Africana Experience and Critical Leadership Studies – serie

Survival of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities as edited by North Carolina A&T State University Chancellor Emeritus Edward Fort, conceptualizes the strategies, strategic planning energies, and delivery systems which might be of assistance to HBCU's as they continue to survive in this age of uncertainty. Its insightful chapters, as penned by Fort and a number of his colleagues (including former Presidents and Chancellors of Black campuses) are data driven and experientially based. The challenges encountered by the HBCU leaders are described as multiple and include fiscal accountability and the continued need to assist the public schools as related to the twin problems of the achievement gap and Clark's "Cult of Cultural Deprivation." The author and his colleagues outline viable strategies geared to address these challenges. The latter represent but two of a number of other challenges confronting HBCU's. These include, but are not limited to (1) enrollment competition with majority institutions, (2) cultivation of alumni support, (3) the garnering of fiscal equity via such avenues as increased federal agency and foundation/corporate support. Considerable space is devoted to the critical issue of institutional leadership. Here, strategies and delivery systems are explored as associated with the HBCU leader's aggressive determination to provide the best possible crucible of learning for students attending the institution. The issues of fiscal accountability and its ever-present spectra of prospective gloom and doom lurks as an enemy to be constantly confronted. Many pages are devoted to the conceptualization of prescriptive strategies, which can be applied to present day campus situations. Leaders of historically black campuses can benefit from these writings as these institutions constantly face the heartache of state revenue shortfall, private university funding sources evaporation and the demoralizing impact of cut backs in program, capital construction, and scholarship support. Creativity protocols are described in detail and forward moving processes poised for prospective success enunciated. Navigating the problem of K-12 economic inequality and its impact upon HBCU's is also explored, as well as the need to enhance "leveraging" for federal support, including the United States Department of Agriculture.Ultimately, alumni support is vigorously support, as an HBCU leadership must.

By its focus on the African immigrant family, Engaging the Diaspora: Migration and African Families carves its own niche on the migration discourse. It brings together the experiences of African immigrant families as defined by various transnational forces. As an interdisciplinary text, Engaging makes a handy reference for scholars and researchers in institutions of higher learning, as well as for community service providers working on diversity issues. It promotes knowledge about Africans in the Diaspora and the African continent through current and relevant case studies. This book enhances learning on the contemporary factors that continue to shape African migrants.

Survival of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities as edited by North Carolina A&T State University Chancellor Emeritus Edward Fort, conceptualizes the strategies, strategic planning energies, and delivery systems which might be of assistance to HBCU's as they continue to survive in this age of uncertainty. Its insightful chapters, as penned by Fort and a number of his colleagues (including former Presidents and Chancellors of Black campuses) are data driven and experientially based. The challenges encountered by the HBCU leaders are described as multiple and include fiscal accountability and the continued need to assist the public schools as related to the twin problems of the achievement gap and Clark's "Cult of Cultural Deprivation." The author and his colleagues outline viable strategies geared to address these challenges. The latter represent but two of a number of other challenges confronting HBCU's. These include, but are not limited to (1) enrollment competition with majority institutions, (2) cultivation of alumni support, (3) the garnering of fiscal equity via such avenues as increased federal agency and foundation/corporate support. Considerable space is devoted to the critical issue of institutional leadership. Here, strategies and delivery systems are explored as associated with the HBCU leader's aggressive determination to provide the best possible crucible of learning for students attending the institution. The issues of fiscal accountability and its ever-present spectra of prospective gloom and doom lurks as an enemy to be constantly confronted. Many pages are devoted to the conceptualization of prescriptive strategies, which can be applied to present day campus situations. Leaders of historically black campuses can benefit from these writings as these institutions constantly face the heartache of state revenue shortfall, private university funding sources evaporation and the demoralizing impact of cut backs in program, capital construction, and scholarship support. Creativity protocols are described in detail and forward moving processes poised for prospective success enunciated. Navigating the problem of K-12 economic inequality and its impact upon HBCU's is also explored, as well as the need to enhance "leveraging" for federal support, including the United States Department of Agriculture.Ultimately, alumni support is vigorously support, as an HBCU leadership must.

