my contribution while the contribution vanished into the institutional record without producing change.

Malperformative Aesthetics: When Inclusion Becomes Architecture

In my doctoral research, I extend malperformative inclusion into a concept I call malperformative aesthetics: the spatial and visual register of the same dynamic. Where malperformative inclusion operates in policy and institutional structures, malperformative aesthetics captures how this logic materialises in architecture, signage, interior design, and the built environment of the campus itself.

The locked lounge is malperformative aesthetics in its most concentrated form. The space is architecturally inclusive: it communicates welcome through design, furnishing, and location. Yet the conditions for inhabitation (the hours, the access, the programming, the food) are withheld. The architecture performs inclusion while the schedule denies it. The building says one thing. The lock says another. And the institution can point to the building as evidence of its commitment while the lock remains, somehow, unremarkable.

Ahmed (2012) analyzed diversity as a textual phenomenon: statements, policies, reports. My concept of malperformative aesthetics extends her analysis into material and visual domains. When an institution displays the flags of sixty nations above a cafeteria that serves no food from those nations, the flags are malperformative aesthetics. When a campus building features Indigenous art at its entrance yet offers no Indigenous pedagogical practices within its classrooms, the art is malperformative aesthetics. When a recruitment brochure photographs a diverse group of students in a space those students can rarely access, the photograph is malperformative aesthetics. In each case, the visual environment performs inclusion that the material conditions withhold.

This extension matters because international students navigate campus spatially and visually before they navigate it discursively. They see the flags before they read the policies. They encounter the architecture of welcome before they discover the schedule of exclusion. Malperformative aesthetics captures what surveys and policy analysis miss: the embodied, spatial, visual experience of moving through an institution that looks like it was designed for you while feeling like it was built for someone else.

Why Institutions Malperform: The Academic Capitalism Logic

The question that naturally follows from describing malperformative inclusion is: Why? Why would an institution invest in the infrastructure and rhetoric of inclusion while withholding the conditions that make inclusion real?

The answer lies in the political economy of contemporary higher education. Slaughter and Rhoades’ (2004) concept of academic capitalism describes how universities have been integrated into the knowledge economy, treating students as revenue streams, faculty as flexible labour, and institutional reputation as competitive capital. Under academic capitalism, diversity is a market asset. International student enrolment generates revenue through differential tuition. Diversity metrics satisfy accreditation bodies. Inclusive branding attracts applicants in a competitive recruitment landscape. The performance of inclusion has measurable market value. The substance of inclusion has measurable market cost.

Malperformative inclusion emerges from this gap between the market value of performing inclusion and the market cost of providing it. Building a lounge is a capital expenditure that appears on the institutional balance sheet as an asset. Staffing the lounge during evening hours, programming it with culturally responsive events, stocking it with food that international students recognize, and keeping it open when the students who need it most are on campus: these are operating costs that appear on the institutional balance sheet as expenditures. The malperformance is economically rational. The institution maximizes the reputational return of the capital investment while minimizing the operating costs of making the investment functional.

Tamtik and Guenter (2019) documented this logic in Canadian universities, finding that inclusion efforts are often time-limited projects tied to specific funding streams rather than integrated responsibilities embedded into base operations. Neoliberal budget cycles favour initiatives with demonstrable short-term impacts, discouraging the multi-year commitments needed for sustained redistribution of resources. Consequently, the equity initiative becomes a project with a start date, an end date, a deliverable, and a report. The report is the outcome. The conditions that prompted the initiative persist.

Haapakoski and Pashby (2017) sharpened this analysis in the context of internationalisation, showing how institutional marketing of global diversity produces what they call curated cosmopolitanism: international festivals stripped of colonial histories, partnership agreements designed to photograph visiting scholars without altering control over research agendas, recruitment campaigns that stage cultural plurality for the camera without redistributing epistemic authority. The curated cosmopolitanism is malperformative because it generates photogenic inclusivity while consolidating the dominance of Western curricular and governance frameworks.

Confessing My Own Malperformance

I would be dishonest if I positioned malperformative inclusion solely as something institutions do to people like me and the students I teach. I enacted it. For nineteen years.

Every time I added a “diversity case study” to a business ethics course whose assessment criteria still privileged Western analytical frameworks, I was malperforming inclusion. Every time I invited an international student to share their perspective in class discussion yet graded their written work against rubrics that valued Standard English fluency over conceptual insight, I was malperforming inclusion. Every time I celebrated the “rich cultural diversity” of my classroom on course evaluations while teaching a curriculum that treated Western organizational theory as universal, I was performing awareness of the problem while maintaining the conditions that produced it.

This confession is analytically productive rather than merely penitential. It demonstrates that malperformative inclusion operates through individuals as well as structures. I was a caring, committed teacher who genuinely valued my students’ perspectives and worked hard to create inclusive classroom environments. I was also a teacher operating within institutional structures that constrained what “inclusive” could mean: the curriculum was set by permanent faculty I had no authority to override, the assessment criteria were standardised across sections I had no governance power to redesign, and my contract status meant that pushing too hard against departmental conventions risked the employment I depended on. My malperformance was structurally produced. Understanding it as such is what distinguishes malperformative inclusion from individual hypocrisy.

The student’s question about grandmother’s wisdom exposed my malperformance. She asked where her grandmother’s knowledge of running a textile business, knowledge transmitted through practice, relationship, and intergenerational teaching, fit within a curriculum organized around Western case study analysis. I had no answer. The curriculum had no room for her question. And I had spent years treating that absence as an oversight rather than recognizing it as what de Sousa Santos (2014) calls epistemicide: the systematic destruction or delegitimisation of knowledge systems that challenge the dominance of Western epistemology. The grandmother’s wisdom was excluded from the curriculum because the curriculum was designed to exclude it, and I had been the instrument of that exclusion, teaching it semester after semester with genuine enthusiasm and genuine blindness.

