Education, Faculty of
Educational Studies (EDST), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Johnson, Leslie Diane
Doctor of Education - EdD
University of British Columbia
In both Canada and the United States, women are earning more university degrees than their male counterparts, including terminal degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021; Universities Canada, 2019). Yet as the pathway proceeds towards senior leadership, the relative percentage of women occupying leadership positions decreases remarkably in both countries (Melidona et al., 2023; Universities Canada, 2019). While the reasons for this are complex, the literature regarding women and postsecondary administration exposes issues related to care as a point of tension and a barrier to leadership (e.g., Cardozo, 2017). This study, informed by Joan Tronto’s (1993, 2010) theorizing of care ethics, sought to understand more about the experiences of women academic leaders in the United States and Canada. What meanings do women in postsecondary academic leadership positions give to the notion of care? What perspectives do women from traditionally excluded or marginalized populations have about care and caring in their professional lives? Nine participants took part in semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed before applying an interpretative phenomenological analysis. In keeping with the study’s aims to reposition emotional knowledge alongside intellectual knowledge (Jaggar, 1989), found poems were constructed from the interview transcripts and shared with participants. Five superordinate themes emerged as significant to help in our understanding of participants' experiences and perspectives of care in their leadership practices: 1) Authenticity as a caring leader; 2) Performative optics of care leadership; 3) Caring for oneself; 4) Motherhood and leadership; and 5) Boundaries: establishing and/or maintaining physical and emotional limits. Each superordinate theme incorporated multiple sub-themes. The experiences and perspectives shared by participants confirmed the political and public nature of caring. The study surfaced issues related to performative allyship, where institutions may engage in superficial demonstrations of care without meaningful action. It highlights the challenges and disincentives for authentically active allyship in academic institutions, particularly for leaders from marginalized groups. It also illuminates structural issues that contribute to tensions between caregiving responsibilities and the demands of academic leadership, which include the pressure to meet institutional expectations in a neoliberal context.
THE CARING PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERSHIP: AN INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CARE by Leslie Diane Johnson B.A., University of California, San Diego, 1995 M.S., San Diego State University 2004 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF EDUCATION in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Educational Leadership and Policy) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2024 © Leslie Diane Johnson, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: The Caring Practices of Women in Higher Education Leadership: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Care submitted by Leslie Diane Johnson in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Policy Examining Committee: Dr. Deirdre Kelly, Professor, Educational Studies, UBC Supervisor Dr. Alison Taylor, Professor, Educational Studies, UBC Co-supervisor Dr. Shauna Butterwick, Professor Emerita, Educational Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Anne Phelan, Professor, Curriculum & Pedagogy, UBC University Examiner Dr. Claudia Ruitenberg, Professor, Educational Studies, UBC University Examiner Dr. Catherine McGregor, Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Graduate Programs and Research, University of Victoria External Examiner iii Abstract In both Canada and the United States, women are earning more university degrees than their male counterparts, including terminal degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021; Universities Canada, 2019). Yet as the pathway proceeds towards senior leadership, the relative percentage of women occupying leadership positions decreases remarkably in both countries (Melidona et al., 2023; Universities Canada, 2019). While the reasons for this are complex, the literature regarding women and postsecondary administration exposes issues related to care as a point of tension and a barrier to leadership (e.g., Cardozo, 2017). This study, informed by Joan Tronto’s (1993, 2010) theorizing of care ethics, sought to understand more about the experiences of women academic leaders in the United States and Canada. What meanings do women in postsecondary academic leadership positions give to the notion of care? What perspectives do women from traditionally excluded or marginalized populations have about care and caring in their professional lives? Nine participants took part in semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed before applying an interpretative phenomenological analysis. In keeping with the study’s aims to reposition emotional knowledge alongside intellectual knowledge (Jaggar, 1989), found poems were constructed from the interview transcripts and shared with participants. Five superordinate themes emerged as significant to help in our understanding of participants' experiences and perspectives of care in their leadership practices: 1) Authenticity as a caring leader; 2) Performative optics of care leadership; 3) Caring for oneself; 4) Motherhood and leadership; and 5) Boundaries: establishing and/or maintaining physical and emotional limits. Each superordinate theme incorporated multiple sub-themes. The experiences and perspectives shared by participants confirmed the political and public nature of caring. iv The study surfaced issues related to performative allyship, where institutions may engage in superficial demonstrations of care without meaningful action. It highlights the challenges and disincentives for authentically active allyship in academic institutions, particularly for leaders from marginalized groups. It also illuminates structural issues that contribute to tensions between caregiving responsibilities and the demands of academic leadership, which include the pressure to meet institutional expectations in a neoliberal context. v Lay Summary In both Canada and the United States, women are earning more university degrees than men. However, fewer women hold senior leadership roles in academia. This study explores why the gap exists, focusing on the role of care in leadership. Nine women academic leaders from the U.S. and Canada were interviewed to understand their experiences and perspectives on care. The study identified five key themes: authentic care in leadership, the appearance of care without real action, self-care, the impact of motherhood on leadership, and setting boundaries. The research reveals that caring is both political and public, with many institutions showing superficial support without meaningful actions, especially affecting leaders from marginalized groups. vi Preface This dissertation is original, independent, unpublished work of the author, Leslie Johnson. The research project received University of British Columbia Behavioral Research Ethics Board approval (UBC BREB Number:H18-02222) on September 10, 2018, under the title “Who Cares? The Practice of Care: Perspectives of Women in Higher Education Leadership.” I renewed this certificate on February 20, 2024, and it is approved until February 20, 2025. vii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................. v Preface ....................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... vii List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... xiii List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... xiv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. xv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The Curious Disappearance of Women from Higher Education Leadership .................. 1 1.2 My Practice and Inquiry .................................................................................................. 2 1.3 How I Hope This Study Will Contribute ......................................................................... 3 1.4 Why Did I Think Higher Education Was a Caring Space? .............................................. 4 1.5 Additional Thoughts on Researcher Positionality and the Importance of Reflexivity .... 6 1.6 Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................... 8 1.6.1 Phenomenology ........................................................................................................... 8 1.6.2 The Public, Political Care Ethics of Joan Tronto ...................................................... 13 1.6.3 The “Careless” Institution of the Neoliberal University ........................................... 14 1.6.4 “Women” and Gendered Postsecondary Leadership ................................................ 15 1.6.5 Intersectional Framework .......................................................................................... 17 viii 1.6.6 Love and Knowledge: Drawing on Feminist Epistemology ..................................... 18 1.7 Structure of This Dissertation ........................................................................................ 20 Chapter 2: Literature Review ..................................................................................................... 22 2.1. The Ethics of Care ......................................................................................................... 23 2.2 Diverse Perspectives on—and Intersectional Critiques of—Care Ethics ...................... 29 2.3 What is Neoliberalism? ................................................................................................. 32 2.4 Contradictions of Neoliberal Capitalism and Care - Care Meets Homo Economicus ... 35 2.5 The Neoliberal University ............................................................................................. 40 2.6 The Prestige Economy of Neoliberal Higher Education: Careless Institutions, Carefree Leaders and Tronto’s “Privileged Irresponsibility” ................................................................... 41 2.7 The Neoliberal University, Leadership, Care and Emotional Labor ............................. 53 2.8 Summary of Literature Review Chapter ........................................................................ 55 Chapter 3: Methodology ............................................................................................................. 60 3.1 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis .................................................................... 60 3.2 Recruitment and Selection of Participants .................................................................... 63 3.3 Compensation for Study ................................................................................................ 65 3.4 The Participants ............................................................................................................. 66 3.5 Preliminary Data Collection: Brief Demographic Questionnaire .................................. 66 3.7 Data Analysis ................................................................................................................. 69 3.7.1 Reading and Annotating the Transcripts .................................................................... 69 ix 3.7.2 Identifying Emergent Themes ................................................................................... 71 3.7.3 Searching for Connections Across Emergent Themes ............................................... 73 3.7.4 Moving on to the Next Case ...................................................................................... 73 3.7.5 Looking for Patterns Across Cases ............................................................................ 74 3.8 Poetic Transcription of the Interviews ........................................................................... 74 3.9 Presenting Poems to Participants ................................................................................... 77 3.10 Reflections on Writing Found Poems Using Participants’ Words ................................. 78 3.11 Construction of Quality ................................................................................................. 81 3.12 Research Ethics ............................................................................................................. 88 3.13 Summary of Methodology Chapter ............................................................................... 89 Chapter 4: Individual Findings—Meet the Participants ......................................................... 91 4.1 Leader 1: The Reluctant Leader .................................................................................... 94 4.2 Leader 2: The Community-Focused Caregiver ............................................................. 96 4.3 Leader 3: The Empathetic Humanist ............................................................................. 98 4.4 Leader 4: The Generous Mentor .................................................................................. 101 4.5 Leader 5: The Problem-Solving Advocate .................................................................. 103 4.6 Leader 6: The Moral Compass .................................................................................... 106 4.7 Leader 7: The Transparent Leader ............................................................................... 107 4.8 Leader 8: The Compassionate Changemaker .............................................................. 109 4.9 Leader 9: The Inclusive Architect ............................................................................... 111 x 4.10 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 114 Chapter 5: Cross-Case Themes from the Study ..................................................................... 117 5.1 Superordinate Theme 1: Authenticity as a Caring Leader. .......................................... 118 5.1.1 Alignment with Identity .......................................................................................... 118 5.1.2 Integrity ................................................................................................................... 120 5.1.3 Advocacy ................................................................................................................. 121 5.2 Superordinate Theme 2: Performative Caring and Inequities of Care Encountered by Racialized Women ................................................................................................................... 124 5.2.1 Additional Burdens of Care Expected of Women of Color ..................................... 124 5.2.2 Leaders Wielding Performative Care Behaviors as a Tool of Manipulation ........... 126 5.2.3 Performative Allyship Regarding Care of Marginalized People ............................. 128 5.2.4 Inadequate Care for Professional Growth Extended to Racialized Women in Academe .............................................................................................................................. 129 5.3 Superordinate Theme 3: Caring for oneself ................................................................ 131 5.3.1 What is Caring for Oneself? .................................................................................... 131 5.3.3 Self-Neglect and Self-Harm in “The Careless Institution” ..................................... 135 5.4 Superordinate Theme 4: Caring Identity as Mothers and its Effects on Career Trajectories .............................................................................................................................. 137 5.4.1 Motherhood Informing Caring Leadership ............................................................. 137 5.4.2 Caring Responsibilities of Parenting Affecting Leadership Trajectory ................... 140 5.5 Superordinate Theme 5: Boundaries and Shielding as an Aspect of Care .................. 142 5.5.1 Boundaries Between Work and Personal Lives ....................................................... 142 xi 5.5.2 Boundaries Within the Workplace ........................................................................... 146 5.6 Chapter Summary ........................................................................................................ 150 Chapter 6: Discussion and Conclusion .................................................................................... 154 6.1 Research Question 1: What are the Perspectives and Experiences Women in Postsecondary Academic Leadership Positions Associate with Care and Caring Leadership, and How Does it Inform Their Approach? .............................................................................. 154 6.1.1 Authenticity, Care of Self and the Holistic Experience of Caring Across One’s Experience ........................................................................................................................... 155 6.1.2 Neoliberal Institutions and the Locus of Care Responsibility .................................... 156 6.1.3 Homo Economicus, Privileged Irresponsibility and Motherhood for Academic Leaders ................................................................................................................................. 157 6.2 Research Question 2: What Perspectives Do Women from Traditionally Excluded or Marginalized Populations (e.g., Racialized Communities, LGBTQIA+, etc.) Have About Care and Caring in Their Professional Lives? ................................................................................. 159 6.2.1 Caring Academic Leadership as a Public, Political, and Authentic Activity .............. 159 6.2.2 Performative vs. Active Allyship: Optics vs. Authenticity ......................................... 160 6.2.3 Tensions Between Career Advancement and Care Amplified for Marginalized Women 162 6.3 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 163 6.4 Limitations of the Study .............................................................................................. 165 6.5 Future Research, and Suggestions on the Use of IPA and Found Poetry .................... 166 6.6 Implications for Policy and Practice ............................................................................ 169 xii 6.7 Some Final Reflections on My Practice ............................................................................ 171 References ................................................................................................................................... 176 Appendices ................................................................................................................................. 196 Appendix A: Interview Questions ........................................................................................... 196 Appendix B Consent Form ..................................................................................................... 197 Appendix C Invitation to Participate in Study ........................................................................ 199 xiii List of Tables Table 1: Tracy's Framework of Eight Criteria for Quality ............................................................ 82 Table 2: Participants' Self-Reported Demographic Information ................................................... 92 Table 3: Leader Numbers, Short Descriptors and Brief Quotes .................................................... 93 Table 4: Summary of Superordinate Themes and Related Sub-Themes ..................................... 117 xiv List of Figures Figure 1: Example of Emergent Theme from Transcript Analysis ................................................ 72 Figure 2: Example of Generation of Found Poem from Transcript ............................................... 76 xv Acknowledgements I must begin by expressing my deep gratitude to my superb supervisory committee: my co-supervisors, Dr. Deirdre Kelly and Dr. Alison Taylor, and my committee member Dr. Shauna Butterwick. I have benefitted so much from your wisdom, and I am eternally thankful for your unwavering kindness and support! I would like to thank my study’s participants for sharing their experiences and perspectives. I have learned much and have drawn inspiration from you many times over the years. Tremendous thanks to my fellow 2014 EdD Cohort classmates for your friendship, and for your encouragement – here’s to each of us crossing the finish line! I also thank my supportive work colleagues and friends who have cheered my progress along the way. My gratitude to Alison Miller and the community at The Academic Writers’ Space for teaching me a new way to approach complex, ambiguous work that is both compassionate and generative. I thank the living beings outside my apartment windows for reminding me that we are interconnected within the web of life, especially when I got too much in my own head. And, of course, I thank my family from the bottom of my heart: Mr. M., Julius, Tree, Stella, Sophia, and Greg. You have taught me about care in profound ways. I love you. xvi I didn’t go He said, “Well, even if you don't want the job, we need to have more diverse people applying. Could you go away and think about what we could do to the job so that someone like you might be interested?” There was something else scheduled and I didn’t go. I just felt too awkward to say, “Please change that meeting.” It mattered to me about my family, and I hadn't spoken up. I just didn't tell them to change the meeting. Why? When are we scheduling those meetings? Are they at 8:30 a.m.— why? Why can't they be at 10:00? If I'm not public about that struggle and I'm not public about what I change, how do we ever have hope for the people who don't have the degree of power that I have? The self-care isn't this. You lose it. You recognize you've lost it. You rein it back in. (Leader 7: The Transparent Leader) 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 The Curious Disappearance of Women from Higher Education Leadership In both Canada and the United States, women are earning more university degrees than their male counterparts, including terminal degrees, yet as the pathway proceeds towards senior leadership, the relative percentage of women occupying leadership positions decreases remarkably in both countries. According to Universities Canada (2019), women formed the majority of enrolled bachelor’s (57%) and master’s degree (57%) students, and were nearly at parity with men at the doctoral level (48%). However, when considering the ranks of faculty, the percentage of women trends downward: 50% of assistant professors, 44% of associate professors, dwindling to 29% of full professors. While data on women holding leadership positions (many of whom were faculty members who enter administration) other than the presidency seem a bit challenging to come by, according to Universities Canada, 26% of university presidencies were headed by women as of 2019. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), data shows that for 2020-2021, women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, 65% of master’s degrees, and 58% of doctorates. Women hold approximately 47% of full-time faculty positions; Asian women, 5%; Black women, 4%; Latinx women, 3%; White women, 35% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Yet according to the American Council on Education’s American College President Study (Melidona et al., 2023), 33% of colleges and universities in the United States have female presidents. Of those female presidents, 69% are White, 14% are Black, 8% are Latinx; researchers indicated they were “unable to highlight the unique and varied experiences of Asian or Asian American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, Native 2 Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern or Arab American, or multiracial women presidents due to smaller sample sizes (p. 17).” Why, when more women in both Canada and the United States are earning degrees, including advanced degrees, are so few successfully rising through the ranks to attain college and university leadership positions? This question, prompted by national data and by my own experience in practice, piqued my curiosity and prompted me to want to explore further. 1.2 My Practice and Inquiry While my career path through nearly 30 years has encompassed a variety of settings, including public research and private liberal arts institutions in the United States, for the past several years I’ve served as a senior-level academic affairs staff member working at a small, private art and design college. My responsibilities have included oversight of academic policy, regional accreditation and national arts accreditation. I also serve as a peer reviewer of other institutions, oversee academic and co-curricular program review, and help to ensure effective communication between the executive team and institutional staff on matters related to academic policies, procedures and federal compliance. As reflected in the previously-noted Canadian and American statistics, over the course of many years of postsecondary practice, I have noticed that significantly fewer women than men seem to attain and maintain formal leadership positions (e.g., director, associate dean, dean, provost, president). It has appeared that the higher the positions become in the institutional hierarchy, the fewer the numbers of women holding those positions. While the reasons for this are complex, as I began to delve into the literature regarding women and postsecondary administration, issues related to care surfaced in literature as a point of tension and a barrier to leadership. I found this to be of particular interest, as a desire to serve people in a caring capacity was a key impetus for my decision to pursue a career in 3 postsecondary education, after briefly pursuing career paths in law and family systems psychotherapy. I sought to understand more about care in the context of women in formal higher education leadership positions in Canada in the United States (e.g., directors, deans, provosts, etc.) in academic affairs-related (as opposed to student affairs areas, such as residence life): how they define it, and how that affects their ability to and/or desire to attain or maintain leadership positions. It is also important to consider other facets of being (e.g., race, ethnicity, etc.), and the role these aspects play in how care is conceptualized, valued and experienced amongst the female postsecondary leaders I have known and worked with. These considerations, and the power relations inherent in them, will mean that applying an intersectional lens to this exploration will be important. As part of this journey, I will also want to understand better the definitions of care and how gender and other dimensions of identity are associated with care, with leadership, and with the convergence of the two. My research questions were: 1) What are the perspectives and experiences women in postsecondary academic leadership positions associate with care and caring leadership, and how does it inform their approach? 2) What perspectives do women from traditionally excluded or marginalized populations (e.g., racialized communities, LGBTQIA+, etc.) have about care and caring in their professional lives? 1.3 How I Hope This Study Will Contribute These questions are important to me as a practitioner: I believe learning more about this will increase my understanding of the complex role care plays in the practices and lives 4 (including family care responsibilities) of my colleagues and in my own practice, particularly as regards career advancement for postsecondary leaders. Engaging in this work provided opportunities to better understand the role care plays in my own practice and inform me as I move forward on my career path. I believe it will help me to support the development of the staff members who report to me, and that it supports me in bringing further value to the faculty with whom I collaborate regarding professional development and advancement as well. I envision this research potentially informing the discourses on leadership and leadership development in the postsecondary sector more broadly (not just women, and not just leaders in Canada and the United States). I also hope the research contributes to discussions about inclusion, meaning and purpose in higher education leadership. 1.4 Why Did I Think Higher Education Was a Caring Space? Choosing this topic for my dissertation has led to a great deal of contemplation. One of the things I reflected on repeatedly was – why did I think higher education was a caring space? I’ve become attuned to the fact that people have many reasons for pursuing careers in the academic sector: intellectual curiosity, prestige, or the desire to solve a difficult problem, for instance. The main reason I chose employment in the postsecondary sector all those years ago was because I wanted to be of service by caring for others, by supporting people in their efforts to overcome challenges and pursue fulfilling lives. But why did I perceive higher education – and the academic side of the house within higher education – as a caring space? As a first-generation university student, I recall the wonder I experienced when I first stepped on to my university’s campus. I had only applied to one school, based on the fact that it was near my job in the shopping mall and on the bus route. Early on, I found that what I was learning, and how I was learning to think, were at deep odds with the world view held by my 5 working-class, conservative family of origin. As my world expanded, the disparity of views and values contributed to a rupture in the relationship and my ejection from the family system during my first year of university. While there were certainly difficulties—I overcame homelessness twice during my undergraduate journey— I was extraordinarily fortunate that my life was transformed (saved, really) by the care I received as a student from university psychologist, from faculty in my department, and the department chair. Though it took eight years to complete my bachelor’s degree, it was made possible in part through the support, encouragement and understanding I received from faculty and academic administrators at my university. While I explored other career possibilities after graduating, I kept coming back to the fact that I wanted to do something that mattered. I wanted to help others improve their lives, especially students going through the postsecondary educational journey. I was especially drawn to higher education not only because this was a site of transformative care for myself, but also because it had been widely touted as a societal and economic equalizer in the wake of the 1965 Higher Education Act in the United States. When signing the Higher Education Act into law at his alma mater, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson stated: For the individual, [higher] education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the Nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace -- for it is education that places reason over force” (Johnson, 1965). So, by virtue of my seeking the college degree, I believed I had been caring for my well-being in potent and lasting ways. I also was aware of the ways that the university educational systems at that time hadn’t been designed for people in my situation: classes did not accommodate working schedules, and I was actually doing economic damage to myself because I had to incur student loan debt in order 6 to pursue my degree. At that time, university fees in California were ballooning exponentially to the point where the state stepped in to mitigate the increases, and the location was in the city that had the worst income to living expenses ratio in the United States at that point; the general cost of living was very expensive. So, while I had coped and grown through the caring I received during my university experience, that caring—and my perception that universities were places of caring—was partly down to individuals choosing to care, rather than systemic caring. 