Imagining The Academy

The essays in this book examine various forms of popular culture and the ways in which they represent, shape, and are constrained by notions about and issues within higher education. From an exploration of rap music to an analysis of how the academy presents and markets itself on the World Wide Web, the essays focus attention on higher education issues that are bound up in the workings and effects of popular culture.

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world—in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.

The essays in Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy make visible the submerged stories of Black life in academia. They offer fresh historical, social, and cultural insights into what it means to teach, learn, research, and work while Black. In daring to shift from margin to centre, the book’s contributors confront two overlapping themes. First, they resist a singular construction of Blackness that masks the nuances and multiplicity of what it means to be and experience the academy as Black people. Second, they challenge the stubborn durability of anti-Black tropes, the dehumanization of Blackness, persistent deficit ideologies, and the tyranny of low expectations that permeate the dominant idea of Blackness in the white colonial imagination. Operating at the intersections of discourse and experience, contributors reflect on how Blackness shapes academic pathways, ignites complicated and often difficult conversations, and reimagines Black pasts, presents, and futures. This unique collection contributes to the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the ways in which Blackness is made, unmade, and remade in the academy and the implications for interrelated dynamics across and within post-secondary education, Black communities in Canada, and global Black diasporas.

In the past thirty years there has been a sea change in North American intellectual life regarding the role of religious commitments in academic endeavors. Driven partly by postmodernism and the fragmentation of knowledge and partly by the democratization of the academy in which different voices are celebrated, the appropriate role that religion should play is contested. Some academics insist that religion cannot and must not have a place at the academic table; others insist that religious values should drive the argument. Faithful Imagination in the Academy takes an approach based on dialogue with various viewpoints, claiming neither too much nor too little. All the authors are seasoned academics with many significant publications to their credit. While they all know how the academy operates and how to make worthwhile contributions in their respective disciplines, they are also Christians whose religious commitments are reflected in their intellectual work. Book jacket.

The essays in this book examine various forms of popular culture and the ways in which they represent, shape, and are constrained by notions about and issues within higher education. From an exploration of rap music to an analysis of how the academy presents and markets itself on the World Wide Web, the essays focus attention on higher education issues that are bound up in the workings and effects of popular culture.

Bring on the competition and the cheerleader fights. I'm ready to take a stand, prove myself, and save my team once and for all. After triumphing over another exam-gone-wrong, all we want to do is recover. But it seems that there's no rest for the witches, because another challenge immediately smacks us in the face. It's something none of us saw coming, and one thing is for sure: entering Semester Four won't be the same unless the Notorious Four is together once more.I, Brianne Marie Harlow, have to take matters into my own hands if I want to attend my Fourth Semester at Witchling Academy with my four boyfriends. I only have one shot to bring my wayward team member back into the fold, and though I'm confident I can change his mind, I'm worried about the challenges that will surely come if I succeed.Tension is growing, and the dynamic of our team is beginning to morph into something stronger than any of us realize. My relationships with Jax, Connor, Kaito, and Finnick are maturing, and with those changes come experiences I could never imagine happening with any other group of wizards.The Witchling Games are approaching, and our team is ready for the chase. Things are about to get feisty, and while I'm always ready to kick some magical butt, I can't help but wonder if we have what it takes to win. There's only one way to find out. Let's do this, Semester Four.

How do you fix a computer glitch that disappears before you get a good look at it? How do you negotiate with a hacker who doesn't seem to want anything?Colorful sixteen-year-old Fireball and her elite team of classmates from Cinzento Secure's corporate academy must do exactly that. They're investigating a hack at a prestigious bank, and the bizarre network issues they've observed are turning out to be something stranger than Team Raven has ever encountered.That Something grows more serious by the minute, reaching tendrils outside the bank and into critical infrastructure. As the team races to keep the hack from costing lives, a new question is added to the mix: why is someone stalking their newest team member?

This book proposes ‘paragogic’ methods to re-imagine the art academy. While art schooling was revolutionised in the early 20th century by the Bauhaus, the author argues that many art schools are unwittingly recycling the same modernist pedagogical fashions. Stagnating in such traditions, today’s art schools are blind to recent advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As discipline-based education research in art eternally battles the perceived threat of epistemicide, transformative educational practices are rapidly overcoming the perennialism of the art school. The author develops critical case studies of open source and peer-to-peer methods for re-imagining the art academy (para-academia) and andragogy (paragogy). This innovative book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the art school, as well as how the art academy can be reimagined and rebuilt.