Intellectual Leadership, Higher Education and Precarious Times - (Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education) (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education. The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, ambivalences, and disruptions that now mark everyday life and interactions. In the precarious present and, what has changed and why? What might now be the new social reality within which we work?"--

Book Synopsis

This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education.The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, ambivalences, and disruptions that now mark everyday life and interactions. Rather than thinking about 'freedom from precarious times and precarity' they consider 'freedom from within' and how the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual to think and speak within the public realm might be retained, if not reclaimed. In the precarious present and in times of precarity, what has changed and why? What might now be the new social reality within which we work?

Each of the contributors have been invited to take up their own perspective on what is precarious, and to examine the impacts on intellectual leadership. What does it mean to do intellectual work and be an intellectual leader? What are the implications for intellectual work and leadership if the academy itself is in precarious times?

Review Quotes

A refreshing new approach to intellectual leadership in higher education. Drawing on global examples, the authors grapple with the precarious contexts within which faculty, students, staff and administrators co-exist today. Readers are challenged to resist the notion that universities are in decline and to actively participate in reclaiming their purpose to produce knowledge for the common good.

The book embraces with rigour and relish the task of critiquing the dominant political discourse surrounding universities and wider society. It urges leaders throughout the higher education ecosystem to examine their practices and to redress the iniquities of precarity in higher education.

This broad-ranging and thought-provoking book provides much food for thought that is empirical, theoretical and practical. Its strength is that it offers tools to think with rather than solutions.

About the Author

Tanya Fitzgerald is Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia, Australia.

Helen M. Gunter is Professor of Educational Policy at the University of Manchester, UK, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Jon Nixon was Honorary Professor in the Center for Lifelong Learning Research and Development at the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, UK.