Conference Agenda

Each morning brings a news story in the U.S. with implications for higher education–threats on international students and grants denied or pulled back. As an associate provost I find myself existing in this landscape and at the same time trying to lead and perhaps protect the institutions that I want to survive. As I interact with people, in moments filled with anxiety, uncertainty, and pain, I find myself returning to writings by black feminist scholars on love, specifically the work of Jennifer Nash (2011, 2019) and bell hooks (2001).

Nash proposes we focus on love-politics that centers on vulnerability and witnessing. Love-politics is defined as “a tradition marked by transforming love from the personal…into a theory of justice" (Nash, 2019, p. 115 & 116). Nash’s writing helps us to see that leading with love-politics offers the potential for a powerful reconception of the public sphere and institutions and new forms of relationality marked by collective witnessing and vulnerability. Similarly, hooks (2001) calls us to live by a love ethic and argues that we utilize all the dimensions of love–care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate–in our everyday lives.

This leading with love invites us into a ‘politics of the open end’, orienting our leadership ‘toward a yet-unknown future’. Or as Nash writes ‘the could’. Higher education could be different. It could be a space of love and care. As leaders we can go beyond the limits we impose on ourselves; this involves vulnerability, witnessing, and is risky. How do we show vulnerability and at the same time lead through spaces of collective witnessing? I’m hopeful that leaders can create spaces of collective reimagining and insist that our institutional communities are spaces that unlock sacred, loving possibilities even under current conditions.

“When forced into a binary, you always choose wrong”

- Jelani Wilson (as quoted in brown, 2017, p. 155).

I find myself in-between, in the middle… middle management, you might say; quintessentially ‘stuck’ between upper administration and the faculty, between being leader and being led.

But, as Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) assert, “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed” (p. 25). I may be ‘stuck’ in the middle, but “people can simultaneously be stuck and do things, and this is not nothing” (Biehl & Locke, 2017, p. 21). Perhaps this ‘stuck and still doing things’ is like Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) discussion of voyaging between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth space may be like the sea in which becoming happens, and striated space may be like a city block (or perhaps the structures of particular higher education institutions) where ‘progress’ takes place, but “the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 474). In this way, Deleuzian “concepts reject a binary logic (either/or, this or that) in favor of a logic of connection, a logic of the and (this and this and this and . . .)” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 226, italics in the original). This is reminiscent of brown’s (2017) discussions on wavicles, or objects that “exhibit both wave and particle properties” (p. 45; see also Barad, 2007)—they are a both/and.

Thus, I explore what is possible for leadership in the academy when we lean into the middle, the in-between, by (re)reading and thinking-with poststructural/posthuman/new materialist concepts (e.g., Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) and activist/social movement literature (e.g., brown, 2017) together and apart. Perhaps we do not have to choose (‘wrong’) from the binary of leader/led; perhaps we can engage both/and…and…and…

I consider the intersection of field-based knowledge with leadership practices, working against bifurcating the one from the other despite institutional roles that foreground discreet working identities within education. I do this from learned experiences, transitioning as I have from traditional faculty roles (where success was largely dependent on scholarly, field-based recognition and accomplishment) to administrative positions (evaluated according to institutionally-oriented claims of success). I do so as an experiment of relationality—one that begins with the assumption that to separate the one from the other is a superficial endorsement of the liberal framings that my scholarly and leadership practices openly critique. I do not aim for some wholeness of a scholar-leader (or administrative-scholar) but rather a challenge to institutional framings that are loathe to release a modernist past.

To ground my presentation, I work through my shift from a faculty “research methodologist” to administrative title. I offer these shifts as less progressive (or otherwise linear) than experimental moments where philosophical concepts such as being, practices, time, and space are differently understood, experienced, and enacted through the friction of contextual change and specific shifts in role.

I engage with the work of Thomas Nail (2019) to generate a series of productive experiments with the potential to challenge and change how I/we have encountered leadership in education. More than bringing relational materialism to bear on leadership, my aim is to think with process philosophy such that otherwise commonsensical notions of leadership and faculty work bend into unrecognizable shape and difference is possible.

Critical Posthumanism, through its troubling of humanistic framings and exposure of the entangled relationships between humans, technologies, and the environment, calls for the application of a new ethical approach to deal adequately with the complexities and paradoxes of these times. These complexities are particularly marked in UK academia; a space fraught with stringent funding cuts, job precarity, threats to intellectual freedom, and fractious industrial relations. To lead in this space is challenging, particularly when onerous management and administrative tasks compete with space for creative and collaborative work. Virginia Woolf’s (1938) call ‘Think, we must’ - part of a public diatribe against war in which the author linked masculine symbols of authority with militarism and misogyny - feels particularly pertinent in its rally to think differently about how we are led, and reclaim philosophy as an act of resistance. However, spaces to reflect on leadership, and put to work philosophical concepts are sadly lacking in the neoliberal academy. In this paper I explore how affirmative practice (Braidotti, 2011) has enabled me to find these spaces in my role as Programme Director; a role which requires me to administer and lead a Masters degree while fulfilling research and scholarship responsibilities.

Affirmative practice, a paradigm based on Spinozan ethics, does not turn away from difficult conversations or practices, but instead works to transform pain into knowledge via processes which enhance one’s capacity to affect and be affected by others (Braidotti, 2011). Central to this premise is the idea that oppressive structures cannot be effectively dismantled by simply identifying and exposing their harmful aspects, but through cultivating alternative relational visions, to inspire new forms of social coexistence.

Through a series of short narratives, I reveal my application of affirmative ethics; a process of emphasising philosophy as praxis and identifying micro-political moments of activism and social justice.