So far, Challenging Diversity has attended to the question as to how to identify and undo relations of inequality in the light of the social processes and norms that underpin them. However, while I have explored different strategies and techniques, a central premise of my argument has been the impossibility of pinning change down. So, in chapter 4, I argued for individual equality of power as a political aspiration, to be pursued through dismantling social inequalities. At the same time I suggested that equality of power was an unattainable goal, while its pursuit needed to confront the likelihood of new inequalities arising. This fluidity and lack of certainty does not make change pointless, however. It simply makes it more complex. In this chapter and the one that follows, I address one particular aspect of the change process: the introduction of new sustainable practices and routines. More specifically I ask: what techniques and strategies are needed to create new, embedded social practices? But this question has a twist, since the practices in which I am interested are those at odds with the wider status quo.

For the most part, diversity politics has paid little attention to this issue. More has been said by liberal multicultural writers concerned with the dilemmas posed by assimilation, on the one hand, and social accommodation, on the other. However, while such writing has focused on the problem of survival for minority practices, its emphasis on ethnic differences means that other differences, particularly normative ones, become bracketed.