How does the postcolonial, feminist academic lead? A perspective from the US South

Abstract

This article draws on post‐colonial and feminist theories to interrogate the notion of ‘leadership’ in the academy. Specifically, it examines challenges that women faculty, especially women of colour, immigrant women, and, in particular, Asian and Asian American women, encounter as they balance leadership work with scholarship and teaching. Integrating theory and autobiography, the author situates herself as a post‐colonial, feminist academic and a South Asian immigrant in the USA, and reflects on her own leadership experiences. She identifies three central themes—recognizing one’s implicatedness, maintaining integrity and developing resilience—and discusses implications for rethinking leadership.

Over three decades ago, arguing for ‘consciously woman‐centred universities’ (p. 155), Adrienne Rich (1979: 136–137) wrote:

The university is above all a hierarchy. At the top is a small cadre of highly paid and prestigious persons, chiefly men, whose careers entail the services of a very large base of ill‐paid or unpaid persons, chiefly women. … Each woman in the university is defined by her relationship to the men in power instead of her relationship to other women up and down the scale.

Historically, then, leadership in the academy has been mainly the domain of men. Even today, faculty of colour and women faculty are underrepresented in the US academy (Rich 1979, Ah Nee‐Benham and Cooper 1998, Turner and Myers 2000), which remains androcentric (Bensimon and Marshall 2000). Furthermore, the leadership work of academic women—and especially women of colour—is often devalued in the corporatized, masculinist culture of the academy, in which economic rationality and the ability to make hard decisions are associated with maleness (Ah Nee‐Benham and Cooper 1998, Blackmore 1999, Blackmore and Sachs 2000).

In this article, written as an invited contribution for a themed issue on post‐colonial and feminist perspectives on academic leadership, I consider gender, race, and nation as I interrogate the traditional, masculinist notion of leadership. Specifically, I wrestle with the following questions: what are the intersections of culture, context, and difference, the tensions of margins‐and‐centre that women faculty, especially women of colour and immigrant women, navigate as they engage in leadership work? How do they navigate the complex, dynamic tensions of balancing scholarly productivity, teaching, and service in leadership roles? And, what are the implications for rethinking academic leadership from postcolonial, feminist perspectives?

To that end, first, I draw on extant literature to consider leadership at the intersections of gender, race, and nation. Specifically, I consider the challenges encountered by academic women, including women of colour and immigrant women, focusing particularly on Asian and Asian American women faculty. Next, I engage perspectives emerging from postcolonial and feminist theories to illuminate further how women academics, being implicated in the very structures and processes they are attempting to transform, encounter catch‐22s or contradictions as they participate in leadership work.

As I develop this big picture discussion, I situate myself as a post‐colonial, feminist scholar and a South Asian, immigrant woman academic, currently teaching in the US South, and draw on theory and practice to rethink—self‐reflexively, recursively—the notion of leadership within the academy. This method of analysis, integrating theory with autobiographical reflections on practice, serves to hold my feet to the fire, as it were. For instance, even as I consider the relevance of post‐colonial and feminist theories in contributing to transformative discourses and practices, I am compelled also to engage my own implicatedness and participation in extant structures of power as well as the attendant contradictions I encounter. As Leela Gandhi (1998: ix–x) notes, ‘postcolonial theory principally addresses the needs of the Western academy. … Rarely does it engage with the theoretical self‐sufficiency of African, Indian, Korean, Chinese knowledge systems or foreground those cultural and historical conversations which circumvent the Western world’. Following this thought‐provoking criticism, I have written elsewhere (Asher 2009: 70):

As an academic, a South Asian, and a ‘woman of colour’ in the United States, I find myself to be both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ (Asher 2001, 2005, 2007). … Many postcolonialists, including ‘expatriate’ scholars such as myself, have acknowledged the irony of postcolonial scholarship emerging from academics situated in the ‘West’ (Gandhi 1998). Indeed, I struggle with my own implicatedness as a South Asian immigrant and a postcolonialist situated in the Western academy. While my work draws on critiques of colonialism and contributes to scholarship in education, I am aware that it does not draw on and represent the ‘self‐sufficiency’ of ‘Eastern’ thought. I continue to wrestle with the contradiction of recreating the elision and bring self‐reflexive scrutiny to bear on my work as it focuses on issues of representation, equity, justice, and transformation.

