The politics of happiness
In 2010, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed published The Promise of Happiness, a book that fundamentally changed the way we think about happiness: not as a personal emotion, but as a political and social tool. Together with her later work On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), Ahmed developed what we might call a critical framework for reading institutions: an affective and institutional analysis that unpacks how organisations, universities, and public bodies use the language of positivity to present a version of themselves that bears little resemblance to the reality experienced by those who work or study within them.
When good words do bad things
The key concept is happy talk (and its close relative, mission talk): that polished, optimistic, celebratory form of institutional communication that speaks of inclusion, diversity, and equality as achievements already secured, while obscuring power dynamics, concrete exclusions, and the experiences of those who live a very different reality inside those same institutions. Happiness, from this perspective, is not a neutral goal: it is a promise that steers behaviour towards what is socially approved, and silences those who do not recognise themselves in that narrative.
A recent article by Monica O’Mullane, titled: Enhancing Participation and Overcoming Institutional ‘Happy Talk’: Developing and Applying a Participatory Visual Mapping Technique as part of Research Interviews with Athena SWAN Ireland Charter Team Members, offers a compelling and concrete application of this framework, examining the case of Athena SWAN, one of the best-known institutional programmes for gender equality in higher education, in the context of an Irish university. That is where I want to start.
Mapping what institutions actually do
The most original methodological contribution of the article lies in its attempt to work around the happy talk mechanism.
O’Mullane developed a visual mapping technique, a participatory method in which interviewees are asked to write concrete actions on cards and place them on a physical map designed specifically to counter the drift towards institutional rhetoric during interviews.
This is an evolution and synthesis of existing participatory approaches that, to the author’s knowledge, had never previously been applied to a research context of this kind. The underlying insight is simple but powerful: when people are asked to name real, tangible actions that can be located in space and time, it becomes much harder to retreat into ready-made narratives.
When the mask slips
The findings are telling. Thirty-five percent of the senior managers in the sample were unable to complete the exercise, not because of any lack of competence or goodwill, but because their repertoire consisted almost entirely of happy talk. They spoke fluently about “organisational culture”, “inclusion strategies”, and “institutional commitment”, yet were unable to translate any of this into concrete, mappable actions. The author reads this as a form of institutional peacocking: a kind of performative display in which securing an award – such as the Athena SWAN charter mark – becomes more important than the actual change that award is meant to recognise.
What emerges is what we might call the paradox of gender washing: the more skilled an institution becomes at talking about equality, the greater the risk that it moves further away from actually delivering it. When the language of diversity hardens into repeatable, socially rewarded formulas, it stops being a critical tool and becomes a mechanism for closure instead.
Research as a political act
It is worth reflecting on what makes participatory methods effective beyond this particular case study. Visual mapping is not simply a workaround for rhetoric: it is an epistemological and political choice. Shifting agency from the researcher to the participant – asking people to show rather than merely tell – means redesigning the power relations within the research space itself. The person holding the cards drives the conversation; the person answering a fixed list of questions does not.
There is also an ethical dimension that the article addresses carefully. The sample was small, some participants expressed fear of professional repercussions, and the author had to balance the need to make institutional dynamics visible with the need to protect individual identities. This is not a minor detail, but an integral part of a research project that seeks to apply the principles of inclusion not only as its subject matter, but as a practice within the research process itself.
The question worth asking
What the article ultimately offers is an invitation to ask an uncomfortable question: how do we know whether an institution is genuinely changing, or simply becoming better at appearing to change? O’Mullane does not provide a definitive answer, but she offers tools – both methodological and conceptual – for asking the question more honestly. For anyone working or researching in the field of EDI in higher education, it is well worth tracking down.
Monica O’Mullane, University of Cork. ALL IRELAND JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION (AISHE-J) Volume 18, Number 1(Spring2026)
AI‑Assisted: Portions of this text were translated from Italian to English and reviewed for English language by AI, which also suggested paragraph headings. The entire content has been thoroughly verified by RB.