1.5 Additional Thoughts on Researcher Positionality and the Importance of Reflexivity As noted by Herr and Anderson, researchers need to attend to their multiple, complex and often shifting insider/outsider status in relation to research participants and research contexts (Herr & Anderson, 2005, p. 48). As I embarked on the research process, I recognized the importance of acknowledging and engaging in reflexive work around my own positionality as a researcher. As a researcher, it is incumbent upon me to pay attention to assumptions and how my identity as a White (currently middle-class) woman is constructed in interviews and how any assumptions and biases may be informing my perceptions or constructions of interviewees. As Best puts it: “I remind myself of the work I must do as I struggle to move along an insider/outsider continuum – recognizing myself as a racial insider/outsider is never something that just is but is an interactional accomplishment (Best, 2003, p. 909).” I would extend Best’s comment to include other markers of social difference as well. I tried to bear in mind Reay’s assertion that it is important to carry the awareness of insider/outsider relations and power differentials between me and research participants into the analysis and interpretation of the data generated by our interviews (Reay, 2012, p. 636). Reay and Finlay both caution against making assumptions regarding shared experience when working with participants from similar backgrounds, and Reay further cautions that the insider/outsider relationship can fluctuate even 7 within the course of one interview (Reay, 2012, p. 636; Finlay, 2012, p. 321). I found this to be valuable in part because it offered me an opportunity to reconsider the potential power relations between me and my informants. I’d been working under a misguided impression that because my study focuses on people in similar professional positions to my own, that the power relationships would be largely that of equals, or possibly even with the interviewee in a position of greater status and power than me. Thinking it through reminded me that this may not be the case, and that these dimensions of status, power and insider/outsider relations are nuanced and require constant awareness and sensitivity. I also appreciated Reay’s reflexive work on her own reactions to class (Reay, 2012, p. 634). I have often experienced dissonance between my working-class background and the cultural norms of senior leadership in academia and at my current institution in particular. I’m also beginning to become aware that my approach to professional interpersonal interactions, including interviews, is informed by my training as a psychotherapist, where self-disclosure was strongly discouraged in most circumstances. While the purpose of the study’s research interviews was to learn about the experiences and perspectives of my research participants, it is not the same thing as a therapeutic dialog, and I found myself reminding myself of that frequently throughout the interview process. Finlay advises that the type of reflexivity researchers engage in should align with their overall conceptual framework. Since I worked to engage in my study from an intersectional feminist, phenomenological perspective, relational reflexivity seemed an appropriate approach, contributing to my own growth in addition to attending to the ethical and professional requirements of the research process. As Finlay notes: “The relationship under scrutiny is not simply that between two people in a straightforward dialogue. There are multiple interacting 8 ‘selves’ or subjectivities involved (Finlay, 2012, p. 325).” This view of multiple selves resonates with me and aligned with my hope to honor the complex emotional as well as the intellectual dimensions of the work. 1.6 Conceptual Framework This study is grounded in the philosophy and approach of interpretative phenomenology. It is informed by care ethics, particularly as they are framed by Joan Tronto. It is also informed by the critical feminist discourse regarding the “careless institution” within the context of gendered leadership in the neoliberal university, as well as intersectional critiques of care theory—all of which look upon on care as a political activity and which share normative ideals of social justice. This project draws from feminist epistemology as outlined by Alison Jaggar, which is significant in that it seeks to reposition emotional knowing alongside intellectual knowledge and served as the impetus for the use of poetry in this project. Below, I outline in a bit more detail the threads from which the conceptual framework is woven. 1.6.1 Phenomenology For this project, I draw upon Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to guide the approach to the research. Phenomenological research is an approach to the study of human phenomena, with a long-established philosophical basis for exploring the human experience (Hein & Austin, 2001). Van Manen (2016) describes phenomenology as a uniquely human science designed to “question the way we experience the world” (Van Manen, 2016, p. 5). In phenomenology, the researcher is primarily concerned with understanding the vital elements, structures, and meanings of what we feel, what we think, and what remember, rather than the physical or external manifestations of these phenomena (Polkinghorne, 1989). Phenomenology uses methods to evoke, describe, and interpret conscious (and sometimes unconscious) 9 experiences and their meanings so that we can better understand the meaning of the human experience. Phenomenology is rooted in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and subsequently in the works of Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty and others, all of whom were instrumental in the development of more interpretative forms of phenomenological research. As a methodology, phenomenology is distinct in that it starts in the “life-world,” Husserl's term for pre-theoretical, pre-reflective human experience (Moran, 2000). According to Husserl, exploring the life-world, involves gaining insights into how people actually experience phenomena—before thinking, before reflection, before other conceptualizations inevitably transform the real experiences of the life-world into secondary reflections of experience. In order to study human experience phenomenologically, Husserl argued, one must depart from the normal, everyday attitude towards life and adopt a phenomenological perspective, where attention is consciously directed to the perceptions of the experiences we intend to explore (Smith et al., 2009). Husserl's phenomenology is often considered “descriptive,” as it has the explicit aim of describing the essential elements of human experience, including the various components and their interrelationships (Hein & Austin, 2001). The goal of descriptive phenomenology is to describe the features, structures, and underlying themes “that give form and meaning to the life-world” (Laverty, 2003, p. 15). Husserl's approach to phenomenology makes two assumptions: 1) that human experience has an inherent logic accessible to the outside observer, and 2) that phenomenological methods hold the key to revealing the content and structure of that experience (Dukes, 1984). From an ontological point of view, descriptive phenomenology assumes that the reality under investigation is recognizable as a solid and unchanging entity, ready to be 10 discovered through careful and systematic investigation. In this sense, Husserl called phenomenology “genuine positivism” (Sinha, 1963, p. 562). One significant aspect of descriptive phenomenology is bracketing, the process of identifying and, as far as possible, setting aside the assumptions and prejudices, and assumptions that one brings to the study of a topic (Hein & Austin, 2001). Bracketing facilitates what Husserl called “phenomenological reduction,” in which the researcher reduces the viewed world from the unfiltered world of the natural setting to awareness alone and focuses on the participant's experience of the phenomenon of interest in the phenomenological setting (Smith, 2005). Subsequent phenomenologists, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, questioned Husserl's perspective on bracketing, instead suggesting that a critical and reflective process of continually exploring the implications of the researcher’s prior knowledge and biases toward the research process was necessary in order to consider subjectivity from the researcher's perspective (Finlay, 2009). Later phenomenologists, including Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, continued to emphasize the importance of describing human experiences as they exist in the life-world, but many dismissed Husserl's view that there is only one correct interpretation of experiential phenomena. Heidegger advocated for an approach now known as hermeneutic or interpretive phenomenology. Heidegger conceptualized human experience and phenomenology in terms of Dasein (literally translated as “there-being”), which describes the inherent place of all human experience in the context of the world of life (Smith et al., 2009). In contrast to Husserl's notion of a common existence in the life-world, Dasein is unique to each individual, who exists in social, cultural and historical contexts. There is an integral relationship between each human being and the life-world in which they exist. Rather than using Husserl’s concept of bracketing to 11 avoid assumptions and biases, Heidegger's approach to phenomenology explores the intersubjectivity of experience; the ways that relationships in the life-world give meaning to experiences. With the integrated and intersubjective nature of Dasein, Heidegger espoused descriptive and hermeneutic aspects of phenomenological research. Gadamer (2004) emphasized and expanded on the hermeneutic nature of phenomenological endeavors. Like Husserl, Gadamer saw phenomenology as the best approach to attain access to “matters themselves,” but Gadamer saw phenomenology as a way to understand understanding itself as well (Moran, 2000). Moran states that “Gadamer’s philosophy, then, is a kind of phenomenology of understanding” (p. 250) and offers insight into what it means for people to find meaning and meaning in their experiences. Like Heidegger, Gadamer emphasized the inherent position of the observer, but stressed the importance of history and tradition in shaping the interpretive process. From Gadamer’s viewpoint, it is humanity’s self-cultivation (Bildung) through interactions with society and culture that creates the potential and perspective for understanding human experience. For the interpretive process, Gadamer's contributions suggest that phenomenology must constantly engage with the ever-changing dynamics of self and other, society and history, while always being aware that the entire process of interpretation (even attention to context) the context is located in it and inevitably always changing. Merleau-Ponty (2002) added to our understanding the individual and specific nature of human experience by describing the embodied human relationship to the life-world. According to Merleau-Ponty, our bodies cannot be viewed simply as objects of the world, “but as our means of communication with it” (2002, p. 106). Our existence as physical subjects has important implications for how we see others, since our perceptions are always mediated by our own 12 physical distinctness from others, while others' experiences are centered in their own embodiment within the world. Our interactions with others are shaped by the “mineness” we perceive about our own experiences and the aboutness we feel about the experiences of others (Smith et al., 2009). Each body-subject informs, shapes, and is shaped by the experience of being both embodied and different. For Merleau-Ponty perception is not passive observation, but “creative receptivity” that is characterized by the interplay of “interiority and exteriority of psychical and physical embodiment” (Vasseleu, 1998, p. 24). The active cultivation of creative receptivity serves as a tool to propel phenomenology beyond mere one-sided observation, enabling interpretations that consider the intersubjectivity of the embodied individuals engaged in the experience. The contributions of Heidegger, Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty to Husserl's original phenomenological approach suggest that the phenomenologist concerned with investigating authentic human experience must attempt to explain as completely as possible the ways in which the researcher and the participants exist in the world (e.g., embedded in society and culture, in relation to others, historical/temporary, physically). Van Manen (2016) argues that an individual can inhabit different lifeworlds by assuming different roles throughout the day, and that a child's lifeworld has different experiential qualities than that of an adult. van Manen describes four “existentials” of lived experience that can inform the process of interpretation: “lived space (spatiality), lived body (corporeality), lived time (temporality) and lived human relationship (relationality or communality)” (p. 101). These contexts are not identical for two people, and thus the interpretation of a human phenomenon observed in a research participant's lifeworld will be subject to a unique perspective that is perpetually changing in response to each new observation and experience. Taking into 13 account this partial and ever-changing nature of being and understanding, Gadamer proposes that researchers maintain an “openness” to texts that emerge from phenomenological inquiry and engage in a “dialogue between what we bring to the text, and what the text brings to us” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 26). Openness, reflexivity, awareness of context - all these aspects have informed the development of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the methodological approach used in this study. 1.6.2 The Public, Political Care Ethics of Joan Tronto While earlier feminist conceptualizations of care ethics were focused on the moral development of the individual (Gilligan, 1977; Noddings, 1984), Joan Tronto's conceptualization of care ethics advocated a public, political role for care ethics (Tronto, 1993). In doing so, she redefined the boundaries between morality and politics, emphasizing the importance of values like attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, and meeting others' needs, traditionally associated with women in private contexts, within the public sphere. In her work, Moral Boundaries (1993), she contended that care should be recognized and valued in the public realm, where it rightfully belongs, rather than being relegated to the private or domestic sphere. This repositioning, according to Tronto, would lead to a more equitable distribution of power in the public sphere, resulting in a more democratic and pluralistic political landscape. Tronto's theorizing of care includes institutional settings. In Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose (2010), she suggests that institutions should not be modeled after family structures or market dynamics, as some theorists have proposed. Instead, Tronto argues that care in an institutional context should focus on three primary areas: 1) the purpose of care, 2) acknowledgment of power relations, and 3) the need for a pluralistic approach tailored to meet 14 individual needs. She emphasizes that creating political space within institutions is essential for addressing these concerns effectively. Her work highlights the existing disparities in the distribution of care work within institutions, where care tends to be disproportionately assigned to marginalized groups, which further underscores the secondary status of care in society. Her work also addresses the gendered, raced, and class-based nature of care as it is broadly constructed in society; she points out that “taking care of” (Tronto, 1993, p. 115) has been associated with masculinity, while “caring about” has become gendered, raced, and classed. This division implies that men and individuals with greater privilege tend to focus on public and broader issues, while women and people of color often find themselves tending to private or local concerns. She introduces the term “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1993, p. 120) to describe how dominant groups, often unaware of their exercise of power, maintain their positions of privilege by disavowing their care responsibilities; this conceptualization of care ethics is a useful juxtaposition with the discourse regarding higher education as a “careless institution” and its critique of the “careless leader” construct within postsecondary context (Grummel et al., 2009; Herschberg et al., 2018; Lynch et al., 2012). 1.6.3 The “Careless” Institution of the Neoliberal University While care appears to be a key value for many female leaders in academia (Cardozo, 2017; Gardiner, 2014; Gaudet et al., 2022; Hughes et al., 2017), it may also be perceived as a barrier to leadership positions. Some scholars have described postsecondary leadership positions as being “greedy” to serve as the sole focus of the individual’s energy, time and focus; leaders in these contexts are constructed as “carefree” or “careless” (Fitzgerald, 2014; Grummel et al., 2009; Morley, 2013), where the presumption is that leaders are without care responsibilities and that the embodied needs for care that leaders themselves experience are ignored or at times even 15 penalized. A number of scholars also note that, indeed, academic work generally is situated in a high-pressure, entrepreneurial postsecondary context, where care responsibilities (including self-care or care of family members) and work ascribed to care, such as advising students or mentoring junior faculty, are deemed less prestigious and important than activities related to research and publishing (Butterwick & Dawson, 2005; Lynch, 2010; Morley, 2013). These clear tensions, between care as a value—and care as a thing that is ignored or perhaps even penalized—inform my desire to better understand what care means to women in postsecondary academic leadership roles, and to learn more about their experiences of care in their work worlds. 1.6.4 “Women” and Gendered Postsecondary Leadership I know I’m not a man – about that much I’m very clear, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman, either…the trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other (Bornstein, 2016, p. 10). As I explored the literature regarding women in postsecondary leadership, I found it striking that, thus far, none of the studies I have encountered have defined what “woman” is for the purposes of their work. Many scholars have, however, observed that postsecondary institutions are gendered places and reinforced gendered norms (Haake, 2009; Acker, 2010; Lynch, 2010; Morley, 2013). For example, Haake’s study regarding leadership identity development in female postsecondary department heads concluded that there is “an overall discursive pattern that makes leader identities develop in an increasingly gendered way the longer the leadership positions are held,” and that “the discourse on academic leadership strengthened rather than weakened traditional gender roles in an analysis of the identity development process” (Hakke, 2009, p. 16 301). Haake’s findings appeared to align with Butler’s concept of gender as a performance, and one in which the players are expected to operate within societal norms: “Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished” (Butler, 1988, p. 522). Women postsecondary leaders’ encounters with reinforced gendered constructs around performing leadership (and the challenges these constructs present to them) was a recurring theme the literature, reiterating the importance of examining constructs of gender. In an effort to seek out further insight into what constitutes a “woman” and how that might impact postsecondary leaders in these highly gendered, largely binary-conceptualized workplaces, I attempted to locate any literature regarding transgendered postsecondary leadership or any involving intersex or non-binary gender identified participants, but was unable to locate any. Interestingly, however, in a study applying Queer Theory to the study of gay, lesbian and queer postsecondary presidents, Bullard discovered that the female participants in the study “reported the greatest incidence of gender identity and stereotype issues” (Bullard, 2013, p. 63). Indeed, gendered expectations of the presidents’ performed behaviors emerged as one of the most prevalent themes in the study. Clearly, the nature of gender is complex. According to Killermann, gender is “like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder to solve” (Killermann, 2017, p. 169). With full acknowledgement of the complicated, non-binary nature of gender, and the problems inherent in the enforced binaries of gendered labels, for the purposes of this particular project regarding the lived experiences of women postsecondary leaders in a highly gendered work context, I worked 17 with participants who self-identify and who are identified as “women” in their work contexts. Throughout the research journey, I was reminded of the societal and workplace constructs regarding gender, especially as a binary system and those constructs within my own worldview. 1.6.5 Intersectional Framework Arising from Black feminism and Critical Race Theory in the United States, Intersectional Theory emerged as a response to discourses that reinforced discriminatory power relations both in legal and social justice advocacy situations (Crenshaw, 1989). Its use, however, has expanded well beyond its original context and continues to move and develop across multiple disciplines and contexts (Carbanado et al., 2013; Collins, 2015). Cho et al. describe intersectionality as a “heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics. It exposed how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice” (Cho et al., 2013). Crenshaw’s early work in intersectionality, for instance, discusses examples from case law in the United States where discrimination cases brought to court by Black women were mired down in the single-axis framing of them as people. In reviewing some case law exemplars regarding discrimination, Crenshaw discovered that African-American women could attempt to bring a discrimination case on the basis of gender or on the basis of race but not both, and that the courts refused to include them as members of classes in lawsuits due to ambiguity regarding which aspect of their identities had been the subject of discrimination. Crenshaw further decries the notion that Sexism or racism can be meaningfully discussed without paying attention to the lives of those other than the race-gender-or class-privileged. As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what 18 happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to be White women (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 152). Crenshaw’s contemporary, Patricia Hill Collins, emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the ways that individuals can simultaneously experience both marginalization and privilege, and that both aspects can affect the ways they navigate various social contexts: “Oppression is filled with such contradictions because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone’s lives” (Collins, 2000, p. 287). I believe this shift away from binary conceptualizations of power and powerlessness is important towards having a more nuanced perspective of the role that care plays in the careers and lives of women postsecondary leaders, and I reflected on this as I engaged in the research process. I found that it is also important to be mindful of in my role as a practitioner as well. In order to weave consideration of intersectional literature into this work, I included related studies done specifically from an intersectional perspective, or intersectional critiques of respective areas, after initial introductions to some of the literature I encountered during the process of my literature review in Chapter 2. 1.6.6 Love and Knowledge: Drawing on Feminist Epistemology I approached this project from a feminist perspective. Alison Jaggar explains, “Feminist researchers seek to rethink the related ways in which the symbolically masculine is overvalued and the symbolically feminine is undervalued in specific cultures and contexts, and they pursue new knowledge likely to be valuable in the quest for gender equity” (Jaggar, 2014, page x). A large motivation in choosing this area to study stemmed from my curiosity about how women leaders in higher education experience the traditionally feminized realms of care as they interface 19 with the traditionally masculinized realms of leadership (Burkinshaw, 2015; Fitzgerald, 2014; Morley, 2013; Wallace & Wallin, 2015), and the further complexities of how intersectional aspects of gender, race and ethnicity (and, when possible, class) play into it all. As Patricia Hill Collins notes: “Work constitutes one important concept that contains highly nuanced scholarship on how labor market organization, occupational segregation, work-family balance, and other aspects of paid and unpaid reproductive labor underpin complex social inequities” (Collins, 2015, p. 11). By engaging in this study, I hope in some small ways I can help contribute to the development of more equitable practices. My explorations regarding women in postsecondary leadership and care are informed by feminist challenges to the long-standing valuing of reason over emotional knowledge in the academy and elsewhere. For example, when describing the development of our current dominant paradigm of Western objectivity, Alison Jaggar explains: “the validity of logical inferences was thought independent of human attitudes and preferences; this was now the sense in which reason was taken to be objective and universal” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 152). I believe that care as valued and demonstrated by postsecondary leaders may constitute what Jaggar calls an “outlaw emotion”; emotions that are unacceptable or incompatible with the dominant perceptions and values of a given context. Jaggar also notes that women are: Relatively adept at identifying such emotions, in themselves and others, in part because of their social responsibility for caretaking, including emotional nurturance…this emotional acumen can now be recognized as a skill in political analysis and validated as giving women a special advantage both in understanding the mechanisms of domination and in envisioning freer ways to live (Jaggar, 1989, p.171). As Jaggar discusses, feminist epistemology acknowledges that emotion (including caring) counts 20 amongst interdependent, non-dichotomous dimensions that comprise knowing. I envision my study and corresponding approach aligning with these perspectives, and hopefully contributing to efforts to re-position emotion alongside reason as a viable way of knowing. 1.7 Structure of This Dissertation Utilizing qualitative interviews with nine women in higher education academic leadership, my research attempts to understand how these leaders understand and experience care in the context of their work. In Chapter 2, I engage in a review of the related literature; in Chapter 3, I explain the research paradigms and methods used in the study, including the use of found poetry generated from interview transcripts; a strategy I employ to help reclaim emotional knowledge alongside intellectual knowledge. The found transcript poems are distributed throughout this dissertation ahead of each chapter; the choice of where to place each poem within the dissertation was driven by intuitive, emotional and aesthetic logic rather than a specific intellectual strategy. In keeping with the idiographic context of the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach, in Chapter 4, I present profiles and individual findings for each participant. Each profile includes that respective leader’s understanding and experiences with caring in the context of their work worlds. Chapter 5 delves into a cross-case findings of the significant superordinate themes and sub themes that arose from the research. Chapter 6 engages in further discussion of the findings and threads them back to the research questions I had at the start of the study. Chapter 6 culminates with the implications of the research and recommendations for future studies and considerations of my professional practice as a consequence of the research findings. 