I find that this work of grappling rigorously with the nuances and complexities I encounter is difficult and demanding because it pushes me to arrive at integrity between theory, lived experience, practice (be it leadership or teaching), and scholarly writing. Sociologist Sara Delamont (2007: 2) argues ‘against auto‐ethnography’, asserting that such work is ‘essentially lazy—literally lazy and also intellectually lazy’ and does not allow us to ‘fight familiarity’. She reminds fellow scholars, that as empiricists who study ‘the social … our duty is to go out and research …’ (pp. 3–4). While the caution against being lazy is worth bearing in mind, it does not justify the wholesale dismissal of auto‐ethnography, autobiography, or self‐reflexive narrative. One may do both—good qualitative (or quantitative, of course) research and good auto‐ethnographic work. Second, in contending that ‘autoethnography focuses on the powerful and not the powerless’ (Delamont 2007: 2), she sets up another spurious binary. Some of us are both powerful and powerless: Witness critical scholarship to date that engages the contradictions we encounter—within and without the academy—at the intersections of race, class, gender, and nation. And, if women, peoples of colour, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) individuals, immigrants, and those who grapple with disabilities did not summon up the energy and courage to write about their experiences, struggles, and achievements, would not there be greater lacunae than currently exist in our knowledge today; especially in such areas of scholarship as feminist studies, women’s studies, gender studies, queer theory, multiculturalism, and dis/ability studies? Finally, rigorous autobiographical work (witness, for instance, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s (1984) essay)—like any rigorous research, actually—contributes to revealing and deconstructing the nuanced, context‐specific, and, at times, seemingly contradictory workings of race, class, gender, culture, and nation. Next, I consider implications for re‐thinking leadership in the academy.

Leadership in the academy at the intersections of gender, race and nation

Although women constitute a majority of the student population in post‐secondary education, higher education has ‘overlooked almost entirely women’s roles as shapers and interpreters of the academy’, thus rendering them ‘an invisible majority’ (Bensimon and Marshall 2000: 134). As we know from the writings of women of colour, such issues are compounded at the intersection of race and gender (hooks 1984, Collins 2000, Ladson‐Billings 2000, Matthews 2002). For instance, Collins (2000: 197) argues for the ‘social construction of black feminist thought’ that is grounded in concrete experience and material conditions, as well as black/African American standpoints and feminist standpoints. Within the academy, black feminist thought ‘must be prepared to confront Eurocentric, masculinist, political and epistemological requirements’.

According to Chesler et al. (2005), organizational factors—such as the mission, culture, and resources of the institution, extant power and social relations, and approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and inquiry, all of which are interdependent—contribute to shaping ‘institutional racism’ in higher education. Institutional ambivalence towards multiculturalism, on the one hand, leads to faculty of colour being used ‘as resources for anything related to diversity or race’ (Chesler et al. 2005: 136); while, on the other hand, it contributes to devaluing such efforts. It is well known that ‘minority’ faculty, although (or, perhaps more accurately, because) limited in number, often get tapped to serve on committees and assume leadership roles even as they encounter isolation and racial and ethnic bias at their institutions (Turner and Myers 2000).

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Chandra Mohanty (1991: 28) wrote about the need to rethink race and gender, given the ‘massive incorporation of third world women into a multinational labor force’. Given that ‘third world women’ are ‘often the most exploited populations’ (p. 28), and often situated as victims in both domestic and international contexts, Mohanty recommended that we develop constructions of ‘third world women’ that go ‘against the grain’ (p. 29). Today, women of colour and immigrant women are still marginalized as workers and leaders; be it within the academy or without. For instance, Skachkova (2007: 728–729) notes that there is a dearth in terms of research—especially quantifiable data—pertaining to immigrant women professors. In her study, conducted with 34 immigrant women faculty at a major US research university, she found that they ‘experienced differential treatment in academia from students, colleagues, and administrators’, were underrepresented in the university’s administration, excluded from social networks, and ‘even experienced discrimination in the form of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism’.

