Intellectual Leadership, Higher Education and Precarious Times

Professor Helen M Gunter editor Professor Jon Nixon editor Professor Tanya Fitzgerald editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:30th May '24

£90.00

Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.

Intellectual Leadership, Higher Education and Precarious Times cover

Intellectual leadership is under threat from the authoritarian turn in western style democracies, and this book presents research contributions from leading edge thinkers regarding higher education and research expertise.

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?

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. -- Paul Gentle, Academic Director, Invisible Grail, UK
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. -- Margaret Grogan, Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership and Policy, Chapman University, USA
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. -- Rebecca Boden, Research Director of New Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland
A hopeful path forward for intellectual leadership as a crucial element of a better and more socially just future. -- Mary Churchill, Associate Dean and Professor of the Practice, Boston University, USA

ISBN: 9781350291805

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

232 pages