Challenging Diversity offers an intervention in a set of debates carved out across and through that place where the politics of equality meets the politics of diversity. In the process, my argument has focused on two sets of issues. The first relates to diversity's boundaries; on what basis can distinctions be drawn between those differences to be encouraged and enabled and those to be discouraged and undone? The second set of issues concerns the wider normative context within which struggles for equality and diversity are placed. This normative context can be seen in two quite different lights. As a conservative configuration of principles, it can work to ‘hold back’ the pursuit of change. At the same time, progressive norms provide a thicker, richer texture to the question of what diversity through equality actually entails.

My starting point has been the celebration of diversity – the valorisation of social and, in particular, cultural differences by those on the poststructuralist left. Yet, as I explored in the book's early chapters, despite the praise heaped upon a flourishing pluralism, few diversity theorists have been prepared to discard completely notions of value. As a result, the claim to celebrate diversity quickly boiled down to a debate about where the limits of diversity should lie.