Intersectional Challenges and Successes of Women in Higher Educational Leadership Internationally: Autoethnographic Reflections

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium is designed to explore how women in higher education leadership across the world reflect on the impact of intersectionality in understanding, apprehending, and enacting their work. Addressing AERA’s theme, “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action,” and the International Studies SIG’s focus, the session features four research investigations from women leaders in Australia, England, Ireland, and the United States who collectively have researched women in educational leadership in over a dozen countries. Their work instantiates the role of women in imagining, promoting, and affecting higher education leadership. Presenters explore how women leading education in international contexts serve to create socially just and equitable universities that honor the many intersections that others and they experience.

Sub Unit

• SIG-International Studies

Chair

• Elizabeth C. Reilly, California State University - Channel Islands

Papers

• Bearing Witness to One’s Life as a Latina Leader: An Autoethnographic Examination of Race/Ethnicity and Gender While Leading Across the Continents - Elizabeth C. Reilly, California State University - Channel Islands

• Hope at the Edge of a Glass Cliff: Autoethnographic Explorations of a Transnational Scholar Across Landscapes of Leading and Following - Nicola Sum, Monash University

• Visible Invisible: Black Women in British Higher Education - Victoria Showunmi, University College London - IOE

• Moving From the Tangled to the Secure: Female Academics Spinning Silk Threads Across the Academy - Mary Elizabeth Cunneen, University College Dublin

Discussant

• Nicola Sum, Monash University