Considering Asian and Asian American faculty

Several scholars have written about the specific challenges and struggles encountered by women faculty (as well as students) who are Asian or Asian American (Ideta and Cooper 2000, Matthews 2002, Li and Beckett 2006, Mayuzumi 2008). For instance, Ideta and Cooper (2000) note the under‐representation of Asian and Asian American women leaders in the academy, as well as the dearth of qualitative work documenting their stories. Mayuzumi (2008), using a transnational feminist approach, analyses issues pertaining specifically to Asian women faculty in higher education in the North American context. Considering the effects of cultural and material discourses, as well as extant social and political structures, she highlights the Orientalization of Asian and Asian Americans as exotic and submissive. Further, according to Mayuzumi (2008: 173) given their ‘difference’—in terms of race, language, accent—Asian women faculty are construed as ‘illegitimate citizens’, who are less competent than their white colleagues. This bears out Mohanty’s (1991: 34) assertion that, ‘the existence of third world women’s narratives in itself is not evidence of decentring hegemonic histories and subjectivities. It is the way in which they are read, understood, and located institutionally that is of paramount importance’.

Given these considerations, I now situate myself as a scholar who draws on post‐colonial and feminist theories, writing primarily in the area of curriculum studies/theory in the larger education field, and in women’s and gender studies. I am also an immigrant from South Asia, a lesbian, and a woman academic of colour, teaching, researching, and engaging in leadership (administrative, curricular, and scholarship‐related) in the post‐9/11, post‐Hurricane Katrina US South. I turn now to discussing how some women faculty of colour navigate the complex, at times, contradictory tensions of participating in leadership activities while being at the margins of race and gender, and possibly sexuality, nation(ality), and language. Three central themes relevant to rethinking leadership emerge here—recognizing one’s implicatedness, maintaining integrity, and developing resilience. As I discuss these issues in subsequent sections, I incorporate reflections/vignettes (offset by the use of italics) culled from my particular leadership‐related experiences in the education field, to illuminate the theoretical arguments I develop.

Postcolonialism, feminism, and leadership in the academy: a view from ‘margins, centre, and the spaces in‐between’

As noted earlier, the leadership work of academic women and women faculty of colour is marginalized and devalued in an academy shaped by a masculinist culture and institutional racism. According to Bensimon and Marshall (2000), the organizational frame of the academy makes it a patriarchal institution that reproduces gender inequities in terms of such factors as tenure and research productivity. Indeed, then, Judith Butler’s analysis is apropos. According to Butler (2006: 65):

Cultures are governed by conventions that not only regulate and guarantee the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce the bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and a punitive regulation or reproduction to affect that end.

Post‐colonialists and post‐colonial feminists interrogate educational structures, policies, and practices in relation to trans‐national cultures and contexts, including histories and effects of colonialism. For instance, Hickling‐Hudson et al. (2004) note that conceptions of knowledge, race, and culture are contested, and educational systems and structures re‐inscribe colonialism. Alexander and Mohanty (1997: xxviii–xxix) write that: ‘Decolonization has a fundamentally pedagogical dimension—an imperative to understand, to reflect on, and to transform relations of objectification and dehumanization, and to pass this knowledge along to future generations.’ The work of feminist curriculum scholar, Janet Miller, who works at the intersections of autobiography and trans‐nationalism, illuminates these analyses (Miller 2005, 2006). For instance, self‐reflexively interrogating what and who gets constituted as different, and how, in academic contexts of diversity, Miller (2006: 42) writes:

To unintentionally reinscribe my students’ ‘international’ identities as fixed and static versions of ‘other’ would be the antithesis of what I believe in and have worked for as a major emphasis of curriculum theorizing in the U.S. field…. But there is always the danger that I have positioned myself, in relation to my international students, as normative and unmarked and as such, have concealed the mark of privilege.