21 A split When I was younger, it was, I think, a split— the professional and personal. They've merged, I think, as I've gotten older. A lot of the people, you know, women of color who came up scrappy, trying to get a job like tomorrow, to support my family. “Where do you want to be in five years?” I don't know. I could be, I think, further along Maybe, somewhere else. I’d have that, you know, aspect a little bit more heightened up I'm not going to fight with you, I don't care who gets credit. Because we're women, we get it done. Because we're like “get it done.” Let’s get this shit done. (Leader 2: The Community-Focused Caregiver) 22 Chapter 2: Literature Review The purpose of this study was to better understand the perspectives and experiences of care encountered by women in higher education leadership in Canada and the United States. Further, while no one single study can prove comprehensive, I wanted to begin to incorporate diverse voices rather than taking a monolithic approach to “women,” which in much of the research regarding postsecondary woman leaders has included only White middle and upper-middle-class women. The review of the literature was continuous though the process of identifying the topic and the contours of the study, the data collection and analysis, poetry generation and the integration of the work into the dissertation itself. The literature review draws from several types of resources, including books, journal articles, dissertations, internet resources and periodicals. The sources were accessed via the University of British Columbia’s Library website, as well as via Google Scholar, ERIC/EBSCO and other search engines. The search was not limited by a specific time frame, as the related literature in draws from work that is evolving. I focused my search on higher education in Canada and the United States, but included relevant sources from elsewhere, primarily the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. The literature engaged in for this project can be categorized into a few primary threads, including: 1) the literature on care, particularly “second generation” (Hankivsky, 2004, p. 27) care ethicist Joan Tronto; 2) literature focusing on intersectional perspectives on caring, particularly as regards critiques of care ethics and of higher education leadership; 3) the critical feminist critique of the “careless” university and how that connects to a broader context of the neoliberal university and the capitalist crisis of care. 23 2.1. The Ethics of Care Care ethics as a normative ethical theory originally developed as a challenge to justice perspective theories of moral development in the late 20th century. Ethics of care are widely understood to have been first articulated by Carol Gilligan in her work In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Gilligan’s work critiqued the then-prevalent developmental theories for their failure to address the perspectives and experiences of women, and, importantly, that the linear developmental ideation of moral development was framed in an individualistic manner, divorced from the web of relations that shape human life. Gilligan found fault with the model that her mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, had posited, claiming she heard a “different voice” than the voice of justice posited by Kohlberg. Gilligan believed that the care perspective was an alternative, but legitimate form of moral reasoning overshadowed by the dominant focus on independence. She characterized this difference as one of theme – relationality - rather than attaching it specifically gender, although many interpreting her theories continued to associate the difference with gender rather than theme. Gilligan illustrated a key example of the difference between her perspective and Kohlberg’s by using the “Heinz dilemma” (Gilligan, 1977). In this exercise, children were presented with a scenario where a man, “Heinz,” should steal an expensive drug to save his wife. One child, Jake, viewed the dilemma’s resolution in that the right to life supersedes property rights, so that people should decide that Heinz should steal the drug. Another child, Amy, believes that Heinz should not steal the drug, as this could lead to his arrest and would take him away from his wife, depriving her of his support. Amy believes that the pharmacist would understand and try to help if Heinz were to explain their circumstances; thus she conceives of the situation as a relational one, set in a context of a web of relationships. Gilligan suggests that 24 women and men are speaking with different voices and she seeks to reframe the assumption of and individualistic (archetypically male) perspective being the standard for moral development and reasoning. There were numerous critiques of, and responses to, Gilligan’s work. Some claimed that the sample size used was too small and homogenous of groups—university students and women considering abortion (Brabeck, 1983). Notably, Walker and Snarey point out that the Heinz dilemma changes if Heinz is identified as Black, because in the United States, Black males are disproportionately likely to be arrested, with less change that their cases will be dismissed without significant penalties (Walker & Snarey, 2004). In another response to Gilligan’s work, Benhabib draws from it to help articulate a fundamental dichotomy regarding public and private realms in moral and political theory. She points out that public has been associated with justice, history and the social sphere (generalized others) in which men operate with autonomy; private has been associated with women and with the natural, atemporal and concrete others. She states that under this set of assumptions, “Needs, as well as emotions and affects, become merely given properties of individuals, which moral philosophy recoils from examining, on the grounds that it may interfere with the sovereign self” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 418). Nel Noddings expanded theories of caring into an educational context in the 1984 work Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. Underpinning her conception of care from a maternal perspective, Noddings predicated her theory that women engage with morality differently from men—entering “the practical domain of moral action…through a different door” (Noddings, 1984, p. 2) and with an understanding that each caring relationship is unique. Noddings describes care as occurring in two phases of caring: “caring-for” and “caring-about.” Caring-for references applied caring services, and caring-about describes a state where 25 caring ideas or intentions are cultivated. In her original work, Noddings framed a limited scope of caring – one that has been critiqued as being parochial – where caring is stronger and more obligated towards those who can reciprocate and moving outwards becomes decreased in specificity, contextual judgment and obligation to care. She posited that it is impossible to care-about everyone, particularly those from whom one is distant. While her ideas received pushback and she did adjust them somewhat, she ultimately stood by her idea that caring for remote others is not possible. While Noddings’ approach is significant in its conceptualization of an ethic of care based on interpersonal relationships, especially as concerns primary and secondary education, it can be construed as reinforcing gendered stereotypes. For example, she writes: There is reason to believe that women are somewhat better equipped to care than men are. This is partly the result of the construction of psychological deep structures in the mother-child relationship. A girl can identify with the one caring for her and thus maintain relation while establishing identity. A boy must, however, find his identity with the absent one – the father – and thus disengage himself from the intimate relation of caring (Noddings, 2013, p. 97). I have concerns that this perspective could seem potentially essentialist and polarizing, and may contribute to the reinforcing of unhelpful gendered stereotypes. Noddings, however, also provides valuable insights the notion of the “careless institution” many scholars raise: “Schools as institutions cannot care directly…but a school can be deliberately designed to support caring and caring individuals, and this is what an ethic of caring suggests should be done” (Noddings, 2013, p. 182). The suggestions Noddings posits to make primary and secondary schools more supportive of caring may not map readily to a college or university context, but the idea of 26 institutions functioning in ways that are conducive to care (or, in many cases, not conducive to care) is significant and is borne out in the challenges raised by scholars of higher education (Cardozo, K, 2017; Grummel et al., 2009; Herschberg et al, 2018; Lynch et al., 2020). In contrast to the earlier work of Gilligan and Noddings, which focused on the personal development of individuals as moral entities, Joan Tronto’s 1993 work Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care explicitly challenged the boundary between ethics and politics and provided a reframing of care ethics in a public and political context. Tronto called attention to the political contexts in which care work is always conducted. In Moral Boundaries, Tronto asks: “What would it mean in the late twentieth century American society to take seriously, as part of our definition of a good society, the values of caring—attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs—traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration?” (Tronto, 1993, p. 2). Her question was in contrast and challenged previous feminist scholarship and philosophy that approached care as virtue ethics and as a contrast to male justice ethics, a distinctly feminine morality typically associated with maternal qualities (French, 1985; Ruddick, 1989). Tronto implored “we need to stop talking about ‘women’s morality’ and start talking about a care ethic that includes the values traditionally associated with women” (Tronto, 1993, p. 3). Her work asks its readers to reconsider the boundaries normally drawn between morality and politics in order to properly place caregiving work as part of the work of the public realm, where she believes it rightfully belongs. Positioning care in this way, according to Tronto, would also place less emphasis on the cultivation and wielding of power that are associated with the realm of politics and public life. Thus, centering care in this way opens up “more democratic, more 27 pluralistic politics in the United States, in which power is more evenly distributed.” (Tronto, 1993, p. 21) and those who are marginalized are afforded more equity. Tronto defines care as: …a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (p. 103). To illustrate the breadth of care, Tronto frames four dimensions: 1) Caring about – being collectively responsible in a general sense towards others; 2) Taking care of, which connotes agency and responsibility towards the cared-for; 3) Care giving, which involves direct meeting of care needs and coming into contact with those needing care; 4) Responsiveness of the care-receiver to care. This does not connote reciprocity on the part of the care-receiver; rather, it is focused on the understanding that those receiving care are usually in a vulnerable position and their voice is important and distinct from what those caring for them may imagine. Later, in her 2013 work, Caring Democracy, Tronto added a fifth aspect of care—caring with, which signals caring in a context of plurality, communication, trust and solidarity. Tronto considers these elements to be important for the care needs of democratic society to be given proper focus and elevation. Tronto’s work is particularly useful when considering institutions; she in fact particularly considered what constitutes a caring organization in her work Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality and Purpose (2010). In it, Tronto argues that rather than modeling them on the family (Noddings, 2002; Schorr, 1997), or in response to the market (Page, 2005; Preskill & Russ-Eft, 2005), as other theorists have done, when we make explicit some of the background conditions of good familial care, we can apply what we know toward better institutionalized 28 caring. Tronto argues that providing good care in an institutional context requires making explicit certain elements of care, such as assumptions about purposes, individuals’ needs, and power dynamics, that are often unspoken and taken for granted in the family setting (Tronto, 2010, p. 159). However, Tronto notes a number of possible challenges that approaching care within an institutional context would bring, such as potential conflicts within the organization, power relations that may not have already been long established, or inconsistencies within the institution’s approach or prioritization, and competing purposes (Tronto, 2010, p. 160). Good care in an institutional context has three primary areas of focus:1) the purpose of care, 2) a recognition of power relations, and 3) the need for particular tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs. Importantly, Tronto emphasizes that political space within institutions is necessary to address such concerns. Tronto also notes the fact that within most institutions care is still disproportionately the work of the less well-off and more marginal groups in society reflects care’s secondary status in society. (Tronto, 2010, p. 166). Another dimension of this problem is that care is often a result of the irresponsibility and non-responsiveness of the privileged. Bubeck (1995) has argued, for example, that not only is care gendered but that it is also gendered in part because the kinds of practices that care entails, such as paying attention to the needs of others, are viewed as impediments to the project of masculinity in our culture. Another way Tronto’s approach to care theory proves valuable when considering a postsecondary context is that her framing of care includes collective care versus focusing on the dyad—care-giver and dependent care-receiver—earlier theorists such as Gilligan and Noddings presented as the foundation of caring relationships. Tronto notes that caring very rarely happens in a dyadic context, but is more complicated and engages multiple individuals, even within family systems. Tronto also calls out the gendered, raced and classed, nature of how care is constructed: 29 Out of this association of ‘taking care of’ with masculinity, ‘caring about’ also becomes gendered, raced, and classed: men and people of greater privilege take care of; they care about public and broader issues. Women and people of color have very little to take care of, they care about private or local concerns (Tronto, 1993, p. 115). Such constructions of caring versus constructs of leadership also play a role in the experiences of women in higher educational leadership. The conflation of masculinity with notions of strength, resilience, and independence persists, and is in opposition to vulnerability and care seeking. In this respect, contemporary empirical research with boys, men and care continues to highlight the way which care remains feminized, presenting particular challenges for boys and men in giving and receiving care (Cross & Bagilhole, 2002; Davies & Eagle, 2010; Morrell & Jewkes, 2011). Tronto’s concept of privileged irresponsibility juxtaposes clearly with the observation of the “careless institutions” of academia made by a number of feminist scholars of higher education. 2.2 Diverse Perspectives on—and Intersectional Critiques of—Care Ethics While Tronto’s work points to some of the ways in which care is gendered, raced, and classed, it is useful to consider further critiques of caring as constructed by its original theorists. Audrey Thompson, in her important treatise Not the Color Purple, cautions: “all too often, ‘caring’ is spoken of in reference to the needs of ‘girls and women,’ for example, as if all girls and women had the same needs. The universal character assumed for these needs is underscored when the non-universal needs of non-White girls and women are acknowledged only on the periphery of the main discourse” (Thompson, 1998, p. 528). Thompson points out that White dominant conceptualizations of care frame the home as a center for caring and a safe haven from the public, while historically the home has not necessarily provided a safe haven from the poverty and discrimination experienced by African Americans. Further, the work of caring in the 30 Black community has been shared by the church, by “extended or fictive kin, and by the Black community at large” (Thompson, 1998, p. 532) as a means of bringing about social justice rather than as a remedy for the failures of justice in the world. Thus, caring is not only an act of emotional labor, but distinctly physical, intellectual and political as well. Thompson holds that the vision of caring in the African American community is not focused on an absolute ideal, but is “grounded in a pragmatic vision of the possible; while changing what is possible is also part of that vision, survival at times is a more pressing concern” (Thompson, 1998, p. 536). Thompson’s perspectives about community caring, extended caring, and their association with survival, are reinforced in the work of Lisa Bass and of Patricia Hill Collins, both of whom describe the importance of community and “other mothering” as part of the caring perspectives and practices of Black feminist caring (Bass, 2012; Collins, 2000). Bass further notes that Black women may also need to draw upon an “ethic of risk” in some situations in order to enact care; risk may accompany their efforts to care. For example, some of the women in one of Bass’s studies at times risked their own job security by breaking institutional rules when protecting racialized students who were themselves subject to discipline, expulsion or even potentially legal problems in a school setting (Bass, 2012, p. 81). An additional caution against essentializing issues regarding care comes from the work of Hankivsky on care and intersectionality. In the first work of its kind, Hankivsky expressly applies intersectional theory to care ethics (Hankivsky, 2014). Noting that care ethics and intersectionality “share normative ideals towards social justice” (Hankivsky, 2014, p. 253), she also identifies some important gaps in the discourse of care ethics when viewed through an intersectional lens. Importantly, Hankivsky notes that “even the most nuanced, complex versions of care theory fall short because they center and prioritize gender and gendered manifestations of 31 power. As a result, when care scholars consider factors beyond gender, they are inclined to add race and class rather than consider the ways in which these are co-constructed in multiple ways with various effects” (Hankivsky, 2014, p. 252). Hankivsky’s critique serves as an apt reminder to attend to the many nuanced and complex aspects of people’s experience with care, their own dimensions of being, and the importance of self-reflexivity when conducting one’s own research. There are inherent tensions in this work. It is important to ensure we do not polarize the conversations about care, unwittingly impose our own experiences or biases, and that we not overlook other interlocking facets of our research participants’ identities as we learn from them about their experiences regarding care and their practices. Raghuram (2019) further discusses the importance of an intersectional approach to care ethics. Noting that “gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorized” (Raghuram, 2019, p. 613), she notes that racialized difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. Noting that the gendered difference as the basis for so-called “feminine” caring (initially put in opposition to masculinized justice ethics), this position was heavily debated and contested, even by first-generation care theorists (Gilligan, 1977; 1993). Raghuram’s exploration focuses on racialized women and ethics of care, using gender to refer to unequal structures of power that women experience at the crossroads of race and class. Raghuram observes “race has been central to the division of caring labor in the postcolonial world” (Raghuram, 2019, p. 617). She also points out that, as Narayan (1995) observed – that the concepts of care and justice were both leveraged by colonizers, and that the language of care was often used to justify colonial oppression. One of her key arguments is that much of care ethics has been tacitly theorized via “the unnamed White body,” (p. 619) and that scholars and activists 32 who explore how care is enacted in strongly racialized settings disrupt some of the assumptions that accompany the early, dominant theorizing of care. The tacit theorizing of care ethics via the “unnamed White body” was further responded to by a number of scholars (Anzaldúa, 1987; Collins, 2009; hooks, 2000; Lorde, 1988) who bring the focus of caring squarely into their (raced and classed) embodied experience. Further, as some scholars point out, the educational sites where teaching and learning are situated are not neutral, but are structured around White and middle-class values and culture (hooks, 2000; Reyes, Banda and Caldas, 2023). In such settings, educational caring can take the form of survival, defiance and resistance (Sosa-Provencio, 2019). 2.3 What is Neoliberalism? When considering the role that neoliberalism plays in the experiences of care in postsecondary academic leadership, it is important to consider how neoliberalism is being defined. To that end, I will draw from some significant threads in the literature, before considering the conflicts of neoliberal capitalism and care in a general sense, and then focusing on literature regarding care in the context of the neoliberal university. Rowlands and Rawolle note that the term “neoliberalism” is often not defined when used in educational research (p. 266), and that “there is a tendency in educational research to make extensive use of the word ‘neoliberalism’ (or its variants neoliberal, neo-liberal and neo-liberalism) as a catch-all for something negative but without offering a definition or explanation” (p. 260). Apple further adds that ““neoliberalism does not stand alone, and it takes on different forms in different contexts. It is also not a unitary movement, since it has contradictory tendencies within it” (Apple, 2017, p. 148). So, neoliberalism is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, whether applied to educational institutions or otherwise. While due to its 33 complexity it can be difficult to describe, Rowlands and Rawolle note that it is important for educational researchers to make an effort to define neoliberalism when drawing upon it for their work (p. 270). To that end, I will highlight some key concepts regarding neoliberalism as laid out by some important scholars who have engaged with the concept. While neoliberalism can be characterized in a number of ways and is subject to context, it is often framed as a new strain of the 19th century economic laissez-faire on which the dramatic rise of industrial capitalism was built. This governmental hands-off approach to the free market economy then expanded in the post WWII expansion of liberalism in the decades following the defeat of fascism and communism (Rowlands & Rawoll, 2013). It is associated with the decline of the Keynesian welfare state, in which the government serves as a buffer or equalizing force, intervening for the welfare of the people. According to Apple (2017), neoliberalism intends to remove the buffer of social welfare as a governmental function in the belief that the market operates most efficiently and effectively without regulation. He notes that as neoliberal globalization relocates production from nation-states, those state’s powers to intervene are significantly altered. Amongst criticisms levelled at these policies is that they exploit natural resources and people, particularly in less-developed economies, force redistribution of assets from social welfare projects to market enterprise, and jeopardize the human right of free and compulsory education. Apple also points out that the goal of neoliberal reform is to convert educational systems into markets and to privatize educational services. Larner (2000) indicates that the term neoliberalism denotes forms of political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships (p. 5). She also indicates that some scholars are using the term “neoliberal” as a general descriptor for post welfare state citizenship regimes. She notes “Whereas under Keynesian welfare is on the state provision of goods and 34 services to a national population was understood as a means of insuring social well-being, neoliberalism is associated with the preference for a minimalist state. Markets are understood to be a better way of organizing economic activity because they’re associated with competition, economic efficiency and choice (p. 5).” Larner argues that things are more complicated than that; neoliberalism is both a political discourse about the nature of rule at a set of practices that facilitate the governing individuals from a distance (p. 6). Brown (2015) describes neoliberalism “not simply as economic policy but as a governing rationality that disseminates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo economicus” (Brown, 2015, p. 176). She denotes the shift neoliberal rationality enforces, from individuals as democratic citizens sharing in power and a common good, to investors or consumers. She also notes that democracy itself has been morphed by the neoliberal rationality so that institutions of higher education are thought of as cultivating technically skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life. This shift in rationality, she argues, also affects the nature of postsecondary education. She claims that public higher education in 20th century North America, despite many wrong turns, appears retroactively to have been in a golden age, making a liberal education more widely available than it had previously been, thus opening avenues for inclusion for marginalized peoples. However, in the 21st century, the support has been eroding and the prevailing concept is that: “skills for twenty-first century jobs provided by an instructional staff itself organized by market metrics ought to replace the patently anachronistic conceits and trappings of university life and content” (p. 161). Connell (2013) discusses the impacts neoliberalism has had on higher education, including the shift from education as profoundly relational and caring, to the reframing of it as “human capital formation” (p. 104). The overarching landscape of neoliberal higher education is 35 marked by this shift from education for public good to “competitive training, competition for privilege, social conformity, fear and corruption, while protest and rational alternatives are marginalized” (p. 110). Connell also argues that neoliberalism has led to the erosion of academic autonomy and the commodification of knowledge. This has resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum, with a greater focus on vocational and practical skills at the expense of critical thinking and intellectual curiosity. Additionally, Connell suggests that neoliberalism has created more precarious and exploitative environment for academic workers, who are increasingly subjected to market-based performance metrics and precarious employment conditions (p.106). Connell's work highlights the significant impact that neoliberalism has had on higher education, and suggests that alternative models of education that prioritize equity, critical thinking, and intellectual curiosity are necessary in order to counteract these trends. Counter to the influence of neoliberalism, she centers care in the educational experience: To say that education involves nurture is important. Education involves encounter between persons, and that encounter involves care. Learning from a computer is not education; the machine does not care. Learning from a person behaving like a machine is not education; that person’s capacity for care is being suppressed. It is care that is the basis of the creativity in teaching, at all levels from Kindergarten to PhD supervision, as the teacher’s practice evolves in response to the learner’s development and needs” (p. 104). 2.4 Contradictions of Neoliberal Capitalism and Care - Care Meets Homo Economicus While the neoliberal capitalist homo economicus is construed as an independent actor in landscape of market rationality, this conceptualization does not align with the perspectives of care ethicists—that we are all in relationship and in varying ways interdependent. Tronto (2013) 36 points out: “Like every political theory or ideology, neoliberalism contains a concept of care within it” (p. 25). She describes three ways neoliberalism accounts for care and caring: Firstly, it emphasizes the concept of personal responsibility, which sets up failures of governmental policy and infrastructure to be chalked up to personal failures of individuals. Secondly, neoliberalism frames care as a market problem. Since markets are expected to meet needs, if a need exists, then a market solution will emerge. Tronto notes (2017) that the website Care.com claims to have 22 million subscribers in 19 countries, matching their members with short- and long-term care providers for “childcare” “adult and senior care” “pet care” and “home care.” In this way, all needs can be considered met; if there is not yet a market solution to a problem of needs, then one will emerge. Thirdly, neoliberal capitalism situates and reinforces the family as the proper locus of care, reducing government costs and increasing efficiencies. Tronto synthesizes the three aspects of neoliberal care: Putting these three pieces together provides us with a kind of theoretical account of how people should care for themselves and those close to them within a neoliberal society: care for yourself by acting rationally and responsibly; if there are care needs that you cannot meet for yourself, then use market solutions; and finally if you cannot afford market solutions, or prefer to care on your own, then enlist family (and perhaps friends and charities) to meet your caring needs. (2017, p. 30). The inadequacies of the neoliberal approach to caring have been many; Tronto notes that its fundamental conceptualization of humans as autonomous and rational agents is out of alignment with care’s ontology that everyone exists in relation to others and that we are interdependent, not only with other humans but with other life forms and with the environment of our planet. The care world view is that people become autonomous through a complex process of growth, and 37 that all human beings are subject to vulnerability and changes in their embodied conditions that may require them to rely on others for care. All of us, including the seemingly independent, able-bodied, are perpetually in relationships of giving and receiving care of various kinds. The shifting needs and capacities for care is an important way to think about how our human lives change over time. Nancy Fraser further articulates how financialized neoliberal capitalism conflicts with caring labor and the fundamentally relational nature of living and how society sustains itself (social reproduction). She lays out an account of how the current “crisis of care”, characterized by lack of family-work balance, time poverty, and social depletion, all giving rise to stressors on the caring relationships with children, family and community, and in general cultivating and sustaining relationships. In Contradictions of Capitalism and Care (2016), Nancy Fraser notes that there are stresses on care and conflict with care deeply rooted in the structure of capitalism. On the one hand social reproduction makes capital accumulation possible; on the other capitalism’s current goal of infinite accumulation is destabilizing the processes on which it relies. Fraser posits that this tension plays a significant role in the crisis of care. Fraser notes that as capitalist societies have undergone significant transformations since the 19thcentury, the appearance of the underlying crisis has surfaced in a number of ways. She notes that capitalist societies ignored the work of social reproduction, separating it from the work of economic production, and associating it with women: Splitting off reproductive labor from the larger universe of human activities, in which women’s work previously held a recognized place, they relegated it to a newly institutionalized ‘domestic sphere’ where its social importance was obscured. And in this new world, where money became a primary medium of power, its being unpaid sealed 38 the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages, even as their work supplies a necessary precondition for wage labor—and even as it also becomes saturated with and mystified by new, domestic ideals of femininity. (Fraser, 2016, p. 102). As the focus of the current crisis relies mostly on the capitalist economic system, Fraser lays out the contradictions and crisis tendencies that are inherent to capitalism. With a broader view of capitalism’s roots, she forms a critique of capitalism not only in regards to its economic contradictions, but to its crisis tendencies, especially those related to social reproduction and care. Fraser categorizes the capitalist system into three different historical regimes. She calls the first one “separate spheres,” the second “the family wage” and the last “the two-earner family.” She claims that each of these regimes brought up a different side of the contradiction of social reproduction in capitalism, dealt differently with these boundary struggles and sometimes managed to redraw them. The first regime started with the liberal competitive capitalism of the 19thcentury. While the economy was pushing its limits and the exploitation of workers came to a peek, in this regime, the state left the social reproduction to the workers and established a new restricted image of the family and gender differences. Trying to save capitalism from a social crisis by protecting women legally from exploitation and by creating the Victorian ideal of the housewife, this regime managed to intensify male domination. The legal protection of women proved problematic, as wages remained too low to sustain a family and working-class women struggled to conform to the new Victorian ideals. Middle-class women found themselves in a position where they had no legal rights and were dependent on men. This regime created the idea 39 of “separate spheres,” where women were responsible for the social reproduction and the gender hierarchy was strengthened, although only wealthy people could reach this ideal. Following with the state-managed capitalism of the 20thcentury, the economy rebooted after the Great Depression and the Second World War, thanks to large-scale industrial production and domestic consumerism. The state dealt with the contradiction of economic production and social reproduction by investing in welfare programs such as health care, childcare and old age pensions. This regime established the “family-wage” household, with the dominant male breadwinner and the female housewife, again intensifying female subordination. Founded on colonial and post-colonial exploitation and gender hierarchies, there were major racial inequalities present and the ideal of “the family wage” was not achievable for most families. Managing to soothe social contradictions for some time, this regime ended in a crisis, when the New Left started to fight racial, imperial and gender inequalities and the economy found itself in a “productivity crisis.” The third and contemporary regime is globalized and financialized capitalism. Neoliberalism abandoned welfare and hired women into waged work. Fraser names this regime the “two-earner households.” Women performing the same work as men was touted as a form of emancipation, yet it significantly contributed to the creation of a “care gap.” Women able to provide income for their family often find themselves needing to pay workers from a less advantaged economic class to take on the responsibilities of caring for children and others in need of assistance with daily activities of living, for the upkeep of their homes, and for other types of necessary work required to sustain life. That worker, in turn, often must do the same, creating a dual system of social reproduction, favoring those who can pay for it and excluding those who cannot. 