Reshaping Beloved Community: The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions offers a reflexive interrogation on the history of black male incarceration in the United States starting in the nineteenth century to both illustrate the complex ways black male felons have been discursively constructed and the various techniques utilized in the United States to erase the contributions of black male felons and their black radical projects. This erasure has left many black men without the benefit of fellowship and community. Therefore, Reshaping Beloved Community focuses on particular black male felons and their cultural production to highlight experiences of blackness that is often marginalized or ignored. In order to characterize these experiences and contributions of black male felons, Reshaping Beloved Community expands Victor Anderson’s definition of creative exchange by offering contemplative conversations of black male felons in history and the cultural works they produced. It draws on an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how some black male felons have used prison and the experience of incarceration to craft narratives and liberation movements. The philosophical approach within Reshaping Beloved Community deploys constructive and innovative concepts, particularly of the grotesque, to interpret how black male felons have resisted American political and cultural restraints on their humanity. Anderson’s concepts of creative exchange help create a framework that enables readers to see how the cultural production of black male felons reveals the unique experiences and worldview of black men trapped in various forms of penal captivity. These experiences speak to a deeper reality that is largely hidden because of the ways incarceration and penal captivity diminishes certain people in society. Yet a reengagement with those movements helps to link black male felons to the whole of black life and culture.In the end, Reshaping Beloved Community allows black radical scholars to gain deeper insight into the roles black male felons have played in critiquing American politics and culture. Moreover, it shows that the cultural productions of black male felons are just as important to understanding black life in American society as slave narratives, blues music, and the like.

This book offers an examination of the development of HBCUs and their role in higher education. Chapters in the volume analyze the contemporary role of HBCUs through several lenses, including politics, education policy, leadership practice, culture, and social justice. Scholars, practitioners, and university leaders will find this book useful in navigating the political, academic, and financial landscape of these institutions. Contributors include practitioners and scholars in the field who share their scholarly findings as well as first-hand practical experiences, resulting in a comprehensive volume essential for scholars of and leaders in higher education.

Identity Re-creation in Global African Encounters explores race, racial politics, and racial transformation in the context of Africa’s encounters with non-African communities through various perspectives including oppression, racialization of ethnic difference, and identity deconstruction. While the contributors recognize that ethnicity has long been a staple analytical category of engagements between African and non-African communities, they present a holistic view of the continent and its diaspora through race outside of both colonial and neocolonial binaries, allowing for a more nuanced study of Africa and its diaspora.

In Fragmented Identities of Nigeria: Sociopolitical and Economic Crises, edited by John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji and Rotimi Omosulu, readers are offered essays which explore the historiogenesis and ontological struggles of Nigeria as a geographical expression and a political experiment. The transdisciplinary contributions in this book analyze Nigeria as a microcosm of global African identity crises to address the deep-rooted conflicts within multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious, and multicultural societies.By studying Nigeria as a country manufactured for the interests of colonial forces and ingrained with feudal hegemonic agendas of global powers working against the emancipation of African people, Fragmented Identities of Nigeria examines the history, evolution, and consequences of Nigeria’s sociopolitical and economic crises. The contributors make suggestions for pulling Nigeria from the brink of an identity implosion which was generated by years of misgovernance by leaders without vision or understanding of what is at stake in global black history. Throughout, the collection argues that it is time for Nigeria to reassess, renegotiate, and reimagine Nigeria’s future, whether it be through finding an amicable way the different ethnicities can continue to co-exist as federating or confederating units, or to dissolve the country which was created for economic exploitation by the United Kingdom.

Decoloniality is a perspective that challenges the colonial foundation and neoliberal operations of the westernized university today. In Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University: Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy Assata Zerai highlights feminist decoloniality as a tool to promote institutional transformation, indirectly through changes in research and teaching in the social sciences, directly by centering social justice within higher education. Reflecting on three decades of scholarship, Zerai adapts principles of decolonial theory to scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis transnationally, focusing on higher education in the USA and South Africa. She intentionally centers students who have been racially and culturally excluded in these contexts and provides evidence of university students experiencing intersectional microaggressions, including gendered, ableist, and queerphobic anti-Blackness. Zerai argues that faculty must appreciate such realities in order to affirm students and create learning environments in which all may thrive. Further, this book argues that ethical commitments to minoritized students and their communities must be reflected in humanizing research practices. Finally, Zerai reviews ways in which scholars have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in their academic work. This book highlights these new approaches within the social sciences, to promote justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion (JEADI) within higher education.