Engaging the oeuvre of such feminist scholars as Miller and bell hooks, I bring self‐reflexive and autobiographical analyses to bear on education work, focusing here on leadership.

A catch‐22—that is what it is. This leading‐from‐the‐margins business. I wrote about being both insider and outsider in the academy as I completed my doctorate (Asher 2001 ). After over a decade in the academy and post‐tenure, like bell hooks (1994), I know even better that I am at ‘margins, centre, and the spaces in‐between’ (Asher 1999 ). Margins, not just because I am an immigrant, a woman, a woman of colour, a lesbian, but also, at this time, because I am mid‐career and because I am not in administration. Centre, because I have tenure (which confers ‘seniority’ and ‘security’ upon a faculty member) as well as leadership responsibilities and draw a middle‐class income. I find that I am ‘at the interstices’ (Asher 2005 )—the in‐between spaces—as I navigate the contradictory tensions of margins‐and‐centre on a daily basis in the academy. Indeed, drawing on postcolonial and feminist thought, I have continued to develop my discussion of my own implicatedness in oppressive systems and discourses in recent years (Asher 2005 , 2007 ). Even as I develop critical analyses of multicultural education discourse and practice, I am aware that I actually teach and work in contexts in which stereotypic representations are common and often reified, for instance, over a decade of teaching, I have observed that multicultural education courses in teacher education programmes are, typically, assigned to faculty of colour, while the student population is majority white. This can lead to a reification of binaries and the notion that multiculturalism is to do only with the ‘other’, who is ‘on the margins’. As Matthews ( 2002 : 209) wrote, ‘To put it boldly, our desires for inclusivity and authenticity should not distract us from examining the ways that multiculturalism can parallel racism in the production of absolute cultural differences’. Indeed, I recall an African American, female, graduate student, who was assigned to teach multicultural education courses, once telling me that her students construed her as ‘the mad [as in angry] black woman’, even though she was not.

In this article, I expand this effort to maintain integrity as ‘academic self‐woman of colour other’ (Asher 2001), in terms of theory‐research‐practice, by integrating the dimension of leadership. And although I do not construe margin and centre as a neat dichotomy, given my situatedness in terms of race‐gender‐culture‐nation and my scholarly interests, I do see my leadership efforts within the academy as coming from the margins. Indeed, my vision of and approach to leadership also serves to interrogate and rethink traditional notions of leadership in the academy, extending the concept beyond aiming solely for higher numbers (in terms of enrolments, grants, and rankings), to mentoring junior faculty and fostering community (especially for women, faculty and students of colour, and queer faculty), bridging theory‐practice divides, and arriving at ways of maintaining personal and professional integrity as one progresses along one’s career trajectory. Again, my vision of leadership is driven by post‐colonial and feminist perspectives, which focus on addressing issues of marginality, resistance, voice, agency, and social transformation (hooks 1990, 1994, Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Asher 2005). As I have written elsewhere (Asher 2005: 1080):

Postcolonial and feminist theories present useful analyses of these two issues—interstitiality [being located at the interstices, the in‐between spaces] and implicatedness—which emerge in cross‐cultural endeavors, particularly in present‐day, global contexts of school and society. A number of theorists … discuss how the colonized/oppressed internalize the ways and language of the colonizer/oppressor, in order to survive within extant social structures.… Decolonization and social transformation, then, are necessarily self‐reflexive processes, requiring the deconstruction of not only the colonizer and external oppressive structures, but also one’s own internalization of and participation in the same.