40 2.5 The Neoliberal University Neoliberal capitalism’s influence on universities has been widely associated with a number of phenomena in postsecondary education, including commodification, globalization and the rise of managerialism. As Connell (2013) notes “In the global metropole, i.e. North America and Europe, neoliberalism has gone far to dismantle the Keynesian welfare state, the system of regulated capitalism and state-supplied services that was dominant in the generation from 1945 to 1980” (p. 101). As a consequence of this, education shifts from being regarded a public good to a commodity of privilege, available to those who are in a position to access it. Connell notes that neoliberalism’s engulfing of education has been accompanied by a resurgence of competitive standardized testing in primary and secondary schools, and a rise in managerialism that parallels the corporate world: an emphasis on efficiency and performance management that have changed the relationships of faculty with institutions (e.g., the erosion of tenure and the rise of contingent faculty positions with often precarious terms of employment). Ball (2012) also makes observations on neoliberalism’s impact upon universities, noting the fundamental shifts in subjectivity and the way practitioners within postsecondary education think about their work: “there is a proliferation of new spaces of calculation and new visibilities within which we relate to one another and seek our place and our worth and our needs. Our days are numbered – literally – and ever more closely and carefully” (p. 18). Ball discusses the regimes of performativity that accompany neoliberal audit culture, noting that Experience is nothing, productivity is everything. Last year’s efforts are a benchmark for improvement – more publications, more research grants, more students. We must keep up; strive to achieve the new and very more diverse targets which we set for ourselves in appraisal meetings; confess and confront our weaknesses; undertake appropriate and 41 value-enhancing professional development; and take up opportunities for making ourselves more productive (p. 19). He notes that increasingly the social structures and relations of higher education institutions are replaced by information structures and the responsibility to perform lest we risk being deemed irresponsible (or, I would suggest, even surplus to requirements). Ball further observes that, for many people working in postsecondary settings, these phenomena contribute to “a growing sense of ontological insecurity: both a loss of a sense of meaning in what we do and what is important in what we do” (p. 20). Like Connell (2013) and Ball (2012), Gardiner (2020) also observes the tensions between neoliberal drivers of higher education institutions and institutional caring in the neoliberal university: “The neoliberal model places the emphasis on economic metrics whereby students are regarded as consumers, and faculty as mobilizers of particular forms of commodifiable knowledge” (p. 178). She also notes the diminishment of the core meanings and purposes of education for the sake of metrics and market forces, and cautions “But these numerical aspects of university life sit uneasily with another prevailing discourse, that of institutional well-being and student flourishing. In short, there is intense competition affecting what university personnel should care about” (p. 179). 2.6 The Prestige Economy of Neoliberal Higher Education: Careless Institutions, Carefree Leaders and Tronto’s “Privileged Irresponsibility” Reviewing the literature regarding “careless institutions” and the considerable challenges presented by the construct of the “carefree leader” made me think of Tronto’s observation about the “privileged irresponsibility.” Amongst the useful concepts Tronto introduces in her work is the idea of “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1993, p. 120). The term “privileged 42 irresponsibility” was first used by Tronto in an address entitled Chilly Racists to the American Political Science Association in 1990. When considering the power that racism confers on a dominant group, she created this phrase to reflect how the dominant group fails to acknowledge their exercise of power, thereby maintaining their positions of privilege. In her subsequent works, Tronto frames democracy as a system where the work of caring is allocated to some social groups—usually marginalized populations—while it allows others—usually from dominant groups—to simultaneously depend on and refuse to acknowledge the care they are benefitting from that is the labor of the marginalized group. In postsecondary settings, women, particularly those who occupy marginalized positions due to their status, such as racialized women and those from lower economic statuses, take responsibility for less valued but essential activities, while (White) men are disproportionately represented in management and research positions (Carolissen & Bozalek, 2012; Zembylas et al., 2014). Privileged irresponsibility arises from “the unbalanced nature of caring roles and duties in our society” and means that “those who are relatively privileged are granted by that privilege simply to ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face” (Tronto, 1993, p. 120). Although the privileged receive services and care, their interdependency is denied, and the contributions of the care givers upon whom they rely are disregarded. Tronto describes her second phase of care as denoting agency and responsibility towards the cared-for; privileged irresponsibility is demonstrated by the disavowal of care responsibilities by those in power.1 Importantly, the care challenges experienced by women in academia are not only found in the tensions between “careless” or “greedy” institutions and their priorities and obligations 1 For a discussion that troubles Tronto's notion of "privileged irresponsibility" in the context of higher education and coloniality, see Bozalek & Zembylas (2023, pp. 37-62). 43 regarding care in a personal context. Kandiko Howson et al. (2018) point out that, in heavily gendered, prestigious academic work spaces, women often limit their opportunities for advancement in order to attend to the “bread and butter” care labor associated with keeping institutions running, such as committee work, student advisement, and mentoring of junior faculty while their male counterparts engage in more valued endeavours. Indeed, research conducted specifically on academic housework shows that it tends to be done mainly by women (Angervall & Beach, 2020; Heijstra et al., 2017). Kandiko Howson et al. further describe the impacts this has on female academics’ ability to advance in the prestige economy of higher education: “the interdependencies of the building of academic careers is belied by the rewards and recognition systems that value individual achievements, as if those are obtained by individual effort alone (and they never are)” (Kandiko Howson et al., 2018, p. 536). Ivancheva et al. (2019) also note a higher propensity for women in neoliberal postsecondary workplaces to encounter greater precarity than their male counterparts, and are overrepresented in part time and fixed term appointments (Ivancheva et al., 2019, p. 449), while also operating with in an overarchingly masculinist, neoliberal setting. They claim that the construct of the ideal “careless” academic worker (Grummel et al., 2009; Herschberg et al., 2018; Lynch et al., 2012), which existed prior to the rise of neoliberal capitalism’s commercialization of the academy but gained tremendous traction and expansion in recent years, lends itself to “two profoundly gendered types of precarity in academia: labor-led precarity and care-led affective precarity.” (Ivancheva et al., 2019, p. 450). Using ethnographic writing to narrate three case studies emerging from a larger, multi-sited study in Ireland, they place care work and affective labor at the center of the issue rather than income or career satisfaction in order to highlight the impacts gender has on it. Paid work, and non-paid caring, relational work 44 outside of the employment site are both included in their study, as they are not separated in the realities of their participants. Indeed, “a risk to the security of one’s care and love relations is as real as a threat to one’s wage relations, and equally serious in its consequences” (Ivancheva et al., 2019, p. 450). In an academic realm where the ideal worker is constructed as without significant care and obligations, career advancement is more accessible when there are no relational constraints. The authors note that, for instance, in German universities almost twice as many female tenured professors have no children as do their male counterparts (Ivancheva et al., 2019, p. 457). They also note that the concept of work/life balance assumes there is a clear boundary between the two from the perspective of those who work, while the lived experience in the life-worlds of people do not separate the requirements of work and outside responsibilities, including care and relational obligations. They are all lived as one. Lynch et al. (2020) seek to use empirical research to better understand the impact that the rise of commercialization and other neoliberal forces have had on working, learning and caring relations in higher education. They state that they are doing so in a context where care work is gendered and considered the responsibility of women, whereas neither the theory not care work itself, as noted by others (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1993), is the sole prerogative of women. Lynch et al. claim that it is vital to address care related injustices due to the pervasiveness of capitalism in the academy and “the fact that the ethics of capitalism are deeply antithetical to the ethics of care” (Lynch et al., 2020, p. 158). They note, as regards the specifics of women and care in the academy, that women face very real temporal reality of pregnancy and birth, often during crucial junctures in their career trajectories and that they generally cannot offer the 24/7 availability desired by universities of an ideal “carefree” academic. This gendered order is reflected in the attrition of women from academic careers and frequently lower attainment in both academic and 45 administrative positions (Lynch et al., 2020, p. 160). With this more global context (including North America) taken into consideration, the researchers conducted a study of academic and managerial staff in ten Irish higher educational institutions. It examined ways in which doing hands-on, primary caregiving interfaces with the expectations placed on the ideal worker in the university setting. Their study surfaced, amongst other things, that the increased focus on itemizable outputs and audit culture, a hallmark of the commercialized, neoliberal university, creates a deeply gendered culture of carelessness that is especially hostile to those working on contract or who have sole caring responsibilities for others. Their data suggests that the care-free worker model is ingrained into performance appraisal systems, which constitute a particular challenge for women in postsecondary education. Women who live up to the highly-masculinized ideal of the totally devoted, carefree scholar, moving from country to country or domestically, often have to delay hopes of having children or indeed rich personal relationships and affective, inner lives. Lynch et al. note that: The alternative option is to live with the responsibility of being a “failure” in their own eyes and that of colleagues…the ideology of ‘work–life balance’ masks how workplace structures disregard their dual commitments. They are left to blame themselves for ‘failing’ to manage unreasonable work demands… But the problem of overwork is not individual but structural and there is no legitimate language to name over-working for the structural problem that it is” (Lynch et al., 2020, p. 164). I found this quite striking, as recent advice in industry publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems to place the onus of balancing care responsibilities on to the individual academic employees rather than noting the structural issues within institutions that foment the problems in the first place (Whitaker, 2018; Hartig, et al., 2017). 46 Lynch, et al. also noted that the distinction between who people are – within and outside their work context has been diminishing – people working in academia, as elsewhere, are considered to be what they do for a living. A number of their participants conveyed a reluctance to raise care-related needs with their supervisors, including cases where there could be a valid legal complaint of discrimination, for not wanting to add to their stress and burden when they are already over stretched. They conclude that “those who do unaccountable but essential care work are disadvantaged by the neoliberal, accounting, deliverable culture of current universities. Without a governing ethic of care in higher education, the ambition and self-interests of a few will override the educational and research interests of the many” (Lynch et al., 2020, p. 170). The authors conclude by stating that devaluing care has significant negative consequences for women, but for students, fellow employees, and the culture of the institution as a whole. Women academics’ uneasy relationship with care and caregiving is further taken up by Hughes et al., who state that feminist research shows that caring has proven to be a significant “monster” for women in the academy. They claim that women undertake disproportionately more pastoral and caring work within the academy than do men, and that this work in turn is not valued by their institutions, particularly in an under-resourced climate that prioritizes more visible accomplishments, such as publishing. Yet caring is a significant site of feminist ethics in action, and is often expected of women, including women in academe. Hughes et al. discuss the place of caring in feminist theorizing, claiming that it holds an especially ambiguous position: “it is posited both as a hallmark of woman’s difference and it is viewed as an entrapment of subservience from which woman must escape” (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 131). Hughes et al. set forth to explore how women leaders are paradoxically positioned both as carers for their colleagues and students while also being paid workers in a “survival of the 47 fittest” postsecondary climate where there is little time or bandwidth for care and it is not highly valued. Their research involves analyzing vignettes using a typology of care created by care philosopher Joan Tronto (1993). To illustrate the breadth of care, Hughes et al. turn to the four dimensions of care outlined by Tronto: 1) Caring about – being collectively responsible in a general sense towards others; 2) Taking care of, which connotes agency and responsibility towards the cared-for; 3) Care giving, which involves direct meeting of care needs and coming into contact with those needing care; 4) Responsiveness of the care-receiver to care. Hughes and colleagues applied Tronto’s four aspects of care to specific examples from autobiographical vignettes, pointing out some ways their responsibilities under the Ethics of Care were challenged. For instance, they posit that enacting an Ethic of Care in under-resourced, highly competitive circumstances unintentionally creates opposition: faculty and administrators need to care for students, but in an under-resourced environment they themselves may become exhausted or overwhelmed due to their own lack of care (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 137). The second approach used by the authors explores caring as an aspect of subjectification through examining the “process of submission and mastery” (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 133). They define subjectification as the ways we develop our sense of identity, particularly our identities as caring people. In so doing, they intended to “draw upon the ambiguous and contradictory ‘monster’ of care as a learnt condition that is constructed in the everyday of academic life” (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 134). They interrogate why, when care is not valued and not rewarded by most institutions, particularly when there is an emphasis on economic efficiency, do female academics take on care responsibilities? Hughes et al. posit that women are actually “seduced” by caring discourses and are socialized into gendered caring roles by sources they encounter 48 every day, including the media, family, and in their professional lives. As the importance of caring is reinforced and undertaken by women repeatedly, the practice of caring is “mastered” and, according to the writers, the more it becomes intrinsic to one’s identity. Yet the authors also note that there is a “striking ambivalence to caring…our feelings are diverse and contradictory” (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 142). Hughes et al. conclude by suggesting that resisting the long-standing binaries of women and men, care and ambition, individual versus collective, and atomism versus relationality is a potentially powerful way forward in the research and practice of the Ethics of Care. They believe that although their research was done solely in the context of English postsecondary institutions, many of the issues raised in their study are generalizable to Australian and North American settings. While their “auto/biographical focus group” (Hughes et al., 2007 p. 132) approach for this paper focused on their own experiences and did not articulate the race or class of the participants, Hughes et al. call for further research into how varied cultural contexts shape the particularities of caring experiences in higher education (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 146). Sandra Acker (2010) investigates women’s postsecondary academic leadership careers, drawing from a study of participants from Canada and Australia. Acker questions the circumstances under which women pursuing careers in postsecondary academic leadership will “fit in” with the prevailing culture of academe and utilizes Bourdieu’s field theory to examine how women “find their way through organizations that are gendered, as well as raced and classed” (Acker, 2010, p. 130), and how they grapple with making sense of the conditions within which they are navigating. Acker’s position is that generalizations in the literature about women’s ways of leading (usually portrayed positively) and the literature about women’s impediments as leaders in higher 49 education have become dualistic and entrenched, whereas the stories of their actual career experiences are taking place in a fluctuating personal, institutional and sociopolitical context. To explore the actual experiences and contexts of female leaders in higher education, Acker conducted qualitative interviews with female senior leaders (e.g., vice-provosts, deans, chairs, etc.) working in Canada and Australia. Most were situated within faculties of education. She draws upon Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the “academic field,” a space of social forces and struggles. Acker thus is not interrogating leadership in general, but specifically within the university setting, which involves two predominant types of power, or academic and intellectual “capital” with which leaders operate within the academic field. Acker also uses Bourdieu’s analogy of the “game” of leadership occurring within the academic field; by this analogy her study’s participants are viewed as “players” participating in the game. Central to Bourdieu’s concept of operating within a field is his notion of habitus, or a durable but flexible, embodied disposition attained through one’s life experience, that finds expression in the field. Some “players” have a habitus that gives them a good “feel” for the game, while others have a habitus that causes them to be less suited to it. Acker believes that women are often at a disadvantage in terms of academic or intellectual capital within the university setting, and that as they climb through the ranks at the university their perceived “leadership habitus” is often perceived as being poorly matched to higher-level positions. Acker points out that gender is but one aspect of the habitus, and that other facets of the habitus (class, race, etc.) also are a factor. Thus, while two women may both be at a “leadership habitus” disadvantage due to gender, one may still have advantages over the other based on the perceived capital associated with other aspects of their respective habitus. She 50 notes “within these gendered, classed and raced academic fields, leadership is a tricky business, especially for those whose habitus is not well matched to expectations” (Acker, 2010, p. 134). Acker noted the “most striking similarity” in her study is the way all of the participants’ relationships with family and others (of which caring is an important aspect) influenced their professional choices (Acker, 2010, p. 141). She also indicates that institutions’ increased focus on “managerialism” and accountability was present in all of the accounts from the leaders she engaged with in her study. Acker's analysis emphasized lack of available support from other female leaders as a significant obstacle (Acker, 2010, p. 146). She notes that this is exacerbated by the fact that women are often promoted in small numbers and frequently distanced from their colleagues in the process. She concludes her piece by claiming, as other scholars have, that it is important to create networks for female leaders in higher education to support one another. This call for women to care for one another in their leadership efforts resonates with the emphasis Hughes et al. place on interrelatedness and the web of connectedness as a core part of the ethics of care (Hughes et al., 2007, p. 134). The experiences of women in academia as regards gender, equity and care, is further discussed by Gaudet et al. (2022) in a Canadian context. Drawing from 22 semi-structured narrative interviews with female academics at two Canadian universities, the authors describe the importance of care for understanding gender inequalities in academia, also utilizing Tronto’s typology of care, although applying it in a different way than did Hughes et al.; they frame the experiences of their interviewees to align with caring about undergraduate students – e.g., putting too much time into their teaching, caring for graduate students, and caring with colleagues doing administrative tasks to protect their shared values via “academic housework” (Gaudet et al., 2022, p. 76). Gaudet et al. note that all of this work is happening in the realm of 51 postsecondary education, which is a type of performative prestige economy with masculinized gender norms that do not reward these caring activities “does not literally mean that it is controlled primarily by people who self-identify as male, but rather that it is constrained by values historically shaped by male dominated culture that works against the interest of care” (Gaudet et al., 2022, p. 83). They note that the high-performance culture of the academy masks professors’ vulnerabilities; the tension women experience between their organizations’ culture and their care responsibilities leads them to hide their caregiving responsibilities and health issues (p. 83). They note that the culture of academia fosters a code of silence regarding vulnerabilities. The authors also state that while challenges related to self-care surfaced in many ways in participants’ experiences (including physical healthcare), Tronto’s theory does not address self-care, does not name it as an element of her caring framework, although receiving care from others is included (p. 77). While intersectional critiques of care theory are discussed more fully in a different section of this chapter, upon noticing Gaudet et al.’s observation of this gap in Tronto’s care theory, I could not help but think of the important proclamation made by Black activist, scholar and poet Audre Lorde “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde, 1988, p. 125). Indeed, while Gaudet et al. noted that their own study did not address how race and gender differentially affect the dimensions of care among women and those who identify as women, they called for future work to approach the subject from an intersectional perspective (Gaudet et al., 2022, p. 83). Cardozo (2017) also reinforces the importance of regarding diversity and bringing an intersectional perspective to critical studies of women engaged in academic labor. She connects the lack of advancement of women, and particularly women of color, with the neoliberal context 52 in which universities operate: “In higher education, as in other sectors, there is an inverse relationship between who cares and who advances. Not only are women overrepresented in lower states, care sector jobs, they are often in such roles because personal care-giving demands inhibit their capacity to pursue advancement.” (Cardozo, 2017, p. 408). Cardozo points out that in the professorate, women tend to be concentrated in less prestigious disciplines, commanding lower salaries, falling within the lower ranks of tenured faculty, and comprising a higher proportion of contingency, teaching-only faculty who have a higher likelihood of experiencing financial precarity. She notes that women of color tend to be overrepresented at the lower rungs of the tenure system or in the ranks of adjunct faculty and that little research has been published about how this intersects with the precarity of contingent academic labor (Cardozo, 2017, p. 412). She reinforces some of the observations previously made by others, including Ahmed (2012), and Lloyd-Jones (2009), noting other obstacles that racialized women face to career advancement In addition to the enduring bias that views people of color as ‘not scholarly’, the underrepresentation of faculty of color in the tenure system or at the highest levels of administration persists for other structural reasons…those who embody racial difference in the academy do a disproportionate amount of the ‘diversity work’ that is also a form of care work, e.g., in identity-based mentoring of junior faculty and students (Cardozo, 2017, p. 412). Cardozo further situates the undervaluing of academic care work in the neoliberal higher education context: “Advising, mentoring, writing letters of recommendation, and all other forms of ‘life support’ that the educational relationship entails continue to be undercompensated or valued cheaply because they are unquantified under crude ‘productivity’ metrics, as well as 53 unrestricted to the confines of a ‘regular’ workday” (Cardozo, 2017, p. 418). Indeed, while activities such as publishing and successfully securing grants can be itemized in a way that is well-aligned with the accountability approach leveraged by neoliberal institutions, it is challenging to develop metrics for valuing caring (Folbre & Wright, 2012). 