This is a study about EDI in the emergent technological university sector or Irish higher education. The overall aim of the study is to explore and theorise the experiences of EDI practitioners, lecturers and policymakers of discourses of EDI and how these are taken up and enacted in their institutions and through these roles. The main focus is on EDI practitioners as their role in relation to enactment of EDI in HE. My locus in this study is as a critical scholar-practitioner who is influenced by critical feminism, policy studies and pedagogy in trying to understand assumptions and power in relation to practice. This study adopts a hybridised theoretical framework, bringing together Baker et.al’s equality of condition (2004), Ahmed’s theorisation of diversity (2012) and Ball et al.’s theory of enactment (2011) to construct a multi-perspectival analytical lens through which to examine how EDI is understood and enacted in Irish HE. It is a qualitative study and uses data from semi-structured interviews with three cohorts of EDI practitioners, lecturers and policymakers. I framed the methodology through a critical practitioner lens informed by lived experience as lecturer, EDI practitioner, and complicated by being an EDI researcher who is undertaking research on EDI practice in the new TU sector. Field work was conducted with 16 participants (5 EDI practitioners, 8 lecturers and 3 policymakers) to get multiple viewpoints on how EDI is thought about and enacted. All perspectives contribute to the ‘world-making’ of EDI and offer ways of thinking about EDI enactment. This range of perspectives and their different positionalities contributed to the overall findings, but the focus of the thesis is primarily on the experiences of EDI practitioners in TUs. This research reveals that EDI enactment in higher education emerges from the interplay of identity, visibility, performativity, and resistance. Participants identified contradictions, tensions and complexities in the 13 creation of the EDI fixture in HE and in institutional enactment of EDI, including through language, policy, practice and relationally. These tensions are experienced most acutely by EDI practitioners who are at the frontlines of institutional EDI practice. The findings illuminate EDI not as a stable institutional function but as contested, contingent, and constantly negotiated terrain where progress remains provisional and where EDI practitioners must navigate fundamental contradictions between authentic transformation and tokenistic performance. The findings from this research enhance knowledge of how EDI is conceptualised, located, experienced and enacted within HEIs. This exploration is needed as little is known about EDI in HE in Ireland and EDI practitioner roles in Ireland are under researched; this study addresses this gap. It makes a contribution to understanding EDI efforts, the challenges, complexity and the contributions of EDI practitioners and valuing that work. An additional contribution of this research is it puts EDI into the ‘institutional flow’ of academic discourse.