Such analyses also account for context‐specific identifications, instead of relying on pre‐determined notions of us and them, self and other. For instance, as a South Asian in the US, I identify with communities of colour. However, in the US South—where I have been living and teaching for a decade—race relations, even today, are construed mainly in terms of black and white, a legacy of slavery. When I moved here, several white colleagues expressed surprise that I thought of myself as a person of colour and one even assured me that my students would just see me as white! And, as communities of colour, queer communities, and others on the margins have struggled for equal rights, representation, recognition, and equity in the US, they have often (but, of course, not always) been associated with progressive movements. And yet, Louisiana recently elected Bobby Jindal—an arch‐conservative Republican and the son of immigrants from India—as its governor. This event may be construed as the perfect example of the co‐optation of multiculturalism (see Mohanty 1991, McCarthy 1993, Matthews 2002, Asher 2007 for an extended discussion), wherein the visibility of a leader of South Asian descent conveys the reassurance of openness to diversity, even though his agenda remains staunchly conservative. Thus, even as I work to maintain integrity in my efforts at research, teaching, service, and leadership, I am aware that, being implicated in various local, regional, and national contexts in which I am on the margins, I negotiate contradictions on a daily basis.

The implicated self leads on

As Chair of the newly formed Special Interest Group of the Postcolonial Studies and Education of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) from 2004 to 2007, I was in a leadership position that enhanced my visibility in the field at the national level and strengthened my dossier for tenure and promotion. At the same time, I was aware that the influence of these groups themselves is marginal within the larger context of the AERA, compared with the much larger and more powerful ‘Divisions’. Similarly, right on the heels of tenure, instead of being granted sabbatical leave, I was asked to coordinate the compiling of the department’s ‘Self‐Study Report’ for the upcoming programme review. (I acknowledge here that I was compensated fairly for this enormous and demanding task.) Again, on the plus side, this leadership assignment led to increased local visibility and further strengthening of my dossier towards promotion to full professor, in due course. But on the other hand, it hampered my scholarly productivity, delaying my revisions of a major article.

Perhaps these are common experiences for faculty involved in leadership activities and roles, regardless of such variables as race, gender, and culture. And, apart from the external rewards I mention above, I do recognize my intrinsic motivation towards developing my leadership potential. However, I also feel conscious of various context‐specific issues that do not necessarily emerge in the above narrative. For instance, when I earned tenure, I certainly was very conscious that I was the only tenured person of colour in my department. (It’s funny how a number of colleagues have been surprised when I mention this to them! Much less would the possibility of my having experienced racial and cultural isolation occur to them. When was it that Peggy McIntosh first wrote about that ‘knapsack of white privilege’?) Furthermore, I was also aware that another colleague who earned tenure at the same time as I did was not asked to assume major service responsibilities and was able to focus on scholarly productivity (which, of course, is key for tenure‐track faculty to enhance their inter/national visibility and secure merit increases at US research‐intensive universities). Some senior colleagues told me that they saw my leadership potential. And, in fact, I would like to think that this is true enough—perhaps they really did see me as an emerging leader. Finally, the task assigned, although significant, was ultimately low‐impact. So, other than the pedestrian satisfaction of knowing that I had completed the assignment well, there was little intrinsic satisfaction. Of course, I wonder how leadership is construed in such situations and why. For instance, is leadership equated with formal academic positions? Does the institution gain an advantage, appearing to be equitable, when it positions an immigrant, queer, woman faculty member of colour as a leader for such tasks? And, in what ways is academic leadership itself recognized and rewarded? For instance, would faculty members who publish a groundbreaking article or book be acknowledged as leaders by their institutions? So, echoing the dilemma Blackmore and Sachs (2000) have documented, I cannot help but ask: how can academic women—especially those who are at research‐intensive institutions—take on meaningful leadership responsibilities without service (which has traditionally been equated with woman’s work) eclipsing scholarship (which has traditionally been identified with the male model of achievement)?

