Race and Diversity: What Have We Learned?

This article briefly examines geographic scholarship on race and diversity to enumerate how such work can contribute to the Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure and Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity (ALIGNED) project's goal of creating a more diverse discipline and more diverse departments. Our review presents two arguments. First, diversity, as an object of analysis and desired institutional characteristic, is dynamic, unstable, and, above all, historically and geographically contingent. Studies of diversity, and efforts to create it, must begin from this observation. Second, we argue for diverse methodological and epistemological approaches but ones that are linked through a shared commitment to examining race and racism, diversity and inequalities, simultaneously.