Whiteness, Space, and the Architecture of Exclusion

This book examines how institutional spaces, lecture theatres, corridors, offices, and boardrooms actively shape who belongs and who is marginalised. While diversity and inclusion efforts often focus on representation, leadership, and policy, this book argues that space itself is a critical and overlooked dimension of inequality.

Whiteness, Space, and the Architecture of Exclusion examines how institutional spaces, lecture theatres, corridors, offices, and boardrooms actively shape who belongs and who is marginalised. While diversity and inclusion efforts often focus on representation, leadership, and policy, this book argues that space itself is a critical and overlooked dimension of inequality. Drawing on Black feminist theory, disability justice, and spatial analysis, the book explores how whiteness operates through architectural design, temporal regimes, and everyday institutional practices. It combines conceptual analysis with lived experience to examine themes such as architectural privilege, the performance of inclusion, containment through bureaucracy, and the regulation of movement, access, and visibility. By shifting attention from who occupies space to how space is organised, this book offers a new framework for understanding institutional power. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of critical race studies, architecture, geography, higher education, and organisational studies, as well as policymakers, architects, and institutional leaders concerned with equity, access, and social justice.