Navigating contradictions: implicatedness, integrity, resilience

As noted earlier, postcolonial and feminist thinkers recognize that the colonized/oppressed internalize, for the sake of survival, the colonizers/oppressors and their ways of being and language (Freire 1982, Lorde 1984, Trinh 1989, hooks 1990). This analysis can apply to the struggles faculty of colour experience as they fulfil their service and leadership commitments pre‐ and post‐tenure (see, for instance, hooks 1994, Tierney and Bensimon 1996, Blackmore and Sachs 2000). Blackmore and Sachs (2000: 12) have noted that women academics have expressed a ‘high level of cynicism’ regarding their participation, as ‘loyal corporate citizens’, in ‘strategic planning’ and ‘visionary leadership’, as envisioned by the administration at their institution. Also, in her study examining the career histories of feminist, ethnic minority faculty (including both women and men), Bronstein (1993) found that, in general, the more dimensions of ‘differentness’ individuals represented (in terms of race, gender, ethnicity), the more difficult a time they had at their institutions, and the more they were perceived as a threat to existing power structures and those invested in maintaining them (e.g. white male faculty). In another instance, Liang (2006: 91) has written about foreign‐born Asian women faculty experiencing a ‘peripheralization’ of professional identity, encountering resistance and having their credibility questioned—on the basis of not only language and accent, but also due to institutional racism and gender inequalities. According to Blackmore and Sachs (2000: 12), ‘while most people deal with conflicts and compromises in their work, some rebel, some adapt, and some suffer more visibly’.

Indeed, I am aware that, like other colleagues—women and men, of colour and white, queer and heterosexual—I adapt, make compromises (not always happily) to survive in the workplace. When some women colleagues have advised that it is best to ‘behave like a man’ so that one will be left alone to write, I have been troubled by the self‐negation implied. For me, surviving at the cost of my integrity would make for a hollow existence, making me a mere shell, instead of being an academic woman who is grounded—in terms of theory and practice—in an ‘engaged pedagogy’ (hooks 1994 ). Other women colleagues, more grounded in feminist ways of being, have suggested what I think of as the and/both approach—that it is important to be committed to good teaching and citizenship and to protect one’s time and space for scholarly work. It is this exercise of arriving at the right mix in terms of research‐teaching‐service‐leadership, of balancing the equation in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, of finding, like Anzaldúa’s ( 1987 ) mestiza, new, hybrid, productive spaces between margins and centre, belonging and outsiderness that pushes me towards further integrity at each turn.

But here, too, I encounter contradictions. This process comes with its own sets of challenges, struggles, compromises. If I were simply to accept and shrug off philosophically my own implicatedness then I would reduce myself to paying mere lip service towards the task of maintaining and strengthening integrity. Therefore, the most productive way for me to participate as a leader within the institutional context is actually to let myself be troubled by the dilemmas I encounter and work with each in a self‐reflexive, recursive, rigorous way. Again, I recognize that this, too, is not a foolproof formula for balancing the equation. As the reflections below indicate, I find that, at times, I am unable to avoid being implicated in troubling aspects of leadership, such as silencing and elision of nuances and contradictions.

During the academic year following tenure, I was the only tenured faculty member of colour in my department. The year after, due to restructuring, two departments were meshed to create a new department (the one in which I am currently located institutionally) and the number of tenured faculty of colour suddenly increased. So, my particular history of solitariness as an untenured woman academic of colour is further eclipsed.

Now, post‐tenure, one of my responsibilities is coordinating a star master’s level teacher education programme. Previously, this programme was under the leadership of colleagues who had also been most encouraging regarding the development of my leadership potential. However, when it came to passing on the leadership of this programme, one colleague recruited a white male—who had not earned his doctorate at that time but whom this colleague had identified as the ideal leader for this programme—and worked strenuously to convince other colleagues to interview this chosen candidate. My status as a recently‐tenured and promoted faculty member who had, in fact, taught in this programme over several years were evidently discounted here—as was my leadership potential. Once again, I was sharply aware of the challenges of negotiating leadership as a woman academic of colour. And, I also recognized that, ultimately, such efforts to dislocate faculty of colour are less troubling than the veiled, more insidious, hard‐to‐document manoeuvres one encounters.

Equity policy encounters its toughest challenges in the form of covert marginalization and silencing, even in seemingly open, multicultural contexts (Mohanty 1991, Matthews 2002, Asher 2007). Indeed, we see here the relevance of Mohanty’s (1991) argument that it is not just the existence of narratives of women, women of colour, and third world women but rather how they are read, understood, and located institutionally that is of paramount importance.

