The Values of Diversity – Lecture by Lorraine Daston
📅 8 October 2025, 18:15–19:30
🏛️ University of Zurich, KOL-F-101
Lorraine Daston, winner of the Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science and member of the Collegium’s advisory board, will deliver a lecture on the history of values of diversity. She will examine how the concept of diversity, once largely confined to aesthetic and economic contexts, has rapidly acquired profound moral and political significance. Tracing its long history as a “wandering value,” she will show how diversity reveals the unexpected fluidity of boundaries between different normative realms.
It is startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly the value of diversity, until a few decades ago a value largely confined to the aesthetic and organic realms, has acquired deep political and moral significance. Universities, corporations, and governments are now judged by the degree to which they achieve diversity among their leaders and recognize diversity among their publics. Older values of the liberal polity, for example that of honoring merit without regard to creed, race, sex, or ethnicity, have been increasingly eclipsed by values that closely attend to these and other differentiating traits (which traits matter remains contentious). How did this sea change in value come about, and so swiftly? And what kind of value is diversity?
The long history of diversity as an aesthetic and economic value helps explain the recent rapid rise of diversity as a moral and political value. More generally, the case of the wandering value of diversity reveals how fluid the boundaries between what we usually think of as distinct normative realms can be.