2.7 The Neoliberal University, Leadership, Care and Emotional Labor Arlie Hochschild first introduced the term “emotional labor” in her influential 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In it, Hochschild focused on the relational aspects of work. She defines emotional labor as occupational work that requires expressing or suppressing feelings to maintain the external appearance evoking the desired state of mind (for instance, restaurant servers demonstrating solicitous and positive emotions toward patrons). Emotional labor requires at times that we act differently from how we actually feel in order to meet expectations of our occupational role. Hochschild also describes how gender plays into social interactions. Individuals identified as women fall into a “subordinate social stratum” (Hochschild, 2012, p. 163); as a result, they have reduced status, financial resources and power. Consequently, women turn emotions into resources and offer it in return for resources they themselves lack. Hochschild holds that women and men are assigned roles by society in disparate ways: men are expected to engage in work assertively while women are expected to be more diffident and “nice.” Society’s overarching subordination of women increases the likelihood they will be called upon to process the displaced feelings of others, while men may be expected to manage aggression that is directed towards them (p. 163). These constructs of gendered differences open the door for the commercial exploitation of emotions (p. 164). Hochschild maintains that these gendered expectations and power relationships have meant that women generally do a greater share of 54 emotional work than men through their gender-conforming displays of deference. She notes that managed displays of feeling may be taken for spontaneous feelings: “it is possible to confuse the condition of being more ‘easily affected by emotion’ when the occasion calls for it” (p. 165). While numerous researchers have drawn from or expanded on Hochschild’s work (Gardner et al., 2009; Fineman, 2007, 2013; Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020; Iszatt-White, 2013; Mastracci et al., 2010; Woods, 2010), much of the research did not attend to the differences in social location, including elements of race or class. Mirchandani (2003) observed that racialized aspects of emotional labor were absent from much of the literature. She claimed that the discourse regarding emotional labor has centered on normative assumptions of Whiteness, and that many studies have not included heterogenous sample groups: “The failure to understand the emotion work of workers in relation to their social locations has limited the knowledge which has been gained about the range of emotion work which is required of individuals living in heterogeneous social and economic environments” (Mirchandani, 2003, p. 722). She noted that studies on emotional labor have commonly only included participants who are White, and through operating from an assumption that workers are White, and questions how previous studies done on the emotional labor done in various sectors (nursing, law, etc.) would have differed if the studies had not made tacit assumptions about a “universal woman” instead of attending to the “ways in which women are socially located within a multitude of hierarchies which coincide with and construct gender differences” (p. 727). Acker (1999) highlights the impacts intersectional hierarchies can have on women in organizations: “a woman who is Black (White), Spanish (English) speaking and a doctor (waitress), does not experience herself in disjointed segments of gender, race, ethnicity, and class; rather, all these elements are produced and reproduced within the same every day experiencing of her life” (Acker, 1999, p. 51). 55 In recent years, greater attention has been paid to emotional labor as experienced by people of color, how emotion can be racialized, and the additional emotional labor required to navigate White-dominated organizations (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Berheide et al., 2022; Davis & Maldonado, 2015; Chance, 2022; Evans & Moore, 2015; Redden & Scarduzio, 2018). Evans and Moore, for example, studied the emotional labor of racialized students in law school and in aviation careers and discovered: White institutional spaces, built on a history of exclusion, are embedded with White discourses and ideologies that subjugate the racialized experiences of people of color. People of color within these spaces carry the burden of engaging in emotion work that is not equally distributed with their White counterparts. The inscription of race privilege into the social dynamics of these spaces creates burdens for people of color, particularly because of the tacit nature of White institutional space. People of color carry the burden of having to choose between tacitly participating in their marginalization or actively resisting racist ideologies with the possible consequence of institutional alienation, exclusion, or official reprimand (Evans & Moore, 2015, p. 452). Their work illuminates how experiences of microaggressions and dominant ideologies that disregard the impacts of race and racism prompt people of color to take on significant encumbrances in order to participate in many realms; higher education is no exception. 2.8 Summary of Literature Review Chapter This study sought to better understand the experiences and perspectives of a select group of women in postsecondary leadership positions in Canada and the United States. It aimed to expand the research to include more diverse voices. The research involved a review of literature 56 from various sources, including books, journal articles and periodicals, accessed through academic databases and search engines. The literature review focused on a number of threads. Firstly, it included an overview of care ethics, particularly the work of Joan Tronto, who framed care as a public and political consideration. The literature included also considered intersectional critiques of care ethics, including a critique that caring is often narrowly defined in terms of the needs of White women, ignoring the diverse and specific needs of racialized women, and that care for racialized communities serves as a vehicle for social action rather than a refuge from injustice. Further intersectional critiques of care theory note that while care ethics and intersectional theory share goals of social justice, care ethics have often prioritized gender, overlooking factors such as race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The embodied nature of care is also discussed from an intersectional perspective, critiquing care ethics’ theorization of the “unnamed White body” and the raced and classed experiences of care in educational settings that are often aligned with White and middle-class normative assumptions. This is juxtaposed with framing of educational caring for racialized communities in ways that can be seen as acts of survival, defiance, and resistance. The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are highlighted, as it promotes the concept of homo economicus, or humans as independent market actors. Neoliberalism approaches care through an emphasis on personal responsibility and market solutions, which diminish the realities of relational interdependence and care needs. Scholars note a “crisis of care” that has arisen from this neoliberal capitalistic context, which includes lack of family-work balance, time poverty, and social depletion. The three regimes of capitalism (separate spheres, family wage, and two-earner family) reveal contradictions related to social reproduction. Financialized 57 neoliberal capitalism has created a care gap, where those with resources can pay for care while excluding those who cannot. Neoliberal capitalism's influence on universities is evident in the shift from education as a public good to a commodity. This has led to a more precarious environment for academic workers, who face market-based performance metrics and uncertain employment conditions. The emphasis on productivity and performativity has created ontological insecurity and a loss of meaning in academic work. Despite these challenges, scholars like Connell emphasize the importance of care in education and the nurturing relationships between educators and students. The impact of neoliberalism on academic work is also discussed with a focus on the discourse regarding higher education institutions as "careless" or "greedy” in that they make assumptions about “carefree” autonomous workers who are not burdened by care responsibilities in their lives. “Careless” institutions also privilege certain activities such as publishing or securing research funding as opposed to activities that are more readily associated with care work, such as advising students or administrative “housework.” This set of qualities comprising the “careless institution” creates gendered precarity, affecting female academics more profoundly and reifies inequalities in access to higher education leadership opportunities. Tronto’s concept of "privileged irresponsibility" was discussed in connection with the discourse of the “careless institution,” highlighting how those in power often have resources to outsource care to the less privileged (who often belong to gendered and racialized populations), and how those with privilege fail to acknowledge their reliance on care and the marginalization of care work both outside and within institutions. The literature review also considered emotional labor, particularly its gendered at racialized aspects and in the higher education workplace. The concept of “emotional labor” as 58 coined by Arlie Hochschild (2012) is discussed, along with how women, who often occupy a subordinate social stratum, must display appropriate and often artificial emotional reactions due to their status, financial resources, and power within occupational settings. This results in women generally performing more emotional labor than men, in conforming to societal expectations of being deferential. The literature reviewed includes critiques that much of the discourse on emotional labor has overlooked the intersections of race and class, noting that the literature predominantly focused on normative assumptions of ness and lacked diverse representation, limiting our understanding of emotional labor across various social and economic backgrounds. As Acker (1999) emphasized that intersectional hierarchies, including gender, race, ethnicity, and class, are simultaneously experienced and shape individuals' lives. More recent studies have begun addressing emotional labor in the context of people of color, recognizing the racialization of emotions and the additional burden faced in White-dominated organizations. Evans and Moore (2015) highlighted the unique emotional labor of racialized individuals in predominantly White institutions, such as law schools and aviation careers. They found that these individuals bear the extra weight of either tacitly accepting marginalization or resisting racist ideologies, potentially facing exclusion or reprimand. Their work, along with that of others, sheds light on how normative assumptions around Whiteness and associated pressures can require considerable emotional labor from people of color, including in postsecondary educational settings. 59 Path My father was very clear Growing up Growing up was something where I had a profound knowledge of disability in a way that many, many people never do in their lives. Especially, I think for people of my age group, because most people were streamed away from us. Didn’t think people ignored pain because they were uncaring, but because they couldn't face that pain It was too much for them. I don't want to be that person, that can't handle something What were you to do with this infant? I can't solve this for myself, but I can solve it for other people. Reaching behind me and saying, “Okay. You're coming after me and I'll try and make this path easier for you,” How do you clear the path for people in ways that they need now? It's not always what you needed, but it might be something else that they needed I said to the people, I'm not an expert on this— I'm offering it to you and I hope it helps you but it's coming from a place where I would like to see this happen. I'm giving you what I have. (Leader 4: The Generous Mentor) 60 Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter presents the methodology chosen for this project, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, along with a discussion of the significant theoretical influences on its development. It also describes the design of the study and overall approach, including participant recruitment and selection, data collection methods, measures taken to protect participants from risks associated with the research. I explain how I engaged in the multiple layers of analysis inherent in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and the process of creating found transcript poetry after completion of IPA analysis. A worked example of a found transcript poem is included, along with an account of presenting the completed poems to participants and reflections on the use of found transcript poetry in this research project. Finally, I review how the study drew from Tracy’s (2010) framework of eight “big tent” criteria for high caliber qualitative research to help ensure the quality of the research. 3.1 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis After exploring a number of potential methodologies, I discovered that Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was a fitting approach to my planned interviews and analysis of the resulting data. According to Braun and Clarke, it is “one of a number of phenomenological approaches to qualitative research which are generally concerned with ‘persons-in-context’ or ‘being in the world’” (Braun & Clarke, 2013, p. 180). I felt that it was key that my research inquiry situated participants in their contexts and is focused on the meaning they make of their experiences regarding care in light of their roles as higher education leaders and in the relation to the other facets of their identities. IPA also holds that researchers make sense of participants’ worlds using their own interpretive perspective by employing a “two stage interpretation process, or double-hermeneutic,” in which “the participants are trying to make sense of their world” and 61 the “the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make sense of their world” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 53). In addition to phenomenology (concerned with participants’ experiences), hermeneutics (concerned with the researcher’s interpretation of the participants’ experiences), IPA draws upon ideography, which focuses on the particular (Smith et al., 2009). It is designed to “give voice” to the detailed nuances of specific instances of participants’ lived experiences (Larkin et al., 2006). In IPA, semi-structured in-depth interviews are considered the optimal method to collect verbatim accounts from participants (Braun & Clarke, 2013). My intention through working in this way was to provide a general framework of lines of inquiry while creating an open space for participants to own their stories and take the interview into areas that are the most meaningful to them. When possible, I conducted interviews face-to-face with participants; if this was not possible, I conducted interviews via videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom). Brinkmann provides a useful clarification regarding analytic approaches to phenomenological interviewing (Brinkmann, 2013). While emphasizing that any dichotomy between phenomenological reports (which are primarily concerned with what participants have experienced) and discursive accounts (focused on how participants convey their situated accounts) is a bit oversimplified and that the realities of practice more often occur within a spectrum, Brinkmann writes researchers working from a phenomenological perspective ...believe that interview data can reflect the interviewees’ reality outside the interview. They consequently seek to minimize the interviewer’s effects on coloring interviewees’ reports of their reality. The interview becomes a research instrument in the hands of the interviewers, who are supposed to act receptively in order to interfere as little as possible with the interviewee reporting” (Brinkmann, 2013, p. 37). 62 Seidman identifies four themes framing phenomenological work: 1) the temporal and transitory nature of human experience, that is, by asking participants to reconstruct and reflect on their experiences, the participants are asked to search for the essence of that lived experience; 2) subjective understanding – the goal of researchers’ using a phenomenological approach to interviewing would come as close as possible to understanding the true “is” of our participants’ experience from their subjective point of view, 3) lived experience as the foundation of phenomena – and that the lived experience is primarily communicated via language, which illuminates the importance of interview transcripts, and 4) emphasis on meaning and meaning in context, that is, the interviewer must attempt to understand and situate the interview approach to participants within the context of their experience (Seidman, 2013, p. 16-19). Since my exploration focuses on the experiences of women in postsecondary leadership, their experiences related to caring, and the meaning that they ascribe to these experiences, I believe that a phenomenological approach will serve as an appropriate tool by which to achieve this aim. Simms and Stawarska point out that feminist phenomenology is a critical phenomenology that: Finds itself having to balance the hermeneutic discipline of suspicion (of existing discourse structures) with a hermeneutic discipline of affirmation and empowerment (of the complexity of individual, situated, gendered life experiences) in order to find a place for ethical, non-patriarchal political action on behalf of women, men, and children (Simms & Stawarska, 2014, p. 11). This too, speaks to one of my motivations in undertaking this study – to learn from participants about their experiences of care in higher education, which the literature shows to be a 63 phenomenon impacting women in the gendered context of postsecondary leadership (Acker, 2010; Hughes et al., 2007; Grummel et al., 2009). 3.2 Recruitment and Selection of Participants For this study I recruited nine participants in order to maintain the idiographic focus of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Although there is no prescribed specific sample size for IPA studies (Smith et al., 2009), it tends to be applied to small, homogenous samples, “for whom the research question will be meaningful” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 49). My sample group was homogenous in that all participants are formal leaders (e.g., directors, deans, provosts, etc.) in academic affairs-related (as opposed to student affairs areas, such as residence life) postsecondary contexts who identify as women; within that overall homogeneity there were, naturally, variations on individuals’ identities, experiences, and perceptions of those experiences, based on the participants’ circumstances. The focus of the study is regarding the meaning they make of their experiences regarding care (care of self, care of others; expectations regarding care placed on them) in light of their roles as higher education leaders and in the relation to the other facets of their identities. While the participants all self-identified as women and all worked in formal leadership positions in academic affairs, it was important to this study to include women from historically marginalized populations as well (racialized and/or LGBTQ+, for instance). In order to do this, I purposefully recruited candidates through my professional contacts as well as outreach to broader professional networks centered on diversity, equity and inclusion for postsecondary leaders. Three general criteria suggested for selection of participants for phenomenological research are: 1) experience of the phenomenon being studied, 2) willingness and ability to talk about their experiences, and 3) that the group is diverse enough to provide unique stories about 64 the experience (Laverty, 2003; Polkinghorne, 1989). As Polkinghorne notes, in phenomenological studies “the point of subject selection is to obtain richly varied descriptions, not to achieve statistical generalization” (Polkinghorne, 1989, p. 48). Accordingly, I refined my selection criteria and thought further regarding participant recruitment. Participants in the study needed to: 1. Identify as a woman. 2. Currently or have recently held a senior-level academic leadership position (e.g., director, dean, associate provost, provost, etc.) at a bachelor’s degree-granting college or university for at least 3 years. 3. Work, or have worked, in the United States or Canada. 4. Be fluent in conversational English. 5. Have had experiences related to care and caring impacting their work in postsecondary leadership and are willing to share those experiences. Recruitment of research participants is an important component of the research process. Acknowledging this, I used multiple modes of purposeful recruitment to increase my reach to prospective participants. I recruited participants through sending invitations via a combination of formal and informal networks. These networks included contacts within the postsecondary sector who may be appropriate participants and who might be able to assist in identifying other participants who would like to be interviewed; in those cases, participant selection would occur via snowball technique (Biernacki & Waldorf, 1981; Braun & Clarke, 2013; Emmel, 2013; Noy, 2008; Robinson, 2014; Smith et al., 2009). I also leveraged the outreach of associates who, while not participating directly in the study itself, were able to connect me to other prospective participants as third-party gatekeepers. 65 There are, of course, important ethical considerations in using snowballing and third- party recruiting. In accordance with University of British Columbia Behavioral Research Ethics Board (BREB) policy, “Contacts should not give researchers the names and contact information or any other detail about potential subjects without first obtaining permission from those subjects.” (University of British Columbia Behavioral Research Ethics Board, 2017). In accordance with the ideal practices noted by UBC’s BREB, I provided my contacts with a recruitment letter to send to or show potential participants. The recruitment letter and any related materials included instructions for interested individuals to contact me to ask questions or to enroll in the study. Allowing interested individuals to initiate contact with me as the researcher was intended to minimize potential for coercion or influence and to enhance their privacy. Additionally, I distributed an invitation to participate in the study via professional groups such as the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Senior Women Academic Administrators of Canada, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD), and the Canadian Federation of University Women. 3.3 Compensation for Study While the issue of compensation for study participation can be a thorny one (Grant, 2014; Ripley et al., 2010), since participants in in my study were high-level professionals, I offered a modest acknowledgement of their time and efforts to participate. A $50 gift card for Amazon.com or a similar benefit was offered to participants, and was disclosed (though not emphasized) in all recruitment materials. This monetary acknowledgement of participants’ time and effort was also suitable given the historical lack of recognition of, and compensation for, care-related activities in postsecondary education (Fitzgerald, 2014; Grummel, et al., 2009; Morley, 2013). 66 3.4 The Participants The participants ultimately recruited for this study met the previously-described criteria. Of the nine, five were working or had worked in academic affairs-related fields in the United States and four in Canada. Of the nine, five identified as being from racialized groups, one identified as queer, and the remaining three were cisgender, straight White women. While all participants in this study held formal leadership positions within the realm of academic affairs, their career trajectories varied. This distinction only arose after the research project had been completed, and it is not clear in retrospect the precise career pathways of the various participants. Some followed a more traditional scholarly path, progressing through faculty ranks and then transitioning into administrative roles. Others entered higher education administration through professional staff or managerial positions, leveraging their expertise and experience to ascend to leadership roles. The divergence in these leadership pathways reflects trends noted locally (e.g., in a study of career pathways of alumni in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British; see Kostandy et al., 2023) as well as in the broader higher education community about differing career pathways within colleges and universities (Shereda, 2020). A more detailed introduction to the participants is included in Chapter 4. 3.5 Preliminary Data Collection: Brief Demographic Questionnaire Since one of the objectives of this study was to engage with a diverse group of participants and to ensure inclusion of intersectional perspectives, I asked participants to complete a brief demographic questionnaire in order to effectively capture some key pieces of demographic information, including age range, racial/ethnic identity, education level of parents or caregivers and whether they were currently working in academic affairs or had formerly worked in the field. As noted above, the participants came from multiple backgrounds and had 67 diverse identities; having them self-report their demographic information via a simple, brief questionnaire was useful towards helping to ensure that participant selection aligned with the study’s objectives. 3.6 Primary Data Collection: Semi Structured Interviews The aim of phenomenological research is to explore the lived experience of phenomena from the participants’ perspective (Bliss, 2016), so semi-structured interviews guided by the study’s major research questions offered a balance of focus and flexibility that was important “to get as close as possible to what [participants] think about the topic, without being led too much by [the researcher’s] questions” (Smith & Osborn, 2007). Since participants are regarded as experts of their own experiences, phenomenological interviews should follow the lead of participants’ descriptions and stories rather than following the interviewer’s line of thinking (Cope, 2005). As Thompson and colleagues (1989) wrote, “the role of the interviewer is to provide a context in which respondents freely describe their experiences in detail” (Thompson, 1989, p. 138). One 60 to 90-minute phenomenological interview was conducted with each of the nine participants. Some interviews were conducted in person in private conference rooms, while others, especially upon the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, were conducted via Zoom video teleconference. I ensured that interviews were conducted with few or no interruptions, and in a quiet and comfortable environment in which participants would be able to share their experiences openly and honestly. A number of prompts and questions served as a general guide for the semi-structured interviews, including, for instance: 1) What does the term “care” mean to you? 2) What comes to mind when you think of the role care plays in your experience as a leader? 3) Do you believe that 68 any aspects of your personal identity affect your experience of caring, or others’ expectations on you as regards caring? 4) Can you describe a time when your experience or needs related to caring were at odds with institutional needs? How did this make you feel? These prompts and questions were designed to get participants talking about their experiences in the mentoring relationship and were not meant to be prescriptive. Smith and Osborn (2007) highlight some aspects of the interview process in IPA, including rapport-building with participants and allowing them to share their experiences and to raise topics of discussion that are of the most significance to them. “In this relationship, the respondents can be perceived as the experiential expert on the subject and should therefore be allowed maximum opportunity to tell their own story” (p. 59). Follow-up questions were informed by the trajectory each interview took while retaining the focus on participants’ lived experiences; the perceptions, feelings, and memories related to their experiences of caring in the context of their higher educational leadership roles and unique identities. I recorded the interviews using a digital recording device and listened to them to reflect on initial overarching takeaways from the session. All recordings were then transcribed by a third- party transcriptionist who had signed a confidentiality agreement. When the transcripts were each returned to me, I listened to each interview repeatedly while reading the transcripts in order to verify accuracy and consistency and to immerse myself further in the participants’ shared accounts. The completed transcripts were in some cases analyzed directly in Microsoft Word doc form and in some cases ported to Microsoft Excel docs in order to better be able to organize the multiple layers of analysis in which I would proceed to engage. 69 3.7 Data Analysis 3.7.1 Reading and Annotating the Transcripts In Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the process of coding of the data involves repeated “sweeps” of reading through the data, reading line-by-line through interview transcripts and coding at three different levels: 1) Descriptive comments, 2) linguistic comments, and 3) conceptual comments (Braun & Clarke, 2013). IPA noting also involves “free associating”; the researcher notes whatever comes to mind when reading the data (Smith et al., 2009). It involves making notations directly on wide margins of transcripts of the interview data in Microsoft Word or Excel rather than, for instance, employing software to capture the notation. In keeping with IPA’s idiographic focus, rather than making initial notations of themes arising across multiple samples early on, I thoroughly (and repeatedly) reviewed each transcript to note the emergent themes and superordinate themes (Braun & Clarke, 2013). The process to conduct this multi-layered analysis of each transcript took considerable time, and I usually did not pursue the next participant interview until the analysis of the given transcript was complete. I chose this approach since I was an inexperienced researcher and wanted to give myself the opportunity to practice the rigorous, multi-layered approach of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis authentically and a bit at a time, without having to tackle all of them at once. It also took time and effort to locate and recruit additional participants, so conducting the considerable analysis whilst recruiting seemed like a reasonable approach. While it may have been more efficient in terms of time to analyze multiple interviews one directly after another, I believe that engaging in the analysis with the slower, one-at-a-time approach helped me to stay present with each participant and helped me to gradually experiment with approaches to managing the considerable 70 analysis. For instance, I learned that it was more manageable for me to convert the interview transcripts into a Microsoft Excel template I made that had the various foci of analysis rather than using Microsoft Word. I exported the entire transcript into my Excel template, which had columns in it for my descriptive comments, linguistic comments, and abstract or conceptual comments. Doing so visually laid out my commenting in alignment with the portions of the transcript upon which I was commenting. The approach I intuitively came up with was not too different from noting comments in the margins of a transcript; having distinct columns for the three types of comments I was meant to be making for IPA simply allowed me to more comfortably keep track of what I was doing than if I had multiple comments in the margins or if I was using the MS Word comments feature. It was a matter of personal preference. During the process of data analysis, I frequently referenced the original recordings of each interview to verify the accuracy of the transcripts and to help ensure I was capturing nuances of participants’ speech so as to more accurately reflect their tone, inflections and my interpretations thereof. While I had initially considered developing alternative names for participants rather than numbers, when I broached the idea with Leader 1, she expressed a preference for the use of the terms “Leader” or “Participant,” so I proceeded accordingly. In an effort to preserve anonymity, I assigned each participant a random number, along with simply identifying them as “Leader” rather than by name or pseudonym. So, for instance, in discussions of the data, a quote would be ascribed to “Leader 4.” As observed by Guenther (2009) and Kolankiewicz (2021), naming of research participants can be complicated, with wide-ranging potential implications regarding personal, political, and power. Yet, as Guenther notes: “Few authors explain their decisions about naming, and if they mention whether or not they are using pseudonyms, discussions of such use are most often limited to a single phrase or sentence, 71 commonly tucked in a footnote” (p. 412). After grappling with the potential ramifications of identification approaches for this study, and giving careful consideration to the best way forward, I opted to use numbers consistently for all participants. Consultation with my supervisory committee years later, during the process of refining my dissertation, revealed that the numbers alone were not necessarily sufficient aid for readers to differentiate the participants from one another. In order to address this challenge, and under the advice of my committee, I developed a short descriptor of each participant based on their interview data, and also provided a brief quote from the interview that encapsulated a key aspect of what the participant shared. These short descriptors and brief quotes are included in the introduction to the participants in Chapter 4. 