Interrogating the implicated self

I have written recently of the ‘contradictions of a closed openness’, discussing how a seemingly open context ‘which can appear, on the surface, to be democratically progressive and “inclusive”, … ultimately … effaces the other as subject’ (Asher 2007: 69), and that ‘the self, regardless of its location, is never exempt’ (p. 72). This critique is certainly relevant to postcolonial discourse itself, which is generally viewed as addressing ‘the aftermath of colonialism’ (Hickling‐Hudson et al. 2004: 3) and contributing to decolonization. As noted earlier, postcolonial scholars located in the US/‘Western’ academy—many of whom, like me, are expatriates from former colonies—have been critiqued as participating in a discourse that is primarily Western‐focused. Therefore, then, with regard to both my own writing as well as my leadership of the Postcolonial Studies and Education Special Interest Group, I also need to ask myself about the challenges and possibilities of generating scholarship that draws on the knowledge base of both ‘East’ and ‘West’, both the global South and the North.

Similarly, scholars, writing in the areas of multiculturalism and Asian American studies, have argued that Asian Americans need to examine their own participation in reifying stereotypes of diverse peoples of colour of (Lowe 1996, Chow 2002, Asher 2006). As I have written elsewhere (Asher 2006: 175–176):

I was taken aback when, in a discussion at a national conference, a well‐regarded Asian American scholar advised younger scholars that we need to be more ‘like the Blacks’ and be assertive about our rights. Yes, those of us who are on the margins do need to assert ourselves and claim our rights. But, no, we cannot participate in stereotyping Blacks as a monolithic community of vocal, aggressive people. In so doing, we continue to participate in the politics of divide and rule.

Rather, as Lisa Lowe (1996: 71) has advised, it would be productive for Asian Americans and others committed to social transformation to build alliances with other groups on the margins and to engage in internal critical dialogues among their communities to interrogate the multiplicities, hybridities, and contradictions encountered within and without the academy. In other words, when we locate ourselves in interstitial locations—the dynamic spaces between identifications and cultures—we are able to ‘include a more heterogeneous group and to enable crucial alliances—with other groups of colour, class‐based struggles, feminist coalitions, and sexuality‐based efforts—in the ongoing work of transforming hegemony’ (83). This vision is relevant to rethinking leadership in the academy.

Implications for new re‐presentations of leadership in the academy

Adriana Kezar’s (2005: 324) questions—‘What kind of people do we want our children and grandchildren to be? What kind of society do we want them to live in? How can we best shape our institutions to nurture those kinds of people and that kind of society?’—are helpful in considering what does and does not seem possible in rethinking leadership in the academy. How can we actually bring about changes—however small or large—so that leadership is re‐conceptualized to represent diversity, difference, and caring, along with expectations of achievement and fiscal success?

At the organizational level, institutions need to work to foster a culture that is inclusive, empowering and that honours difference (Tierney and Rhoads 1993, Turner and Myers 2000, Chesler et al. 2005). As Tierney and Rhoads (1993: 70–71) remind us:

And yet, to build an institution where cultural difference is the norm, the organization’s participants all must struggle to understand the concept of cultural difference. In doing so, socialization becomes not an experience where everyone must be homogenized, but a process that honors difference. Socialization is not an action where majority members try to equip minority members with the skills necessary to survive. Rather, socialization becomes a process amenable to cultural differences, which in turn enables all organizational members to become cultural learners.

Chesler et al. (2005: 73) reinforce this vision when they recommend that as institutions address racism, they also need to ‘attend simultaneously to institutionalized sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and discrimination against groups based on nationality, religion, and other factors’.

