Effecting Change in Academia: Strategies for Faculty Leadership

As a follow up to our recently published edited collection, Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership<https://www.routledge.com/Surviving-Sexism-in-Academia-Feminist-Strategies-for-Leadership/Cole-Hassel/p/book/9781138696846>, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel are soliciting proposals for an edited collection, Effecting Change in Academia: Strategies for Faculty Leadership. You can find the full call for proposals here:

https://sites.google.com/view/ecasfl/home

A regular review of the trade daily sites like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed will demonstrates that there is no shortage of concerns, problems, and challenges facing higher education in the current moment. Reductions in state funding to universities place ever greater pressure on faculty and staff to make cuts, seek new ‘revenue streams’ and do less with less. At the same time, most of the published work on leadership focuses on a narrowly defined sort of leadership, one that is largely unidirectional. This proposed edited collection calls for chapters that deploy a range of methodologies, but that focus on change efforts across a wide range of institutional environments in which writers describe successful change work. Possible topics may include:

Access to and support for students, faculty, and staff (including Students’ Rights to Their Own Language, emergency grants for students in need, parental leave policies, contingent faculty rights, Title IX initiatives, protections for DACA recipients, graduate and faculty labor organizations)

Benefits and workload changes (advocacy for improvements in, and support for, or resistance to imposed changes)

Acknowledgement of the value of particular types of service or research (area studies, scholarship of teaching and learning, public scholarship)

University policies and/or faculty and student led strategies that focus on harassment, bullying, and workplace environments

Methods for dealing effectively with burdensome administrative requests on faculty time

Strategies for confronting the language of crisis in higher education

Histories of effective change (longstanding LGBTQ centers and Women’s Centers, student organizations, faculty development initiatives, academic libraries and librarians, mentoring strategies, leadership development, labor organizing)

Curriculum development or classroom, department, university, or discipline-wide initiatives geared towards inclusion

Equity, transparency, and consistency in performance reviews, tenure and promotion decisions, and other evaluative processes

We seek to acknowledge how change can happen when the people who have the incentive to change (but perhaps little power) and the decision-makers with the power work together. Successful chapters will describe the writers’ goals, how change was leveraged, and how the goals were achieved. We are particularly interested in proposals that address the following:

§ Rhetorical strategies and values for effecting change

§ The roles of various disciplines in making change

§ Interdisciplinary collaboration

§ Cross-campus collaboration

§ Cross-rank collaboration (graduate and faculty, contingent and tenured, faculty and administrative, student and administrative)

§ Confronting white supremacy and engaging in anti-racist decision-making

§ Partnerships between higher education and local communities/community organizations

§ Disciplinary organizations addressing challenges

§ Launching initiatives and securing resources for diverse groups (inclusive and intersectional initiatives that support multicultural, immigrant, LGBTQ, women, veterans, and other students, faculty, and staff)

Please submit a chapter proposal of 500 words to Holly Hassel (holly.hassel@uwc.edu) and Kirsti Cole (kirsti.cole@mnsu.edu) by January 15, 2018. Chapter proposals should describe the author’s primary focus or claim, include a brief discussion of methodology and data sources, and situate the chapter within existing literature on the topic. Chapters will be formatted in MLA style, 8th edition. Please include author(s’) names, institutional affiliation (if relevant), and contact information (email). Acceptances will be confirmed by March 1, 2018. Full manuscripts due September 1, 2018.

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