What Malperformative Inclusion Costs

The costs of malperformative inclusion are distributed unevenly, falling heaviest on the populations the institution claims to serve.

Table 2
The Costs of Malperformative Inclusion Across Institutional Populations

Population	How Malperformative Inclusion Produces Harm
International students	They invest in an institution marketed as welcoming yet discover that the welcome is architectural rather than operational. They experience a gap between what was promised and what is provided that erodes trust, generates confusion, and produces what I call the time tax: the systematic appropriation of their temporal resources through bureaucratic compliance, institutional navigation, and the emotional labour of performing belonging in spaces that withhold it. The recruitment brochure becomes a promissory note the institution declines to honour.
Contract faculty	They are tasked with delivering inclusive education within structures that exclude them from the governance decisions that shape what “inclusive” means. Their pedagogical innovations are celebrated in teaching awards yet carry no weight toward permanent employment. They enact the institution’s inclusion rhetoric in classrooms while experiencing the institution’s exclusion logic in their own employment conditions. The Teaching Award becomes a recognition of labour the institution has already decided it can discard.
Equity-seeking staff	They are hired to “do diversity” within offices that lack authority over the budgets, curricula, and hiring processes where exclusion is most entrenched. Their labour produces reports, events, and awareness campaigns that satisfy audit requirements without producing structural change. They absorb the emotional costs of institutional inequity while the institution absorbs the reputational benefits of their presence. Their positions are often the first eliminated when budgets contract.
The institution itself	Malperformative inclusion corrodes institutional integrity from within. Students, faculty, and staff who recognize the gap between rhetoric and reality lose trust in the institution’s stated commitments. This trust deficit undermines the very engagement, loyalty, and goodwill that the institution’s marketing seeks to generate. Malperformative inclusion produces diminishing returns: each new equity initiative is received with greater scepticism by the populations it claims to serve.

Note. These costs are structural rather than individual. They are produced by the gap between institutional performance and institutional provision, operating across all populations simultaneously yet falling with greatest force on those with the least institutional power to resist them.

The Alternative: Performative Silence

If malperformative inclusion is the disease, what does the cure look like? In my dissertation, I develop a companion concept I call performative silence: the deliberate withdrawal of symbolic performance in favour of material change that requires no reputational return.

Performative silence is distinct from institutional inaction. It means doing the work without demanding credit for it. Where non-performativity involves saying without doing, performative silence involves doing without saying. Change the exam schedule so students have time to use the circle of chairs rather than announcing an “Indigenous Pedagogical Innovation Initiative.” Extend the lounge hours to match the actual patterns of international student campus use rather than launching a “Belonging Task Force” to study the problem. Redesign the grading rubric to recognize multilingual competence rather than publishing a “Language Diversity Statement” that changes nothing about how student writing is assessed.

The concept is deliberately provocative. It asks institutions to measure their commitment to inclusion by what they change rather than by what they announce. It suggests that the most inclusive institutions may be the quietest ones: the ones whose equity work is so thoroughly integrated into their operations that it requires no branding, no task force, and no annual report. This is, of course, aspirational. Institutions operate within accountability frameworks that require reporting. Accreditation bodies demand evidence of equity efforts. Funders expect deliverables. Yet the aspiration itself is diagnostic: if an institution cannot imagine doing equity work without announcing it, the announcement has become the purpose rather than the means.

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I developed the concept of malperformative inclusion because I needed language for something I had observed for nineteen years without being able to name. The locked lounge. The Teaching Award that preceded the termination. The diversity content I added to courses whose structures remained untouched. The committee meetings that thanked me for my contributions while my contributions disappeared. Each was an instance of the same institutional logic: the capacity to demonstrate awareness of a problem as a mechanism for stabilizing the conditions that produce it.

Ahmed (2012) gave me the foundation. She showed me that diversity statements can substitute for the change they describe. What my experience added was the recognition that this substitution is, from the institution’s perspective, functional rather than failed. The malperformance succeeds at what the institution needs: market positioning, audit compliance, reputational management, and the containment of critique. It fails only at what it claims to serve: the creation of conditions under which international students, contract faculty, equity-seeking staff, and everyone else positioned at institutional margins can genuinely belong.

The concept is an invitation to look at what institutions do rather than what they say, to evaluate inclusion by its material conditions rather than its symbolic gestures, and to ask, when confronted with a beautifully designed lounge in a recruitment brochure: What time does it close?

This page develops a theoretical concept through the researcher’s own experience and the published literature. The empirical evidence for how this concept operates, gathered through visual and dialogic methods in my doctoral study, will be shared on this site following the defence.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

Grimmett, P. (2018). Contract academic staff and the erosion of academic community. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 48(3), 1–17.

Haapakoski, J., & Pashby, K. (2017). Mapping the field of research on ‘international students’: Questioning assumptions and knowledge production in a delimited field. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(6), 927–940.

Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books.

Liera, R., & Desir, C. (2023). Disrupting “happy talk” diversity: Toward a critical race analysis of equity language in higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 94(1), 1–26.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tamtik, M., & Guenter, M. (2019). Policy analysis of equity, diversity and inclusion strategies in Canadian universities. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 49(3), 41–56.

Wong, A. (2024). Auditable accessibility and the limits of compliance frameworks in post-secondary institutions. Disability Studies Quarterly, 44(1).