Challenging Diversity: Steering Effects of Buzzwords in Projectified Healthcare

This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic "buzzwords" and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends-governance by buzzwords and projectification-often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as "diversity" become especially important in an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords (as typically vague terms that need to be fleshed out) are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a "doable" project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing "diversity." We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice.