Book Launch: The Bloomsbury Handbooks of Crises and Transformative Leadership in Higher Education
This handbook series launch highlights a newly released (Fall 2024), 4-volume international handbook series, entitled The Bloomsbury Handbooks of Crises and Transformative Leadership in Higher Education. The volume titles in the series include:
Global crises, unrelenting change, and disruptions (such as pandemics, financial crises, environmental crises, technological innovations, geopolitical events, and others) have induced both challenges and opportunities for institutions of higher education globally, while threatening the sustainability of many. In its intersections with the rise of protectionism, cultural chauvinism, authoritarianism and demagoguery, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated–or at least rendered more visible–a global climate in which culture wars infiltrated campuses, as well as the very discourse of higher learning. Proliferating scepticism about the value of science and expertise more broadly appears to signal a weakening of trust in the role of universities as transformative agents of positive social and human development. As a result of the complex contextual situatedness of these institutions, responses to these crises, disruptions, and uncertainties have often taken quite different approaches.
It is the lessons and reflections on the why and how to lead higher education institutions (HEIs) through these multiple, intersecting and ongoing crises and change that informs the development of the chapters within this handbook series. With over 120-chapter authors from six continents, these volumes will deepen the readers’ understanding of the multiple and intersecting crises and change issues, within diverse local and global geopolitical, social, economic and cultural contexts that leaders in HEIs needed to handle. In creating new policies, programs and pedagogical approaches, leaders in higher education have had to work critically, creatively and collaboratively to identify opportunities and overcome obstacles related to values, ethics, learning, engagement, inclusion, diversity, research, technology, accountability, partnership development, and sustainability, amongst others. Through their leadership and transformative change initiatives, many leaders and senior administrative teams have found or created new opportunities and are now looking at the valuable lessons learned from their experiences under extreme conditions, and how these might inform the post-pandemic, post-change or post-crisis directions for their university.
This will be a Blended event, and held ‘live’ at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, with refreshments provided.
ÃÈÃÃÉçÇø the Speakers
Mary Drinkwater
Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer in Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, and Comparative International & Development Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She is also a faculty lead (curriculum; research) at Yorkville University. Mary’s research interests include critical and decolonial theory and praxis in education, transformative education, critical leadership, educational policy development. She was lead editor and chapter author in Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Yusef Waghid
Yusef Waghid is a leading African philosopher of higher education intent on advancing democratic citizenship education, cosmopolitan education, and global citizenship education in the context of equitable redress and change, equality, non-discrimination, non-sexism, and justice for all. Epistemologically, he draws on multiple traditions of thought, most notably combining dominant aspects of Western and non-Western theories of knowledge to rethink philosophy of education in Africa as is evident in his latest book: Philosophical, Educational and Moral Openings in Doctoral Pursuits and Supervision: Promoting the Values of Wonder, Wander, and Whisper in African Higher Education (Routledge, 2024).
Emily Dobrich
Emily Dobrich is a PhD Candidate in the Adult Education and Community Development program of the Department of Leadership, Higher And Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education located at the University of Toronto. Emily’s research interests include embodied learning, transformative education, social justice, relationality, decolonizing methodologies, and sustainability. Her doctoral dissertation explores how embodied learning approaches can be implemented to reimagine and improve diasporic learning experiences by promoting self-determination, fostering community connectedness through situated solidarity building, and a relational understanding of place.
Jennifer Sumner
Jennifer Sumner is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests include food and food systems, critical pedagogy, sustainability and the social economy. She is the editor of Learning, Food and Sustainability: Sites of Resistance and Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (third edition, University of Toronto Press, 2022).
