Changes and Challenges
Music and Dance as Cultural Dialogue: A Territorial Continuum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Teirstein
A border can be represented by a line. But it can also be viewed more expansively, as its own space, fertile with the potential for either confrontation or learning and evolution. This study examines ways that music and dance can engage cultures across borders, in the absence of a common spoken language. Focusing on Translucent Borders, a three-year investigation at New York University, we consider various uses of improvisation at points of cultural juxtaposition. Translucent Borders is a project exploring ways that dancers and musicians act as catalysts for creative engagement across geographic and cultural borders. Beginning in refugee camps in Lesbos in 2016, Translucent Borders has facilitated global conversations between dancers and musicians in Israel, Palestine, Greece, Cuba, and Ghana through interviews, knowledge-sharing circles, improvisation, and performance. The project is a Working Group of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study. In June, 2018, the world master dancers and musicians with whom the project has been working will come to the United States for a series of encounters resulting in world premiere performances at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, Lincoln Center, and New York University. This paper articulates some of the inherent tensions in the use of improvisation over the course of the project and the performances in June. For instance: bringing together composers who use written notation, with master musicians who work primarily in a non-notational environment, can raise many challenges to both representative contingents, not just in the various aspects of sound production, but psychologically and territorially.
Sense of Belonging: The Impact of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture on Doctoral Education for Students of Colour
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Gabriel
In recent years, the UK higher education sector has been mired in controversies related to the recruitment, retention and progression of students of colour. Studies have sparked much interest in the qualitative and material disparities between White students and students of colour. This highlights the need to more fully understand the nature of the experience of students of colour as it pertains to the university environment, the curriculum and pedagogy, since their voices are rarely ‘heard’ in educational research. Past studies point to disparities linked to progression onto postgraduate research degrees, and the reality that postgraduate researchers (PGRs) from these groups are the most likely to drop out. This paper is based on a qualitative study that examines the challenges faced by PGR students of colour in achieving a sense of belonging during their journeys on doctoral research programmes at universities in the UK. It explores the processes through which dynamic factors linked to institutional culture and academic practice intersect with race, ethnicity and culture to shape their experiences and how this impacts their sense of belonging. This research draws on critical race theory to centre the ways that racialized dynamics and issues of race, ethnicity and culture manifest in the experiences of PGR students of colour. It explores how processes of inclusion and belonging manifest in relation to their lived experiences. The findings point to an othering process that occurs when dominant, White, Eurocentric, gendered norms prevail and become embedded within institutional cultures, epistemologies, and academic practice.
Aspirations of Female Middle Managers and Barriers To Advancement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tosha Aquino Giuffrida , Nicole Rodriguez, Nancy Akhavan
Although women have enrolled and graduated at higher rates than men in every collegiate degree (associates, bachelors, masters, doctorate) since 1988, worldwide, women only hold 25 percent of higher leadership positions. Additionally, the literature shows women often have more direct experience for leadership positions than their male counterparts. Yet, gender inequity strongly exists. Traditional barriers, such as the glass ceiling, focused on external constructs preventing the equality of gender leadership is often mentioned in the literature. The researchers will discuss their study on the inequities of females in the workplace and the aspirations of female middle managers as related to career, education, and leadership. Do female middle managers even aspire to advance in leadership? The latest research about female aspirations in higher education and industry will be shared as the researchers will how female middle managers perceive their aspirations and in what ways aspirations may differ between higher education and industry. In addition, findings on significant barriers and supports to career advancement in the workplace will be shared.
Administering the Black Studies Program at a Historically White Institution: The Perspective of an Ex-Program Director
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dawn Duke
This text seeks to examine the role, challenges, and achievements of an Afro-Descendant female academician, who became Chair of the Black Studies Program at a Historically White Institution in the USA. This is the position I held between August 2011 and July 2016 at the University of Tennessee. The Africana Studies Program is dedicated exclusively to the study of Africa and its diaspora. As head of such an ideologically positioned unit, what impact can I, as a Black female professor, have within a structure that was originally designed to exclude such persons as myself? How can we justly measure the successes and failures of such an administrator when the very unit she oversees exists in a constant tension with the institution it serves? In her role as director, how should she perform to guarantee the well-being of her program, in an institutional environment that disfavors its survival, without completely sacrificing the very precepts that motivated its creation and determine its mandate? What administrative measures are needed to construct positive, meaningful relationships among professors and students, in spite of our status as a numerical and ethnic minority or as a community very vulnerable to discrimination and isolation on campus? This text draws attention to national trends even as it is driven by administrative and professional experiences. It examines the benefits, alliances, and respect built throughout the years that favored the growth and development of the program, as well as realities that have continued to hamper its progress and expansion.
