1st Edition

Leading for Change Race, intimacy and leadership on divided university campuses

By Jonathan Jansen Copyright 2016
    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book offers new theoretical ground for thinking about, and transforming, leadership and higher education worldwide. Through an examination of the construct of intimacy and ‘nearness’, including emotional, spiritual, psychic, intellectual, and physical closeness, Jonathan Jansen demonstrates its power to influence positive leadership in young people. He argues that sensory leadership, which includes but extends beyond the power of touch, represents a fresh and effective approach to progressive transformation of long divided institutions.

    Considering richly textured narratives, chapters explore complex intimacies among Black and White university students in South Africa, post-apartheid and in the aftermath of a major racial atrocity. The stories reveal the students’ transformation in the process of ‘leadership for change’, interweaving concepts of racism, human relationships and intimacy, and in turn expanding the knowledge base of social and institutional improvement. This book explores how, when different kinds of nearness come together in leadership change, young people respond in ways that would not be possible through conventional instruments such as policy, legislation and the appeal to moral sensibilities alone.

    Leading for Change will be critical reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, educational justice, higher education, educational leadership and change, social and/or racial justice. This book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of anthropology, social psychology, and South African contemporary politics, policy and institutional practices.

    Preface  1 .A Researcher’s Guide to Intimate Storytelling  2. Dangerous Intimacies  3. "The Misnamed Free State"  4. Intimacy  5. The Resident Swastika  6. Intimacy Demands a Common Language  7. The Labour of Intimacy  8. Intimate Knowledges  9. Portraits of Intimacy  10. From Intimacy to Nearness  11. A Near and Present Danger  12. The Intimate Observer  13. Nearness in Leadership

    Biography

    Jonathan Jansen is Vice Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State, South Africa, and President of the South African Institute of Race Relations. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a Fellow of the Academy of Science of the Developing World. In 2013 he was awarded the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award in New York and the Spendlove Award from the University of California, USA, for his contributions to tolerance, democracy and human rights.