Decoloniality is a perspective that challenges the colonial foundation and neoliberal operations of the westernized university today. In Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University: Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy Assata Zerai highlights feminist decoloniality as a tool to promote institutional transformation, indirectly through changes in research and teaching in the social sciences, directly by centering social justice within higher education. Reflecting on three decades of scholarship, Zerai adapts principles of decolonial theory to scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis transnationally, focusing on higher education in the USA and South Africa. She intentionally centers students who have been racially and culturally excluded in these contexts and provides evidence of university students experiencing intersectional microaggressions, including gendered, ableist, and queerphobic anti-Blackness. Zerai argues that faculty must appreciate such realities in order to affirm students and create learning environments in which all may thrive. Further, this book argues that ethical commitments to minoritized students and their communities must be reflected in humanizing research practices. Finally, Zerai reviews ways in which scholars have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in their academic work. This book highlights these new approaches within the social sciences, to promote justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion (JEADI) within higher education.

Tiffany Caesar's empowering work highlights the contributions of six extraordinary Africana women educators who have contributed to African-Centered education.This book empowers people of African descent within the United States and abroad by focusing on solutions created by Africana women for decolonizing colonial educational structures. Caesar brings a fresh perspective by discussing the twenty-first-century Black woman and the necessity to archive their experience as leaders in African-centered education. Offering an in-depth examination and analysis of six Africana women (three from Detroit and three from South Africa – Johannesburg and Pretoria), the author challenges the deficit models of Black educational systems. By telling their stories, this book counters the visible invisibility of their African-centered educational leadership through portraiture methodology and Black womanist archival tradition. Caesar highlights the multifaceted activities of each Africana woman, explores the spiritual elements affecting their lives, and emphasizes the role of self-care and why it’s vital to prioritize their health within diverse communities.

This historical account uncovers the lived experiences and history of pioneering Black women deans.Few scholars have studied the origins of Black deans of women and college graduates who were at the intersection of race and gender. Ashla C. Hill Roseboro’s History of Black Women Deans, College Alumnae Organizations, and Activism fills this gap by sharing the lived experiences of pioneering administrators at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and college alumnae who overcame barriers by forming their own professional circles. She investigates newspaper reports, articles, and artifacts from 1910 to the 1960s to provide insights on how these educated women advocated for higher education standards through the collective work of awarding scholarships to students, strategy meetings, and enrichment programs. This sisterhood emphasized how they took creative approaches to gain members, improve education, and promote equality. Past successes and struggles of these trailblazers illuminate how progress was made despite limitations and setbacks. This book points to the path taken by these mentoring leaders who sacrificed for the greater good of their communities. Leaders today can be inspired through these writings to continue being beacons of hope for greater equity towards a just society.

This historical account uncovers the lived experiences and history of pioneering Black women deans.Few scholars have studied the origins of Black deans of women and college graduates who were at the intersection of race and gender. Ashla C. Hill Roseboro’s History of Black Women Deans, College Alumnae Organizations, and Activism fills this gap by sharing the lived experiences of pioneering administrators at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and college alumnae who overcame barriers by forming their own professional circles. She investigates newspaper reports, articles, and artifacts from 1910 to the 1960s to provide insights on how these educated women advocated for higher education standards through the collective work of awarding scholarships to students, strategy meetings, and enrichment programs. This sisterhood emphasized how they took creative approaches to gain members, improve education, and promote equality. Past successes and struggles of these trailblazers illuminate how progress was made despite limitations and setbacks. This book points to the path taken by these mentoring leaders who sacrificed for the greater good of their communities. Leaders today can be inspired through these writings to continue being beacons of hope for greater equity towards a just society.

The book highlights Black women who modeled diverse ways of agency in executing their roles in the nation-building project of the Nation of Islam. Informants candidly discussed their roles as women who were members of the Nation family between 1955 and 2000. C. S'thembile West highlights that activism need not exclude motherhood or marriage and that the home should constitute a “house of resistance,” as described in Angela Davis' seminal article, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves."Nation Women Negotiating Islam illuminates the intricate threads that connect Nation women as a critical component of the continuum of Black women's activism, despite disparate strategies.

Teacher Education Department Chairs and Social Justice: Transformative Leadership through Inclusivity is a ground-breaking book that introduces teacher educators to the power of social justice teacher preparation programs. It highlights the importance and magnitude of developing teacher education programs that include a sociopolitical curriculum. The book adds value to the discourse around critical race theory in education by demonstrating how social justice discourses in teacher education can lead to more socially just teachers who can bring out the gifts and talents of diverse student populations. Included in the book is a discussion of how department chairs who lead social justice teacher preparation programs apply transformative leadership practices. The book offers a critical pedagogy to deconstruct dominant ideologies that permeate teacher education programs and provides strategies to effectively prepare teachers who can educate and advocate for historically underserved students, their families, and communities.