3.7.2 Identifying Emergent Themes In order to begin the process of identifying and developing emergent themes, I worked with the notes which had been created on each transcript. Working to identify and see connection in patterns involved a shift in the way I engaged with each transcript and the notes. In alignment with the concept of the hermeneutic circle, the reflection and reorganization of segments of the data, where the volume of data is reduced while preserving the complexity and multi-faceted nature of what participants shared. As Smith et al. describe it “the part is interpreted in relation to the whole; the whole is interpreted in relation to the part” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 92). In contrast to the initial notes, the emergent themes were intended to capture and reflect an interpretation of the data. I created succinct statements related to the initial notes, and to the relevant aspects of the transcript to which the initial note was attached. These statements were intended to connect to the data as well as reflect the emergence of conceptual abstraction (Smith et al., 2009). See Figure 1 on the next page for an illustration of this. 72 Figure 1 Example of Emergent Theme from Transcript Analysis Emergent theme Transcript Excerpt of Leader 1 Response to “What does the term ‘care’ mean to you?” Initial Notes Care of self is important to her. Care definition is about doing what will create a good outcome for herself – financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually Care of self can be a challenge/struggle. I guess that's a good question. For a long time, I thought caring meant just like caring of other people but not really yourself. A lot of people say, "But you've got to make time for yourself and it's like this different kind of terminologies but never really define something. Care is about doing what sort of -- it's the good outcome for yourself. Not necessarily anything easy. It can be hard but something that will take care of yourself either financially, physically, mentally or emotionally or spiritually. You know what I'm saying? It's not just about the immediate thing. There's a lot of different definitions of care. For me, self-care, I guess it's sort of now it's really reflecting back into yourself and thinking what's the best that I can do for myself. It's not necessarily easy. Caring for has meant caring for others instead of herself, but that’s changing. Linguistic: use of terms "A lot of people say" to denote norms. Care is "good outcome for yourself" which contrasts later to her depiction of care as having to do with collective. Used phrase “Do you know what I’m saying? – seeking to be understood, (and perhaps have what she’s saying affirmed)? Care is about doing things that result in a good outcome for herself financially, physically, mentally or emotionally Self-care can be hard. 73 3.7.3 Searching for Connections Across Emergent Themes The next layer of the process in IPA involves using the individual set of emergent themes established within the individual transcript and ascertaining patterns and connections in the themes. Using one or more of several strategies, including abstraction—themes which can be grouped by likeness under a superordinate theme, subsumption—a theme which becomes superordinate and encompasses other emergent themes, polarization—related themes which can be compared by differentials in the responses, contextualization—influences on data such as culture and temporal events, numeration—the frequency of the theme within the responses, and function—themes which can be examined for their specific function within the transcript (Smith et al., 2009). I captured the emergent patterns and connections between and among themes and summarized by generating what Holland and Montagu refer to as a “potted summary” for each participant (Holland & Montagu, 2020). These potted summaries serve to gather the main substance of the transcript, highlighting key elements and excerpts, which aim to retain the overarching context while also helping to solidify some of the specific themes that had surfaced for each individual participant. 3.7.4 Moving on to the Next Case Rather than looking across all of the cases at once, the idiographic nature of IPA requires researchers to complete all the steps of the individual case analysis before moving on. In keeping with this, I repeated the process for each transcript, including the individual potted summaries, before proceeding to the next transcript with an open mind about what might surface therein and helping to create a thorough data set. I was also still carefully recruiting participants and conducting further interviews, so the initial analyses and potted summaries helped me to gradually have additional points of reference as I continued my research. 74 3.7.5 Looking for Patterns Across Cases When I had completed individual multi-layered analysis and potted summaries for each participant, I then began to look across cases for superordinate themes. These are broad themes that seemed to be reflected in many of the participants’ sharing. There were also subordinate themes, which are more detailed and focused aspects of the broader superordinate themes. It is important to note that themes are included even if only one participant shared them, as they were communicated and interpreted as important to that participant’s lived experience. This is also in keeping with my goal of allowing for individual experiences of common phenomena within the study cohort. 3.8 Poetic Transcription of the Interviews Upon completion of this phase of traditional IPA, I drafted an initial summary of the findings, which is addressed in Chapter 4. This portion encompasses an introduction to five identified superordinate themes and related subordinate themes and excerpts from the transcripts to illustrate the themes. Following the IPA process and summary of findings, I revisited the data with a “fresh eye that poetic transcription offers” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxviii). I generated nine found poems—one for each participant. These poems are presented throughout the dissertation. My reflections on using poetry in this research project are included in the discussion chapter. Following in the footsteps of previous qualitative researchers, I used the technique of poetic transcription (Brown et al., 2021; Glesne, 1997; Furman et al., 2007; Richardson, 2003; West & Bloomquist, 2015), where verbatim excerpts from interview transcripts were used to create poems. Furman et al. note that “research poems differ from more familiar types of poetry in that their point is to generate and present data rather than serve as a literary device…the research poems may also foster more understanding and empathy between research subjects and 75 those who seek to learn about them” (Furman et al., 2007, p. 144). While not a published poet, I have taken multiple university-level courses in creative writing and in composing poetry (I earned a minor in creative writing as part of my bachelor’s degree), so I felt I would be able to create work that would hopefully be meaningful to participants. Since I added the use of poetic transcription to that of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), I first followed the process for analysis in accordance with IPA procedures (Smith et al., 2009; Braun & Clarke, 2013). I then extracted excerpts of speech verbatim from the transcripts choosing words and phrases from the prose, paying attention in particular to any repeated expressions (Sjollema et al., 2012). While I did not change the words participants spoke as extracted from the transcripts, like Glesne (1997, p. 205), I pulled phrases from differing places within the transcript and juxtaposed them in order to represent the rhythm of the participant’s speech, and to portray the essence of what I understand from it. While developing the poems, I created line breaks in the narrative, arranging things for form lines and stanzas. While creating the breaks, I took care to keep distinct units of meaning together to preserve the essential features of the original narrative. I read the poems out loud many times to help attune to the emotional coherence and accuracy of the poems. Figure 2 on the next page shows a worked example of the construction process of the found poetry using the interview transcript from Leader 6. 76 Figure 2 Example of Generation of Found Poem from Transcript Poem “Strong Metal” Excerpt from interview transcript with Leader 6 Caring, it's like it needs a new word. I've always used moral compass as my word. Caring, to me, is being strong Caring means doing the hard work, but doing it because it makes sense for the future. We're going to have to push the needle on this, we're going to have to bend it. You're not there to be friends. When you don't take it personally, it levitates you. It allows you to do your job because you have to have a bit of metal, strong metal, to do this. I think in postsecondary, they almost want a unanimous vote to make something happen. Well, that's never going to happen. You'll never get anything done, and it's stalemate itself, so I said, “We're going to have to push the needle on this, and we're going to have to bend it. Leaning in, and we're going to have to do that. The why we're going to have to do it is because I won't stay otherwise because my moral compass is wired in a way that you have to do what's right. It might not be what everybody thinks you're supposed to do.” Caring meant doing the right thing -- so at the end of this long diatribe that I'm telling you -- caring means doing the hard work, but doing it because it makes sense for the future The nature of the job comes with mistrust. Most people don't totally trust their boss because, at any one time, the boss could go, “Hey, are you -- where have you been?” or you could be asked a question or two. You're not there to be friends with them. When you don't take it personally, it levitates you. It allows you to do your job because you have to have a bit of metal, strong metal to do this because you're bumping up against people Caring, it's like it needs a new word. I don't know what the word is. Like it's caring -- I've always used moral compass as my word. You have to have a strong moral compass to want to do the right thing even though it's going to be hard to do. Caring, to me, is being strong because you're saying that this is taking a toll or it's like, “Let's name that it's crazy here.” 77 During the IPA analysis, I found that I had a tendency to get caught up in generating themes. Even though there is nothing inherent to IPA that would have me focusing on direct logical convergences and divergences within the transcript data, I discovered that the process of composing poems brought me back to emotions and the expressed meanings of my participants’ experiences. Some of the poems reflect the themes that surfaced during the process of analysis, while some relate more to memories, concepts, and emotions conveyed during the interview process that were important to the participants but that might not be explicitly named in the superordinate and subordinate themes developed from the analysis. By employing poetry as a supplementary method of engaging with and presenting the data, I aspired to align with epistemological perspectives that, as Alison Jaggar describes, “would show how our emotional responses to the world change as we conceptualize it differently and how our changing emotional responses then stimulate us to new insights” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 170). My hope is that the use of poetry will allow readers of my study to understand the participants’ accounts in a more engaged way (as opposed to a distanced, clinical stance that positivistic approaches would assume towards research data), and that helped me to remain in close touch with my own emotional connection to participants, their stories, and my own experiences through the research process. Richardson notes that poems “concretize emotions, feelings, and moods – the most private kind of feelings – so as to recreate the experience itself to another person” (Richardson, 1994, p. 9). 3.9 Presenting Poems to Participants After composing the poems, I shared them with the participant from whose transcript it was generated in order to ensure I accurately represent their experiences and thoughts, and to solicit any feedback they wished to share. Doing so helped attend to the ethical considerations 78 inherent in representing participants’ words and offered another opportunity for reflexivity on the process for me as a researcher. Due to the length of time it took to conduct the initial analyses of the interviews and generate poems, and also due to disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was often a delay between conducting the interviews and presenting poems to the participants; however, I ultimately managed to reconnect with most of the study participants. The poems were received positively, and participants confirmed that the poems accurately reflected what they had conveyed during the interview and were appreciative to have their words creatively reshaped in this way. Some participants remarked that they found the poetic representation of their words evoked positive, tender emotions that they had not expected. One participant remarked that she found her poem to be profound and poignant, and that it represented some of her most deeply-held beliefs. I was pleased by the responses and felt that while the process of writing found research poetry had at times been more challenging than I originally anticipated, the exercise had helped to connect this work meaningfully with feminist emotional knowing (Jaggar, 1989) and experiential knowing as well (Heron, 1996). 3.10 Reflections on Writing Found Poems Using Participants’ Words Annie Dillard explained that …usually those happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts…the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle…by entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry (Dillard, 1995, p. ix). 79 When I conceived of adding the use of found poetry to this dissertation research project, I felt confident about it at first because I had created found poetry multiple times at university and through various creative projects. But through this process I’ve discovered it’s profoundly different when you are using the real, living words of people who have been generous and trusting enough to share their inner worlds with you. The enterprise is different still than creating poems that are not drawn from existing published text in the way that most found poems are; I recall a lack of concern and at times gleefully free sensation I’d experienced when crafting found poems from old newspaper articles or books published decades ago. I felt the pressure of representing people in my own interpretation, although that is generally part of both traditional research and also part and parcel of the hermeneutic circle underpinning Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, wherein the researcher is making sense of the way the participants make sense of their experiences. I was very concerned about oversimplifying humans’ complex lived experience or being reductive in efforts to generate succinct encapsulations of key themes leader-participants had shared with me. On the one hand, as Furman et al. framed it: The overall goal of creating the research poem was to use poetic structures as ‘containers’ for presenting the lived experience of research participants in a consumable fashion. Too often, research reports present data either as difficult to consume thick textual descriptions, or through content analysis tables and charts that may often strip data of its capacity to emotionally impact (Furhman et al., 2007, p. 144). And I didn’t find that my experience of writing research poetry was aligning with the way Glesne described “poetic transcription creates a third voice that is neither the interviewee’s nor the researcher’s, but is a combination of both…it disintegrates any notion of separation of 80 observer and observed. These categories are conflated in an interpretative space” (Glesne, 1997, p. 215). I was also greatly affected by the problems Alcoff alerts us to regarding representing others: “the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a reinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies” (Alcoff, 1991, p. 29). Though, as noted elsewhere in this chapter and dissertation, I actively employed measures to address ethical considerations of representation, including engaging in ongoing reflexive journaling and sharing the constructed poems with participants, worries that choosing and condensing the experiences shared with me by participants. As I reflected, journaled, and continued reading while grappling with my discomfort, I stumbled upon Laurel Richardson’s own reflections on her experiences writing research poetry—specifically one of her notable earlier pieces, about a participant called Louisa May—as opposed to leaving the research endeavor within its more traditional confines: Writing the poem took the better part of four weeks. During that time, Louisa May moved into my psychic interior in a way that no interviewee of mine ever had. She moved in the way poetry does. She’s not yet moved out” (Richardson, 1992, p. 133). I found that Richardson had beautifully described part of what I found both profound and difficult in the research poetry process—the way that composing poetry did not come from the same traditionally academic, probably somewhat distanced and nominally (although not actually) “objective” stance I had, at some level, believed was the posture of a researcher. Indeed, ultimately, I found that the at-times awkward experience of crafting research poems re-aligned my own experience and perceptions of self in relation to the topic I was researching and to my participants. Again, Laurel Richardson seemed to have discovered similar territory before me: 81 Representing the sociological as poetry is one way of decentering the unreflexive ‘self’ to create a position for experiencing the self as a sociological knower/constructor—not just talking about it, but doing it. In writing the Other, we can (re)write the Self (Richardson, 1992, p. 136). Authentic, subjective, personal engagement with the words and experiences shared by participants from the stance of a poet rather than an academic researcher changed my relationship with the words and with the interviews themselves. I found it to be a different positionality emotionally and cognitively than how I felt as a human engaging in research interviews or analyzing data via interpretative phenomenological analysis. The process of poetry served to re-position me as a human, engaging in this endeavour from an emotional side. It shifted me from “analyst of” to “sitting with” people as they shared a bit of their lived worlds. 3.11 Construction of Quality In an effort to help ensure the quality of this research initiative, I drew from Tracy’s (2010) framework of eight “big tent” criteria for high caliber qualitative research. The criteria include: i) worthy topic, ii) rich rigor, iii) sincerity, iv) credibility, v) resonance, vi) significant contribution, vii) ethics, and viii) meaningful coherence. I have included further details regarding each of the criteria in the table below, followed by reflections on how I responded to each criterion in my study. 82 Table 1 Tracy's Framework of Eight Criteria for Quality Criteria Method Worthy topic The topic of the research is: • Relevant, timely, significant and interesting Rich rigor The study uses a sufficient, abundant, appropriate, and complex: • Set of theoretical constructs • Data and time in the field • Sample(s) • Context(s) • Data collection and analysis processes Sincerity The study is characterized by: • Self-reflexivity about subjective values, biases, and inclinations of the researcher(s) • Transparency about the methods and challenges Credibility The research is marked by: • Thick description • Triangulation or crystallization • Multivocality • Member reflections Resonance The research influences, impacts, or moves particular readers or a variety of audiences through: • Aesthetic, evocative representation • Naturalistic generalizations • Transferable findings Significant contribution The research provides a significant contribution: • Conceptually/theoretically • Practically • Morally • Methodologically • Heuristically Ethics The research considers: • Procedural ethics (such as human subjects) • Situational and culturally specific ethics • Relational ethics • Exiting and sharing ethics Meaningful coherence The study: Achieved its purpose; used appropriate methods and interconnected literature, research questions, findings and interpretations Source: Tracy (2010, p. 840) 83 i) Worthy Topic This topic stems from my professional and personal experience as an academic affairs leader in the postsecondary education sector. I observed my own experiences related to care and its relationship to what Grummel et al. (2009) noted as the “careless institution”; I simultaneously observed the lack of diversity amongst women in academic affairs leadership and wondered how care may impact the experiences of historically excluded women. My interest in incorporating a diverse group of participants also seeks to address gaps in existing literature regarding the challenges of care and academic affairs leadership as regards marginalized women. ii) Rich Rigor This research drew from theoretical constructs including intersectional feminism, the ethics of care, the literature regarding women in academic leadership, and interpretative phenomenology. The sample size of the study was consistent with parameters for Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) studies; resulting interviews and subsequent analysis were robust and thoroughly engaged. The additional layer of constructing found research poetry and presenting the resulting poems to participants for feedback further contributed to the rigor of the study. As explained further below, under Sincerity, I also attended to rigor though extensive activities in support of researcher reflexivity as well. iii) Sincerity This study is personally meaningful for me, as I am an academic affairs practitioner in higher education. Care is important to me as a human being, and understanding its relationship to professional practice intrigued me. As a White, straight, cisgender woman in academe, I also strongly believe in serving as an ally for my colleagues, some of whom are from historically excluded populations. I informed interviewees of my “insider status” during recruitment for my 84 study and during the interviews. While my insider status helped me to readily understand the terminology, structures and processes of the postsecondary contexts my participants were describing, I simultaneously reflected on the nuances of positionality, nationality, institution type, personal circumstances and other contextual factors that my participants conveyed that were different than my own, as were some of the experiences and perceptions they shared. During the research process, I kept a reflexive journal of my experiences, thoughts and feelings as I grappled with aspects of the process that tapped into the core of why I do what I do. Here is an excerpt from that journal as an example: September 4, 2020 - Friday Tired. Realizing that I’m learning a lot about my own underpinning assumptions about care, caring and what it all means for women in leadership through these interviews with research participants. I saw it as a barrier to professional advancement for many women in the postsecondary sector, and the existing literature does seem to bear that out—but I’m also seeing the intrinsic value care seems to hold for these participants (as it does for me) and how it can’t be separated out. It may be expressed a bit differently, and with different boundaries in a professional versus personal context, but care seems to be so fundamental to these participants’ experiences and perspectives on life. They carry it with them into the workplace and see it as an important part of their identities. As I’m going through this transcript, I’m feeling inspired by how the participant described care – talked about strength and doing the difficult thing as her primary take on demonstrating care in leadership in the higher ed workplace. She also talked about strong boundaries between her job and her personal life, and how her job wasn’t her 85 entire world. It reminded me of Sandra Acker’s “Gendered Games in Academic Leadership” article, in which she noted that the participants of her study were more able to hang in there in the “game” of academic leadership if they viewed it as such – as a game – rather than taking things very personally and infusing a lot of their own personal value into their identities in the workplace. As noted by Hughes and others, I feel tensions between caring and the demands and professional expectations at my job. I get anxious at times from that. I got into this line of work conceiving of higher education as a caring profession – and that’s why I’ve been doing this for so long! But it’s not that simple or clear, as it turns out. It can get really dispiriting – I wanted so much to help people and contribute to making the world a better place. But I’m drawing strength from reading this participant’s perspectives – she cares about her work and for those around her at her job…and I like how she expresses a sense of how it fits into the bigger picture of her life, and how to manage things in a more sustainable way…there’s wisdom in what she is sharing I can take with me. To further support reflexive engagement with the research, I also engaged a coach who is Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) for myself with whom I met every two weeks over the course of several years. This was to provide support and accountability as I reflected upon my feelings and reactions to my interactions with participants, the research process and my experiences with the data, while also maintaining confidentiality about participants and data – the focus was on processing my experience and reactions to topics and themes that were arising for me. I also actively reflected on my social location and current contexts during the research process by reading and doing exercises from works by Ibrahim X. Kendi (2019), Bell and Schatz 86 (2022), Oluo (2018), and DiAngelo (2018). Doing so allowed me to be more open to asking directly about matters concerning race or other aspects of identity. It also helped me to receive people as they were and ask follow-up questions that keyed off what participants told me. iv) Credibility Nine participants from the United States and Canada shared their experiences and perspectives regarding what care meant to them and how it informed or impacted their work as leaders in academe. Interviews were recorded verbatim. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to deeply explore the idiographic information but also the broader surfaced themes. I constructed a poem for each participant which reflected a key theme within their interview, drawn from the interview transcript, and asked for feedback on how this aligned (or did not align) with what they felt they had shared, and if they had any additional reflections after reading their poem. Staying attuned to participants’ experiences and words throughout the analysis and theme identification portions of the research endeavor in addition to other components outlined here also reinforced the credibility of the research. v) Resonance In addition to the composition of found poetry from each participant’s interview transcript, the study is being represented as a doctoral dissertation. Participants were individuals in Canada and the United States who identify as women, and all were from academic affairs contexts in the postsecondary educational sector. While the nature of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis studies is not meant to be generalizable, it may be useful to inform further explorations of experiences and perceptions of care as relates to women in higher education. This study’s use of found poetry generated from interview transcript also aligns with 87 the Tracy’s concept of resonance as “writing should be creative, complex, and encourage the reader to feel, think, interpret, react, or change” (p. 845). vi) Significant Contribution This study is significant because it expands the research regarding women in postsecondary academic affairs leadership and care to begin to include a greater plurality of voices (e.g., racialized women, LGBTQIA+, etc.). The research integrates feminist critiques of the “careless institution” with the ethics of care and intersectional critiques of care ethics and of feminism. It has significantly impacted my understanding as a senior level leader in my own workplace and decisions that I make in my practice. vii) Ethics This study received approval from UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board (BREB). All prospective participants received a letter of invitation detailing the research project, including assurances that their anonymity would be preserved (see Appendix C). All participants signed an informed consent document before the interview (see Appendix B) and I requested permission to audio record the interview. Recordings, transcripts, analyses any other research materials were all stored in a secure location. I maintained a trusting, respectful and supportive dynamic within each interview. I assigned numbers for each participant and redacted identifying information from the dissertation. Of course, ethics goes beyond BREB approval; as noted previously, during this study I consistently sought to attend to the other aspects Tracy cites regarding ethics. This included relational ethics, which included remaining mindful of the gravity of representing others’ stories, engaging in substantial and consistent reflexivity as a researcher, and remaining receptive and aware of my participants as human beings with whom I was engaged in a relationship, and having this awareness guide my choices and actions. 