More specifically, in rethinking leadership, we also need to consider changes in the larger context. For instance, according to Clark Kerr (2001), as universities adapt to such recent changes such as globalization and corporatization and the increasing reliance on electronic media and distance learning, they also have to continue to attend to ‘old business’, which includes ‘extending more opportunities to historical minorities’ (p. 218). Blackmore (1999: 202–203) recommends that we:

Reconceptualize the notion of how difference can be dealt with in policy and practice … by considering how race, class and culture impact on the reception of gender equity policy and strategies, and what that means in terms of producing leadership diversity.

Similarly, individual leadership efforts—in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, and research—are also effective in contributing to fostering equity and justice: witness the recently launched curriculum, Teaching the Levees (Crocco 2007), developed by a team led by Margaret Crocco, a Teachers College, Columbia University faculty member. Crocco and her collaborators developed this curriculum to accompany Spike Lee’s film event, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee 2006), which focuses on various issues of race, class, citizenship, and social/national responsibility that surfaced in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. While the film focuses on New Orleans and the surrounding region, the curriculum draws on the documentary to raise exactly the kinds of questions Kezar offers. In fact, the organizing questions, stemming from issues of race and class that were much‐debated post‐Hurricane Katrina, are: ‘Who are we as a country? What kind of country do we want to be?’ (Crocco 2007: 5). Clearly, leadership in academic contexts can contribute effectively to social justice and transformation.

Again, in addition to generating scholarship that contributes to rethinking leadership (witness this special issue of International Journal of Leadership in Education), what else can academics—women and men of colour, as well as white faculty, faculty who are immigrants and those who are native born, queer and heterosexual faculty—do to contribute to rethinking leadership so that it focuses on fostering thoughtful, non‐defensive engagement across difference and enabling all to assume responsibility for social transformation towards equity, representation, justice? Of course, there is no panacea, no pat, fix‐it answer. But there are ways in which one might work to maintain integrity, develop resilience, and establish coalitions that ‘include a more heterogeneous group’ and build ‘crucial alliances’ (Lowe 1996: 83).

Grounding oneself in one’s strengths and building from there, developing dialogues and collaborations across differences (whether disciplinary or in terms of scholarly approaches/perspectives), and working to develop integrity across one’s theoretical frame and research‐teaching‐and‐service—and now leadership—are all practices that have allowed me to develop resilience. And I acknowledge the visionary leadership of mentors —at my alma mater, Teachers College, as well as those whom I have gotten to know via conferences—in sharing such gems of advice with me. While such seemingly minor actions may not fit with the traditional model of leadership, they exemplify Kelly Oliver’s ( 2004 ) notion of ‘psychic revolts’. According to Oliver, decolonization and social transformation entail, along with large‐scale resistance movements, ‘psychic revolts that can take place in the everyday lives of ordinary people who resist domination’ (35).

For instance, in bringing teaching and scholarship together, I have not only created and taught, individually and collaboratively, such courses as ‘Identity, Culture, and Curriculum’, ‘Globalization, Multiculturalism, and Education’, and ‘Gender, Race, and Nation’ that engage complex issues of race, class, gender, culture but also drawn on theory and practice in my scholarship. Interestingly, I have received emails from readers (with most of whom I am not acquainted) saying that the points I make about the struggles and exhaustion related to teaching about multiculturalism, equity, and justice resonate for them in relation to their particular endeavours and contexts. Again, while such writing does not the larger context transform, it serves as praxis that can contribute to rethinking leadership in response to the questions raised by Adriana Kezar and Margaret Crocco and her team.

Blackmore and Sachs (2000: 14) have discussed the ‘sense of ambivalence’ and the struggle to maintain ‘professional and personal integrity’ women academics experience as they negotiate leadership roles and insider status within a system in which they are positioned on the margins. Although I am not ambivalent about the work I do as a postcolonial, feminist scholar—indeed, I find it highly satisfying to work on my scholarship and teaching—certainly, I am aware of my own watchfulness and scepticism in relation to the academy. However, this does not deter me from striving to strengthen my praxis and persisting in my efforts to contribute to decolonization through my teaching, research and publications. Indeed, it is through this recursive, rigorous process that I sustain not only my vision and practice of leadership in the academy but also my integrity and resilience.