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The aim of the paper is to connect the field of health management to other related academic discourses (critical management studies and critical development studies) that can contribute to a more interdisciplinary approach to understanding health organizations and management.

The paper's design is theoretical critique that blends post‐structural, critical management and critical development approaches into a focused discussion of modernity and its relevance to contemporary health management issues.

Modernity proliferates through a variety of rhetorical tropes that go unnoticed or remain invisible. Through a brief analysis of historical definitions of management and development, the findings suggest that health management could also be critiqued as a cultural and social construction, enriching anthropological studies as well as informing practical critiques of health projects in the development sector.

The conceptualisation of health‐management as a cultural construct of modernity opens up the prospect for some rich empirical studies into what management practices support the scientific‐rational claims on which it rests.

The critique informs a re‐appraisal of health management practices that are often taken for granted and ritualistic parts of organizational life. Such a re‐evaluation could lead to the implementation of more nuanced and appropriate health practices.

Connecting management and development discourses in this way has not been done before and its relevance to health management remains under‐researched. This paper highlights the way these discourses can enrich the study of health organizations and create a truly interdisciplinary understanding of health.

The author extends the work on diversity policy in UK higher education by centring the voices of Black and minority ethnic scholars and de-centring white comfort with the aim of a call to stop the pain that sanitised university diversity policies cause Black and minority ethnic scholars.

Using in-depth qualitative and auto-ethographic research methods, this paper engages with both respondents' narratives as well as the author's experience of carrying out the research within the walls of predominately white universities.

In order for universities to move beyond hollow and sanitised diversity, they must centre the voices of Black and minority ethnic scholars. Respondents spoke of their experiences of pain, and feelings of “taking up” space in predominately white universities. The author also discusses respondents' feelings towards diversity and inclusion policies such as the Race Equality Charter Mark.

The research is built on previous work on diversity by decentring white comfort.

The author advances a theory of white generosity, a product of whiteness and of hierarchised relationships between races characterised by the giving to the racialised person that which has not been asked for and which has no practical immediate purpose, which can be used by anti-racist scholars as a framework for analysing racial oppression.

Using postcolonial and cultural studies and deconstructionist techniques in tandem with autoethnography, the author uses textual readings to examine instances of “giving” shaped by white generosity, drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on the gift in order to deconstruct the structure and rhetorical moves of white generosity.

White generosity demands gratitude in excess of the value of the thing given. If for Derrida the gift is given unconditionally, becoming devalued as soon as it demands acknowledgement or draws attention to itself as gift, white generosity is the gift's inverse: a “giving” that manifests itself only as a demand for its supposed recipient's gratitude. Emancipation is no gift at all; simply a deferral of debt. The “gifts” of diversity, decolonisation, widening participation or access are all objects of brokerage in a system that is inherently unequal and violent for black folx.

White generosity is related to theoretical constructs, such as white fragility, that have commanded significant scholarly engagement. However, it has not previously been named or analysed in a systematic way. This article offers a theoretical framework for use by anti-racist activists and scholars to name, interrogate and deconstruct a powerful narrative used in the continued marginalisation of non-white folx.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the paradoxes of mainstream French anti- racism regarding Islamophobia. The authors focus on the driving role played by French republican values in the recurring inability of anti-racist activism, and anti-islamophobia in particular, to act upon the structural character of racism in France.

The authors’ analysis draws on a longitudinal and qualitative investigation of the “Sud-Education 93” controversy (SE93). The authors use the analytical framework provided by controversy studies in order to focus on the aftermath, in the public sphere, of the organisation by a French labour union of a minority-only workshop designed to provide teachers with a space for expression and purposeful guidance, in order to face Islamophobia and racism issues within French public schools. The authors collected an exhaustive set of data about the comments, criticisms and debates that emerged in the public sphere as a reaction to the workshop. The authors drew on situational analysis methodology, providing controversy analysts with several power-mapping techniques, in order to conduct a discursive analysis of the statements and claims made by the protagonists of the controversy.

First, the authors’ insights point out that French Islamophobia relies on the myth of the universal republican citizen that acts as a context-specific form of colour-blindism. Second, the authors shed light on the discursive and relational mechanisms that characterise the denial of Islamophobia undertaken by political actors who use “reverse racism” arguments as a form of backlash, i.e. a strategy of “fragility” (DiAngelo, 2018) consisting in maintaining artificially a never-ending controversy over Islamophobia. Finally, the authors discuss the role played by these strategies of fragility in the recurring rejection of anti-islamophobia activism in France and the limitations and prospects they embody for future forms of anti-racist strategies.

The Latourian perspective adopted in the paper focuses on the implications of the controversy over Islamophobia within the public sphere. The authors’ fieldwork suggests, however, that the internal dynamics of minority-only organisations embodies sites and répertoires of micro-contestation capable of bypassing on the short run, and perhaps overthrowing, the power of French hypocrisy about anti-racism and the backlash processes the authors observed in the public sphere.

The authors’ contribution lies in the in-depth analysis of “reverse racism” rhetorics as a strategy of fragility and its implications in terms of colour-blindism and backlash.