88 viii) Meaningful Coherence This study’s purpose was to explore the experiences and perceptions of care encountered by women in postsecondary academic affairs leadership positions in Canada and the United States, including perspectives of women who have often been historically excluded. I did this by conducting interviews and constructing found poetry from the resulting transcripts. This project’s research questions are supported by a review of the relevant literature, which was then drawn from to further tailor interview questions and subsequent engagement with the resulting data. I also retained all collected data, recorded interviews, written transcriptions, analyses, associated documents (initial questionnaires, consent forms) and poems. All information is stored in a retrievable place. 3.12 Research Ethics I completed the Tri Council Policy Statement Two (TCPS 2 CORE) Tutorial Course on Research Ethics research ethics training, and reviewed my research plans with these considerations in mind. In addition, during the process of developing my research design, I discovered valuable feedback in some of the literature. I conveyed potential risks and benefits of participating in the research, incorporated informed consent, and included contact information for UBC Office of Research Ethics’ requisite complaint line. I was the only researcher who had contact with each participant. Participants were not made aware of any other participant by name, title, institution or geography. Participants were given numbers or pseudonyms, and identifying information was removed from the written transcripts, direct quotations, dissertation, and the presentation of the results. Data records stored on computer hard drive were encrypted and password protected so as to preserve the privacy of the participants. Participants’ consent forms, email correspondence, and any data 89 linking their names to participation in the study were securely stored in a separate location from the transcript data. All audio recordings will be deleted at the end of the study. In accordance with the ethical guidelines of the University of British Columbia, the data will be retained in a locked drawer within a secure office belonging to my primary research supervisor, for a period of five years after publication of the dissertation, at which time they will be destroyed. 3.13 Summary of Methodology Chapter In this chapter, I explained the methodology and theoretical framework underpinning the data analysis and interpretation. I described participant recruitment and selection, and how data were collected using a brief demographic questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The chapter outlines how the data were analyzed and interpreted using interpretative phenomenological analysis, and how found poems were generated using the data and then presented to participants for any feedback they wished to share. I discussed steps taken to help ensure quality of the research while also attending to considerations such as reflexivity on researcher positionality. I reflected on my experience using found poetry in conjunction with traditional analysis. The chapter describes steps taken to mitigate potential harms to participants by informed consent, safeguarding of data, and concealment of participants’ identities. 90 Little becomes much A gospel song in the ‘70s, She talked about ordinary people. Little becomes much, when you place it in the hands of God. You take your gifts, You take your craft Care, you know – That’s a whole political act. I care enough to call you out Because if I don’t care, then nobody else is doing the caring. Sometimes it’s important to just close the door with people— How are your kids? How’s your mother doing? To feel and sense your empathy, And to know that you’re human. It’s a foundation of being a leader, You’re human. I use data— If you know stuff is wrong, call it out. Do something about it, Think creatively, Outside the box. Always All these assaults coming at you My faculty, they were Exhausted Exhausted I have to speak up Have to give voice to them Slay the dragons Politicized, Womanist Caring I’m going to take care of my own. (Leader 8: The Compassionate Changemaker) 91 Chapter 4: Individual Findings—Meet the Participants The study explored the experiences of nine women in higher education academic leadership and their experiences of, and perspectives on, care. Participants have unique lives, backgrounds, personalities and points of view. While phenomenology is concerned with the nature of lived experience itself, and this study will explore experiences that resonate across multiple participants, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also concerned with the idiographic—intensive study of the individual in an effort to form an understanding of each person or case. It was important to me to make an effort, in the limited amount of time available, and to the extent possible, to understand what was most important to the people participating in this project. Accordingly, I created “potted summaries” of the key findings for each participant, in alignment with the approach to IPA I learned from participating in a three-part series of online workshops—“Getting Great Data Using IPA Analysis”—in the summer of 2020 with Fiona Holland and Jane Montagu of University of Derby, United Kingdom. In the workshops, we received presentations from the faculty regarding effective use of IPA, engaged in group exercises on sample transcripts provided to the class, and dialoged with the faculty and fellow participants regarding questions we had about using the methodology and sharing ideas with one another about how to tailor IPA to our respective project types. In order to help communicate the findings of this study, I introduce the reader to the participants, which include direct quotes and my summary remarks, to learn a bit about each of them. Each of the nine leaders brings varied experiences regarding what was most important to them, their experiences and perspectives. Although varying amounts of time have passed since their participation, I am providing descriptions of them as I met them during the interview 92 process. For readers’ ease of reference, I have created a table (Table 2) showing self-reported demographic information for the participants before we proceed to the individual introductions: Table 2 Participants' Self-Reported Demographic Information Leader Number Race/Ethnicity Sexual Identity Age Range Country Working in Higher Ed During Interview? Childhood Economic Status Leader 1 Asian American Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 USA Yes Lower middle/Middle Income Leader 2 Latinx Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 USA Yes Low Income Leader 3 Asian American Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 USA No - left Lower Middle Income Leader 4 White Heterosexual/ Straight 56+ Canada Yes Upper-Middle Income Leader 5 Settler-Canadian of European Ancestry Queer 56+ Canada Yes Declined to State Leader 6 White Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 Canada Yes Upper-Middle Income Leader 7 White Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 Canada Yes Middle Income Leader 8 Black American Heterosexual/ Straight 41-55 USA Yes Low Income Leader 9 African American Heterosexual/ Straight 56+ USA Yes Middle Income Categories such as race/ethnicity and sexual identity were self-reported by participants. Names and specific job position information have been redacted to protect confidentiality; each participant is identified as “Leader” with a random number 1 through 9 (e.g., “Leader 1”). As noted in Chapter 3, this decision was driven by considerations around naming participants. In keeping with advice from my supervisory committee, in order to help make participants distinct 93 for the reader, Table 3 below has short descriptors of each participant drawn from their interview data and provides a brief quote that encapsulated a key aspect of what the participant shared. Table 3 Leader Numbers, Short Descriptors and Brief Quotes Leader Number Short Descriptor Brief Quote Leader 1 The Reluctant Leader “For a long time I thought caring meant just like caring for other people but not really yourself.” Leader 2 The Community-Focused Caregiver “I really value relationships and I really value my co-workers and so I tried to be a good coworker and I try to kind of be a good member of community.” Leader 3 The Empathetic Visionary “Care for me means empathy. It means being human.” Leader 4 The Generous Mentor “I think of it [care] as being both an obligation and a privilege something that is both offered with generosity but I think is received with generosity.” Leader 5 The Problem-Solving Advocate “As a parent I've become so much more acutely aware of how you can't separate caring for self from caring for others -- at least I can't that I know the more I care for myself the better I can care for my family.” Leader 6 The Moral Compass “Caring means doing the hard work but doing it because it makes sense for the future of this faculty.” Leader 7 The Transparent Leader “If I’m not public about that struggle and I’m not public about what I change how do we ever have hope for the people who don’t have the degree of power that I have?” Leader 8 The Compassionate Changemaker “I care enough to stop my faculty when they engage in certain discourses about certain students and how certain programs are for certain students and whatnot. That's care.” Leader 9 The Inclusive Architect “How you work to optimize your space so that it is a space of care where people from a variety of backgrounds... all feel as though they are cared for and in position to care for others.” 94 4.1 Leader 1: The Reluctant Leader “For a long time, I thought caring meant just like caring for other people but not really yourself.” Leader 1 is a heterosexual/straight Asian American woman in the 41-55 age range who immigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She is currently working in postsecondary education in the United States. She describes her parents’ economic status in childhood as lower-middle income/middle income. Her mother’s highest level of education was college, and her father’s highest level of education was also college. Leader 1’s initial response to describing how she defines care centered on prioritizing self-care, while also repeatedly emphasizing that prioritizing self-care can be challenging, and that previously the emphasis on care had centered on others: “For a long time, I thought caring meant just like caring for other people but not really yourself.” She also described self-care as attending to one’s interests “financially, physically, mentally or emotionally or spiritually.” She further elaborated that her focus had been primarily on the care of her children: “everything was just focused on them, providing them the experiences, life experiences, just everything in terms of their development.” Leader 1 also connected care and the enactment of caring to her Asian-American identity: “Our thing was always about this, and what I always stress in the family too: Don't just think about yourself. Think about others too. It's always about getting something done as a team, as a unit, almost.” This carried over into her experiences of caring in the workplace, as she worked in an Asian corporate context and then later in a White-dominated, American postsecondary context: If somebody didn't have food, everybody would share their food with them. That kind of mentality, I don't really see that too much in American culture. I think that's why maybe 95 people think that I might be more caring, because if I do some things naturally, people think maybe I'm smothering. But then it's also not just smothering, but it's also cultural. Leader 1 also elaborated on her perspectives on caring leadership in the workplace. She expressed irritation that at times leaders demonstrate individualistic behaviors, for instance making and executing decisions without considering fully how they impact others. She described her own relationship with leadership as a bit reluctant, stepping in to fill a need rather than aspiring to the prestige or power of leadership positions. She noted—as a critique—that people who seek postsecondary leadership positions often are motivated by these individual gains rather than the collective good. Care serves as an asset in the context of the workplace for Leader 1 as it creates safe spaces to talk about frustrations. Caring shows up as a network of colleagues that keep her from becoming “alone and isolated.” Care at work involves mutual support problem-solving rather than surface level socializing/social interactions. At the same time, caring at work involves appropriate boundaries: “I guess part of care, it's respecting boundaries like part of it is having that respect, so you don't overstep either or impose especially at the workplace,” noting that “different people have their own positions, different responsibilities and if you overstep and you're trying to use your influence to get something done for yourself, that you're putting that -- the other person, your colleague in a very, very difficult situation.” When it comes to considering advancement into leadership positions, Leader 1 again noted that a difference in her motivation and perspective on what constitutes leadership versus how leadership positions are often constructed: “…people immediately think, ‘Oh, it's about power,” but it's not really about power. It's about I think guiding people, leaders to lead by 96 definition not to exercise their own thoughts -- impose thoughts, their values everything on others either or making -- do the things that are not in line with, I guess the general goal.” While Leader 1 is a single mother with two children, she previously had a partner, and described how gendered expectations that women take care of the family’s children, which she described as amplified by cultural norms, impeded her career advancement at times: “I said, ‘Look, they want to send me for training’ ‘You can't go.’ I'm like, ‘Why?’ ‘You have to take care of the children.’” 4.2 Leader 2: The Community-Focused Caregiver “I really value relationships, and I really value my co-workers, and so I tried to be a good coworker and I try to kind of be a good member of community.” Leader 2 is a heterosexual Latinx woman in the 41-55 age range. She is currently working in postsecondary education in the United States. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood as low income. Her mother’s highest level of education was sixth grade and her father’s highest level of education was second grade. When asked to describe what care was to her, Leader 2 focused outwardly: “I think that care is helping others. So, helping people that you love, family, children, your relatives, people at work. Sort of facilitating things to make them go more smoothly.” She frequently connected care and the practice of being caring to being a “good person” and noted giving attention to helping ensure her children were caring without reinforcing outmoded gender norms. She noted that she had not included herself in her initial description of care and shared that she was working on finding ways to improve that. She also noted that boundaries between work life and personal life as regards care had blurred later in life, whereas they had been more pronounced when she was younger: “And I think when I was younger, it was I think of a split was a little bit, a bigger split 97 [between the personal and professional aspects of her life]…they've merged I think as I've gotten older.” When it came to her experiences of care in her role as a leader, Leader 2 expressed frustration that she focused on caring for the work projects and community more so than applying care toward herself and her own advancement: I really value relationships, and I really value my co-workers, and so I tried to be a good coworker and I try to kind of be a good member of community. And so, I feel like in that aspect, I feel like I'm a leader in that way. But I don't know how that how to translate into something that like, is more tangible or that I can ask for.” She also described considerable tensions between caring for her family and advancement in her leadership career vis a vis her socioeconomic background: “I'm trying to get a job like tomorrow so to support my family. So having like a five-year or ten-year goal is foreign to me, even still.” In terms of intersectional perspectives of care and leadership career advancement, Leader 2 described barriers to leadership advancement based on socioeconomic cultural norms at her institution: “Yeah, there's a big socioeconomic status. I mean I think that you can kind of get by even if -- even if you're a woman if you have the right status and if you have kind of the right pointers of class.” When asked to describe her experiences with leaders that demonstrated caring, Leader 2 spoke of an older Latinx former supervisor she had, noting that one of the ways the supervisor demonstrated caring was ensuring proper payment for the work she was doing in the non-profit sector: “I'm not going to take advantage of you. So that was something that was really present, right? And that was unusual because typically people would ask you, ‘Can you do this for free?’” 98 Leader 2 noted that this former supervisor demonstrated caring by shielding the people who worked for her from the political difficulties often encountered by administrators. Leader 2 also described her experience of caring, or the appearance of caring, used to manipulate political workplace situations. She described a former colleague at a previous institution who was not very competent in many ways, but who used appearance of caring to manipulate other executives and retain networking contacts “if you just saw her kind of from a network perspective, she had a kind of this caring relationship with the executives. But it was very manipulative, and you could see that she knew exactly what she was doing.” Leader 2 also experienced some organizations’ diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as paying lip service or engaging in optics of caring, while failing to actually enact caring in meaningful ways. 4.3 Leader 3: The Empathetic Humanist “Care for me means empathy. It means being human.” Leader 3 is a heterosexual Asian American woman in the 41-55 age range. She formerly worked in postsecondary education in the United States but has, at least for now, left the field. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood as lower-middle income. Her mother’s highest level of education was community college and her father’s highest level of education was university. Leader 3’s initial response to describing how she defines care centered on empathy and being human: I think care for me means empathy. It means being human. I think it’s taking a humanistic approach to life and considering your actions and your words and your values, and what’s important. I think it’s really hard to extract care for me personally from any work I do. Whatever context I feel that may be. 99 She explained that she had encountered tensions between her deep identity with and valuing of care and how that played out in the postsecondary workplace: I think for me, care, maybe I care too much. I do remember at one point in fact somebody told me that literally I think I brought an issue or something and I wanted to fix it. “Oh, you should just not care so much.” And I think I repeated that to somebody, to colleagues around me at the time, like I was told not to care so much when I brought this dilemma, this issue that I was asking… I wanted to ask for help to remedy to fix, to come to a solution or processes of what could be running a bit more smoothly. So, for me care I think is very important in the work that I do...I’m a naturally empathetic person and that’s just one of the top five personality traits about me, as much as I try to beat it down. She attempted to apply the caring less approach to work only (not at home), and found that it did help get more accomplished at times. And then I felt like when I kind of really tried to be a little bit more sort of “just get it done,” you know have that kind of attitude towards my work… so this is very much with work. I was like, I wasn’t like oh I want to lower my empathy at home. But at work I found that when I have less empathy, I could really be desensitized to things a little bit more. I could cope better because, like that person said, I think just don’t care as much. And then also, well, it’s certainly easier to get things done when you don’t care sometimes. However, Leader 3 felt that motherhood brought caring back to the foreground for her: Because there was a point in my life where I was like, oh I’m finally getting empathy out of my top five [priorities], you know what I mean? Like, I’m finally getting there. And then but I just naturally, and maybe it was motherhood or something, shifted back to that 100 very much part of my personality coming back into the forefront of everything I did…Just like that, empathy came back. And then outside of the higher ed profession on my sort of new pathway, you know, empathy is back in there for real. In terms of caring leadership, Leader 3 noted the importance of leaders cultivating care in the workplace, authentically demonstrating care (and that care must be understood in order for this to happen). However, there are many examples of leaders paying lip service to care without the actual actions of care. This also connects into concepts around leadership: hierarchy versus collective work. Presence is important for care – showing up and listening. As part of care, leaders should demonstrate a healthy way of working together. For Leader 3, follow through is another aspect of care. Leader 3’s mother had a lot to do with her understanding and perceptions of caring, growing up as the non-White only immigrants in a predominately White neighborhood, her mother demonstrated caring through charity work for people living in her former country. She also shared that her mother’s Buddhist beliefs informed her mother’s life and actions, and while she herself does not strictly identify as Buddhist, much of the philosophy, including caring about other people and helping others, has shaped who she is. Leader 3 expressed a lot of thoughtful concern about the underpinning norms of higher education work and how many workplaces do not make balancing out care of self and family with the job. And what does that mean for society in a broader context? It hinders the advancement of women into leadership positions, of course, but shifts in how work is approached – perhaps more collectively– could help alleviate the tensions women especially experience between being present and contributing well at work and being present for their families. 101 4.4 Leader 4: The Generous Mentor “I think of it [care] as being both an obligation and a privilege, something that is both offered with generosity but I think is received with generosity.” Leader 4 is a heterosexual/straight White woman in the 56+ age range practicing in Canada. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood as upper-middle income. Her mother’s highest level of education was Ph.D., and her father’s highest level of education was Doctor of Medicine. Leader 4’s describes care as relational and contextual. Familial caring is different than professional caring, and she centers on the roles she has in context: as spouse, mother, friend, daughter, etc. and colleague, supervisor. Leader 4 also emphasized the importance being able to receive care has for her: I think of it as being both an obligation and a privilege, something that is both offered with generosity but I think is received with generosity.” Leader 4 considers herself to be “embedded in a network of very precious relationships which involves care, not just my caring for other people, but people caring for me as well. Leader 4 noted that the level of caring she engages in at the workplace is not as intimate and longitudinal as family relationships, yet she still tries to “bring to work a concern for people's well-being in the workplace, a concern to try and foster their career and their success as whole people.” Listening to colleagues and supervisees plays an important part in engaging in caring leadership: “I think when you have a meeting about a decision that's difficult, sometimes you realize that you only saw one way out and yet there might be a different way in which you can achieve what they want and you can achieve it by getting your goals and their goals.” While the context of university policy framework and students sets parameters and limitations on caring, on 102 the other hand: “Even within limitations presented by university policy, you have a choice to be humane.” Leader 4 experienced examples of caring leadership from others in both a professional and personal context. Earlier in her career, she had a professional mentor who influenced her “to think about your life as something where you can offer things to other people.” Another (male) mentor set an example of caring leadership not only by facilitating opportunities for her, but also by example: “I think he modeled a way of being really respectful and reciprocal in his intellectual endeavors, and hugely generous to me, enormously generous in his mentorship.” Further, her perspective on caring, including in her professional life, was shaped by her parents growing up, especially her father. Her father, a mental health professional who himself suffered chronic pain, instilled in her: [A] determination not to ignore other people's needs or pain, that you wouldn't walk by and pretend you didn't notice. I think that for me, growing up in a family where that was a very open discussion was hugely influential on the person I've become and the person I try to be at work. My father was very clear that he didn’t think that people ignored pain because they were uncaring, but because they couldn't face that pain, that it was too much for them. That's something that I really have tried in my personal life but also in my life at work not to do. To say, I don't want to be that person that can't handle something and so therefore I turn away from it. Self-care plays another vital role in Leader 4’s experiences of care: You realize that unless you take time for yourself -- which I do pretty consciously, sort of everyday -- but there've been moments in which I realized it had to be more than that, that I needed to go for counseling, that I needed help and that I feel absolutely unashamed 103 of doing that. I think one really profound way of caring for someone is to say to them, “I think you need help.” As noted by other participants, Leader 4 described navigating the challenges of balancing motherhood and professional life: “You can map my career against my family life very carefully and it fits. There's definitely a sense that I waited to take certain roles until I was in a certain stage with my family.” She described some factors that had facilitated her career management and what made her career advancement possible: sharing work with colleague; financial support throughout her own education from her parents; outsourcing care of children as needed when they were younger; waiting until children were older before focusing on pursuit of career advancement. 4.5 Leader 5: The Problem-Solving Advocate “As a parent, I've become so much more acutely aware of how you can't separate caring for self from caring for others -- at least I can't, that I know the more I care for myself, the better I can care for my family.” Leader 5 is a self-identified queer Settler-Canadian of European ancestry woman in the 56+ age range, working in Canadian postsecondary education. She declined to state her family’s economic status in childhood. Her mother’s highest level of education was a master’s degree and her father’s highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree. Leader 5’s initial response to describing how she defines care both at home and at work involved intellectually finding approaches to solve problems and then using emotions to fine tune/assess how those solutions are working: As an instructor, I could be engaged or disengaged in the lives of my colleagues, but as administrator, there's a different responsibility around helping them to be the best people they could be and providing them the kind of support that they need to be the best people 104 they can be for our students -- also, demands care from me. Both at home and at work, it's an interesting blend of intellectually trying to discover what the best solutions are to help care for people, and then emotionally to stay in touch with how that's working and how to fine-tune it, and when to take it seriously personally and when not to take it too personally. Self-care is also an important part of Leader 5’s experience and perception of care: As a parent, I've become so much more acutely aware of how you can't separate caring for self from caring for others -- at least I can't, that I know the more I care for myself, the better I can care for my family. I also know that the better I care for my family in the world, the more that is self-care for me because it feels satisfying. It feels like I'm not thwarting myself. It feels like I'm accomplishing things. Otherwise, what's the point? In terms of caring leadership, listening and boundaries emerged as some of the ways she guides and embodies care for those working for her: Just listening to that person, helping them calm down, helping them then problem solve what we can and cannot do for the student as an educational institution, and then kind of patching that faculty member back up and saying, ‘You're doing your best. These are the limits. Now you need to go home and take care of your own family,’ that kind of thing. Leader 5’s example of a caring leader in her practice further surfaced the importance of appropriate boundaries while also emphasizing collegial support: She really clearly established with me at the beginning, ‘I'm not friends with the people I work with. We're not going to be going out for drinks after work. We're not going to be calling each other on the weekends, but during work time, we're here for each other. We are each other's team.’ There are things that we have encountered together as colleagues 105 that nobody else knows about because it's our business. We care for each other, not by getting too involved with each other outside of work but by in the context of work, acknowledging “That was a really tough one,” or “Wow, you pulled that one out of the fire,” “You did a great job there,” or “You're finally getting recognized for this thing I've been watching you do for years and years.” Leader 5’s background informed her perceptions and experiences of care: I grew up going to church, which for me did not mean very conservative or evangelical or anything like that. It was a very progressive, mainstream kind of church experience, but that was a big piece of my life -- was the idea that we're here for more than just ourselves. We're here for our community. I think that -- and my mother is a social worker and a therapist, and I think that also really influenced me in a lot of ways. I did a lot of study as an undergraduate in a religious context. I've always been really -- and also, I was in education, so I was really interested in development like child development but from the point of view of developing character or developing morality. When asked about aspects of her identity that in inform her approach to caring or how her demonstrating caring, especially in the workplace, affects how she’s perceived by others, Leader 5 responded: “That's a good question because I'm pretty straight-looking and I'm pretty straight-acting except that I don't really defer to men all that much, but that's probably more to do with my upbringing and the relationship I had with my parents than being queer.” Further, she noted that her own positionality and power allow her to advocate (and thus care for) for others who have less power: I act like a person with a lot of privilege. I speak like a person with a lot of privilege. I also really get what it's like to be marginalized. I'm in a position to speak on behalf of 106 people who have much less power than me, but I also own a little piece of the standpoint of the oppressed, and so I bring that knowledge to the conversation. It allows me to -- hmm, what does it allow me to do? Sometimes I can make arguments that might not be accessible to me otherwise. Sometimes, it keeps me tenacious when it would be easier to just give up. 4.6 Leader 6: The Moral Compass “Caring means doing the hard work, but doing it because it makes sense for the future of this faculty.” Leader 6 is a heterosexual/straight White Canadian in the 41-55 age range, working in Canadian postsecondary education. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood as upper-middle income. Her mother’s highest level of education was high school and her father’s highest level of education was completing one year of college. Leader 6’s initial response to describing how she defines care was multifaceted and spoke to her experience of gendered leadership in academe and how caring fit within those perceptions: It has different meanings for me, I think. When you think personally versus professionally, they do overlap in some way. Caring personally is different, but it comes over into the professional realm in caring but it also comes with being firm, fair, and consistent in the caring. I think these administrative jobs…it was a very male-dominated sector. I think there's more women moving into some of these jobs, which is great, but to be taken seriously, not so sure you want to show off your caring hat right off the bat because they will perceive you as probably weak or a pushover… I think care for a female becomes almost compromised because you want to care but you're put in an environment that maybe doesn't want you to care in the way you want to. It's not like helping a little kid with a scraped knee or bruise when they fall. 107 Caring in a professional context for Leader 6 meant “doing the right thing…caring means doing the hard work, but doing it because it makes sense for the future of this faculty.” Boundaries between professional and personal roles also are a central part of Leader 6’s perception and experience of care: She shared her biggest takeaway, which she believed could be helpful for many women: “Do not take business personally. This isn't personal. You got hired to do this job, to administrate a faculty. You're not here to be their friend. You're not here to be buddies. You're here to oversee these people.” In terms of caring leadership, Leader 6 connected caring and the difficult actions that sometimes accompany caring, with morality: “Caring, it's like it needs a new word. I don't know what the word is. Like it's caring -- I've always used moral compass as my word. You have to have a strong moral compass to want to do the right thing even though it's going to be hard to do.” By way of illustration of what she meant by “moral compass,” she mentioned feeling compelled to speak up and call attention to problems in institutional situations where others appeared afraid to do so: “…you're naming what people won't name typically…Why don't we want to name that? Why don't we want to name that the friction, the battling?” When Leader 6 described an example of a caring leader, she noted “It makes me sad, but I have to say they've all been men. I've had men bosses my whole career, and they have seen the potential in me and have encouraged me to do what I'm doing.” Leader 6’s background informed her perceptions and experiences of care: I think early on in my life, just who I was raised by my parents -- super caring people -- it came naturally to me.” 4.7 Leader 7: The Transparent Leader “If I’m not public about that struggle and I’m not public about what I change, how do we ever have hope for the people who don’t have the degree of power that I have?” 108 Leader 7 is a heterosexual/straight White Canadian in the 41-55 age range, working in Canadian postsecondary education. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood as middle income. Her mother’s highest level of education was high school and her father’s highest level of education was completing high school. Leader 7’s initial response to describing how she defines care was that care is contextual, based on her role in a given situation, although her first response when thinking about care would be in her role as a mother: “It's how I interact with my kids, how I'm supporting them, how that extends out to all of the networks that basically holding their potential and their current health and well-being at the very center of all my considerations.” However, Leader 7 also spoke of how her caring in the personal realm, as a mother, expands into the other spheres of her life, including her professional life and role as an academic leader, connecting her caring across the personal and professional spheres: “…that's where it bleeds -- from my family into my friends into relationships at work whether their relationships with me, direct reports or others, and then out into my community. I think that's the connection between the two.” In terms of caring leadership, Leader 7 connected thinking of care in connection to others and their well-being, and also the reward that caring for others brings to her: If I think about the other spheres where I operate, in an academic leadership position, I think care means a similar responsibility to think about others and to think about the well-being of others. It also tells me - maybe not responsibility - but also potential that with care also comes incredible reward both for me personally, but also hopefully for others. Like Leader 5, Leader 7 voiced what she believed to be her responsibility as a leader, with relative power, to be open about her struggles related to care and work/life balance: 109 If I'm not public about that struggle and I'm not public about what I change, how do we ever have hope for the people who don't have the degree of power that I have? I have an incredible amount of autonomy. I should just be able to change those things, and yet we know there's a lot of people who can't change those things. If they don't see me doing it, they won't have any hope for that. There's a role to play in making sure that we keep talking about it and we keep recognizing it. When Leader 7 described an example of a caring leader, she noted the attention she received from that person: When I think about it, it's because he indicated that he was interested in what I was doing. He indicated that he would support me, and he provided me with recognition and validation… I just felt like he paid attention. He listened. Little things. I never saw a cellphone in any of our meetings. There wasn't a cellphone on the table beside you. He didn't have a computer sitting around. He would just sit with a pad of paper and say, “What do you want to talk about today?” Just little signaling things like that, I think, are important to everyone. Leader 7’s connected care in her leadership practice with bringing her authentic self to her role: “I really love creativity and to have fun and to have color in my life and so I just loosened up…I would make jokes.” 4.8 Leader 8: The Compassionate Changemaker “I care enough to stop my faculty when they engage in certain discourses about certain students and how certain programs are for certain students and whatnot. That's care.” Leader 8 is a heterosexual/straight Black American in the 41-55 age range, working in United States postsecondary education. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood 110 as low income. Her mother’s highest level of education was high school and her father’s highest level of education was completing high school. Leader 8’s initial response to describing how she defines care focused on using her agency to help others: “Care means thinking about people other than yourself, but it also means that you take what you have and you're able to share it in such a way to help improve outcomes in the lives of other people.” She continued, explaining in more detail about how care and caring are defined by her in her experience: In my days when I was a researcher, I was in the care literature, and I would get upset because I thought that this stuff is just so boring, and I felt like it didn’t capture the care, particularly in the language Black women live care. And so when you think about the way in which Patricia Hill Collins talks about care, that's a whole political act. So I care enough -- and I'll give you an example. I was just talking with another colleague of mine who is a woman of color, too, I care enough to stop my faculty when they talk - when they engage in certain discourses about certain students and how certain programs are for certain students and whatnot. That's care…And I just think that if you care enough about people, you care about - you care about people's outcomes, you know? In terms of caring leadership, Leader 8 explained how she enacts care in tangible ways in her leadership approach: Sometimes it's important to just close the door with people…and just find out, you know, what's going on. Or to ask people, “How are your kids? How's your mother doing?” You know, I think it's a foundation for being a leader, particularly if you believe in servant 111 leadership. You have to be available to people. I think in some ways people have to know and to feel and to sense your empathy and to know that you're human. When Leader 8 described an example of a caring leader: She has such a way of being herself and being true to herself that she does not stray from that, you know, she is a straight shooter. You get it straight, no chaser, but one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. And so I learned to think creatively, outside the box, so that creative thinking building upon little can become much…You know, she really demonstrates just the power of the mind and the power of being - of questioning, because I think when you bring your voice to the table that's probably the best tool, particularly as a Black woman in leadership. That's the best tool I have right there is to be able to raise questions. Leader 8’s background informed her perceptions and experiences of care, connecting them to faith, family and community: I always reference this. It's one of my mother's favorite gospel songs, and it's a song that came out in the 70s. And she talked about ordinary people. And one of the lyrics in it is that little becomes much when you place it in the hands of God, and I really believe that no matter how little you have, you take what you have. You take your gifts. You take your craft. You take what you have, and you ensure that other people have positive life outcomes, that you're helping other people, you know? 4.9 Leader 9: The Inclusive Architect “How you work to optimize your space so that it is a space of care where people from a variety of backgrounds...all feel as though they are cared for, and in position to care for others.” Leader 9 is a heterosexual/straight African American in the 56+ age range, working in United States postsecondary education. She describes her family’s economic status in childhood 112 as Middle Income. Her mother’s highest level of education was earning a MBA and her father’s highest level of education was earning a JD. Leader 9’s initial response to describing how she defines care encompassed many facets, including physical care, mental health, financial soundness and “all the pieces that go along with cultural competence, and ensuring that the workplace, the learning space, the living space is welcoming and supportive, and positions people to do their best.” Leader 9 often referred to caring and enacting caring in ways that emphasized space: “You know, part of it, I think, as a leader, how you work to optimize your space, so that it is a space of care where people from a variety of backgrounds who may have very different definitions of care, all feel as though they are cared for, and in position to care for others.” She added a concept of “caring up” - caring for higher level administrators who, especially during the global pandemic, face considerable challenges: This is something that especially hit me during COVID time watching the leadership of our university and some of the challenges they've had. I think there's also a care piece in terms of caring up and how we relay to the people who are taking the hits for us, quite frankly, that their efforts and their sacrifices, and the wounds they're suffering are appreciated and that we care about them, and we care about the things they're doing for us. I look at it two ways. It's kind of caring down, so to speak. Then there's caring up just as there's mentoring down and mentoring up, I'd argue. In terms of caring leadership, Leader 9 indicated that a lot of the leaders who have demonstrated caring leadership in her career have been women who came from disadvantaged backgrounds or had struggled in some way—people who are not accustomed to entitlement: 113 I probably say that I've seen more of that caring leadership in underrepresented groups than I have in majority folks. That may be related to relative entitlement and the degree to which folks have had the struggle on their way up as well. I’ve probably seen it more in folks who are a little more established and maybe feel: “I've made it, so now I'm in a position where I can give back.” When Leader 9 described an example of a caring leader, she described a mentor she had in her doctoral program as an indelible example: He had a way and continues to have a way of engaging people and putting them in a position where they can do their very best. I can't think of anything more caring than that. He can do this with people who are -- they're going down for the last time; their boat is sinking. He will somehow inspire a person to find a way to plug the hole and keep the boat afloat. Not just keep the boat afloat but turn it into a beautiful ocean liner. It’s a very, very rare gift. It's a gift of caring, it's a gift of mentoring. He's just someone who genuinely cared and reached out to everybody and tried to help everybody to keep their boat afloat. It was words, deeds, it was promoting self-efficacy and teaching me how to fail and not be afraid; that the failure wasn't the end, that failure is really the beginning…His caring was -- I don't think he sees color. I really don't think he does. I don't think he sees gender. I think he just sees people. He sees them in a way that demonstrates he cares about them, and he believes in them and that they should believe in themselves. Leader 9 also commented on a performative and superficial kind of caring that she has noticed as postsecondary institutions in the United States have been called to come to terms with their racist roots and connections to historical oppression: 114 I would say there are some at my institution who would profess to care and to care about some of those same underrepresented folks in our community. Sometimes, it's done with a kind of what's in it for me angle. It's taking that very important caring piece and basically using it for personal gain. That, to me, is less authentic…sometimes people use the term woke and then the folks were awoke and you have a sense, they're going to stay awake and then there are other folks who, you know, they're going to go back to sleep. Their nap is not over. Leader 9’s background informed her perceptions and experiences of care, particularly in the context of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. She conveyed that she experienced prejudice and marginalization around expectations upon her to care, and also in the kind of caring she herself receives as a Black woman: My sense is that in my disciplinary community, I guess in higher education in general, that Black women like me are expected to be caring in terms of more kind of the personal caring, you know, “I care about your career life balance, I care about your health, I care about your mental health.” For my White, female colleagues, I think the focus is not just that but also more on “I care about you as an emerging scholar and I want to help you to nurture your career.” 4.10 Summary In keeping with the idiographic approach to the research, this chapter included an opportunity to be introduced individually to the leaders who participated in the study. The participants shared their perspectives on what care meant to them, how it informs their leadership practices, examples of how care connects to their identities and why it is important to them. The 115 summaries provided contribute to a more holistic, person-centered understanding of the experiences being shared. 116 She catches you Can you really be a good leader if you don’t know what it is to live as a human being? What about that, what if we go there? Do I want to outsource, like having a nanny rear my kid? Do I want to be the one helping her learn and grow? I just needed to slow down. There was no way to slow down. I would know she’s talking and I’m not listening. That feels awful. And then, she catches you not listening. And I’m like oh my gosh that’s like in the movies or on TV You see that happening and you’re like, oh my gosh I’m not perfect now! How did I live like that? What were the things that I was neglecting? To rise to leadership…the care, You may not even realize you’re neglecting. Or you do, and then hopefully make the course correct— whatever than means for you, Right? I hope. Otherwise, something suffers. (Leader 3: The Empathetic Humanist) 117 Chapter 5: Cross-Case Themes from the Study This chapter introduces an overview of the themes identified though the analysis of participants’ interview data. Each superordinate theme is then taken in turn and illustrated using verbatim quotes from participants’ transcripts in order to demonstrate an emerging interpretation. The findings have been divided into five overarching categories, or superordinate themes, that were clearly important to the participants’ experiences of care. Under the umbrella of superordinate themes are sub-themes; the contribution of participants to each sub-theme varied. The five superordinate themes and corresponding sub themes are included in the table below: Table 4 Summary of Superordinate Themes and Related Sub-Themes Superordinate Themes Sub-Themes 5.1 Authenticity as a Caring Leader • Alignment with Identity (faith, culture, etc.) • Integrity (“calling people out,” not turning away from others’ pain) • Advocacy (drawing from experiences of marginalization and advocating for others) 5.2 Performative Caring and Inequities of Care Encountered by Racialized Women • Additional Burdens of Care Expected of Women of Color • Leaders Wielding Performative Care Behaviors as a Tool of Manipulation • Performative Allyship Regarding Care of Marginalized People • Inadequate Care for Professional Growth Extended to Racialized Women in Academe 5.3 Caring for Oneself • What is Caring for Oneself? • Self-Neglect and Self-Harm in “The Careless Institution” 5.4 Caring Identities as Mothers and Effects on Career Trajectories • Motherhood Informing Caring Leadership • Caring Responsibilities of Parenting Affecting Leadership Trajectory 5.5 Boundaries and Shielding as an Aspect of Care • Boundaries Between Work and Professional Lives • Boundaries Within the Workplace 118 5.1 Superordinate Theme 1: Authenticity as a Caring Leader. The superordinate theme, Authenticity as a caring leader, derived from participants’ recurring accounts of how consideration and demonstration of care in their leadership practices are part of their true, congruent selves. This superordinate theme surfaced in three subordinate themes: • Alignment with Identity: caring in leadership strongly connected to qualities such as faith, culture, etc. • Integrity: “calling people out” and not turning away from others’ pain. • Advocacy: experiencing marginalization and advocating for others. It’s worth noting that since authenticity is such a vital, intrinsic value for participants, aspects of authenticity also appear within other superordinate themes (Performative Caring and Inequities of Care Encountered by Racialized Women could be viewed as a “mirage” of authenticity, for instance). In the Authenticity as a Caring Leader superordinate theme, I focus on the three primary ways authenticity surfaced in relation to their leadership practices. 5.1.1 Alignment with Identity For a number of participants, alignment with their identity as a caring leader has to do with aspects of faith, culture and other qualities that comprise their sense of self-identity. Leader 1 described her relationship with caring and its importance to her work in terms of her cultural background: “I think because I'm Asian and our thing was always about this…don't just think about yourself. Think about others too. It's always about getting something done as a team, as a unit.” She connected this collectivist perspective to her focus within her leadership practice: “I'm not trying to lead because I want to be ‘the leader.’ But if I see a need…let's just try to get people on board rather than, ‘I want to be the one leading this.’” For Leader 1, caring in 119 leadership means focusing on what will benefit the group or community rather than striving for a leadership position for the sake of prestige or recognition. Leader 3 reflected on her upbringing and connected it to her perspectives on care as a human and as an educational leader: “a lot of Buddhist philosophy/religion is about caring about other people and giving and helping, it’s very much give, give, give. I feel like that naturally I was always thinking about other people.” For Leader 3, her upbringing in a Buddhist household centered caring in a way that she then brought with her to her leadership by focusing on respect: “it’s related to thinking of others and sort of wanting to be respectful. So, for me there is that respect which is…linked to care, because you’re respecting people.” Leader 8 connected her perspective on caring leadership to her family and faith, citing one of her mother’s favorite gospel songs about ordinary people taking what they have, even if it seems little, “little becomes much when you place it in the hands of God.” She cited that as in influence on her believe that “Care means thinking about people other than yourself, but it also means that you take what you have and you're able to share it in such a way to help improve outcomes in the lives of other people.” For Leader 8, caring leadership involves using her gifts as connected to her family’s perspective on faith and community. Leader 5’s caring leadership also aligned with her faith and a deep sense of her identity. She explained: “I grew up going to church…a very progressive, mainstream kind of church experience, that was a big piece of my life…the idea that we're here for more than just ourselves. We're here for our community.” She noted that growing up in that environment made her interested in the development of feminist morality, which included, although did not specifically focus, on care – and that it contributed to her expanding her view of care beyond her direct inner circle to the broader world, including her leadership practice. 120 5.1.2 Integrity A second subtheme of authenticity as a caring leader surfaced as integrity, meaning both “being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness” and “the state of being whole and undivided” (Oxford University Press, n.d.). The term arose because it seemed to encompass two significant aspects of care in leadership that participants noted as important to them: not turning away from others’ pain, and care enacted through holding people accountable for their actions. Leader 4 described how her experiences with her father, who experienced chronic pain, and a close friend who endured breast cancer, emphasized the importance of not turning away from others’ pain: He talked extensively and really openly about not ignoring pain…one of the things that he really emphasized and I found really connected me with my friend…the person who started the breast cancer group…was that both of them shared a determination not to ignore other people's needs or pain, that you wouldn't walk by and pretend you didn't notice. Leader 4 applies the lessons she learned from her family and personal friendships to her leadership role in academe. She shared that she does not shy away from attending to difficult circumstances in her work or difficult emotions expressed by others in her job, and she views that as something that she brings to her practice of caring leadership. Leader 8 described holding people to account for their actions and holding them to standards of conduct as a form of care, noting that she stopped her faculty when they started to engage in certain discourses that she viewed as disrespectful towards students: “That's care. I 121 care enough to call you out on your shit because if I don’t care then obviously nobody else is doing the caring.” For Leader 8, caring leadership involves integrity; care is demonstrated through using her leadership position and the power it carries with it to stop disrespectful discourses, and to hold her faculty and colleagues accountable to a higher standard. Her statement “if I don’t care then obviously nobody else is doing the caring” reinforces the leadership role these actions can involve—she cares enough to demonstrate the courage necessary to disrupt patterns and cycles of negative stereotyping she encounters in her workplace. Leader 6 also connected caring and the difficult actions that sometimes accompany caring with integrity and holding people accountable: You’ve got to persevere even though it's going to be hard, because when you’re buckling down or questioning some people, what I noticed is…instructors would thank us after. “Thanks for doing that. Nobody else did. Nobody challenged that person,” or “nobody held them to account.” That I found quite interesting. I was struck by the courage and willingness to disrupt the status quo inherent in the caring leadership actions described in these accounts. 5.1.3 Advocacy Using one’s position of power to advocate for others arose as a subtheme of participants’ authenticity as caring leaders. Often drawing from their own experiences of discrimination or oppression, a number of them shared experiences where they conveyed how their own experiences informed their caring actions as leaders. As noted in her introduction, Leader 5 explained that while she behaves like a person who possesses considerable privilege, she also draws from her experiences of personal marginalization to advocate for “people who have much 122 less power than me,” and for motivation to “be tenacious when it would be easier to just give up.” Having encountered her own experiences of oppression as a queer person, Leader 5 leveraged those experiences to advocate for others who are being marginalized. She also noted her caring leadership advocating for others, enhances her tenacity to keep working for positive change when the going is difficult and she meets with resistance. Leader 9 indicated that a lot of the leaders who have demonstrated caring leadership in her career have been women who came from disadvantaged backgrounds or had struggled in some way—people who are not accustomed to entitlement: They recognize that there's a struggle and that, you know, even the best scholar, the best student, the best staff member may not be successful if you don't, from time to time, show them a little care and get them through the rough edges… I've seen are people who had, at some point probably had some care given to them that got them over a hurdle. Then, I guess, viewed themselves in some way as having to pay it forward and ultimately help the next person along. For Leader 9, advocacy for others in her leadership role is a way she can “give back” for the support she herself has received. She notes that a wide range of people around her – students, faculty and staff – can need extra care from her as a leader in order to move through difficult phases, and that most successful leaders have received care that helped them overcome obstacles to allow them to be where they are. Leader 7 realized her leadership role gave her the ability and responsibility to speak up for other people who had not felt they could do so in regards to her workplace’s habit of scheduling meetings that were ill-timed for those with parenting duties: 123 One thing I found incredibly difficult, particularly when my children were young, was the scheduling of meetings that impacted daycare drop-offs, school pickups, children's activities. There was a thing I loved to go to every fall with my kids…There was something else scheduled and I didn’t go. There was some meeting and it just felt too awkward to say, “Please change that meeting because I want to go to this thing…” and I didn't go. I was really upset about it. I thought, “This is crazy. I've got a great job and I get to do lots of stuff,” but it was actually just that it really mattered to me. It mattered to me about my family, and I hadn't spoken up. I was in charge of my assistant. I just didn't tell him to change the meeting. Why? Then I went to a forum where some of the junior female faculty members…were talking to me and I asked them what some of their biggest issues were. They were saying -- many of them were saying the scheduling thing. I said, “You're right. I failed you this week because we're not talking about this enough and I didn't do something here with all of the capacity I have.” I need to be more public about those. I need to ask every time, “When are we scheduling those department meetings? Are they at 8:30 a.m.? Why? Why can't they be at 10:00?” Leader 7 recognized her own unnecessarily conflictual experience between work and family care commitments and her consequential disappointment were not unique to her; she saw that having been elevated to an academic leadership role, she was in a position to make a difference to others by changing the way some things were done in order to reduce the tensions between professional expectations and family care responsibilities. Speaking up for others and making changes to the way things are done was an important aspect of care in her leadership practice. Caring, as demonstrated in differing ways, comprised an important facet of how participants saw their work as leaders connecting to their authentic selves. Whether it was the 124 aspects of their identity that informed how they had come to perceive care and express it in their work, the courage demonstrated via caring enough to confront and manage difficult situations on the job, or their strong sense of caring as expressed as advocacy for others in the workplace, it was clear that deep connection to who they are as people informs the infusion of care into their leadership work. 5.2 Superordinate Theme 2: Performative Caring and Inequities of Care Encountered by Racialized Women In contrast to the superordinate theme of Authenticity, examples of inauthentic caring arose in interviews with racialized participants, leading to the theme Performative Caring and Inequities of Care Encountered by Racialized Women. Stemming from participants’ accounts of how they experienced performative care, this superordinate theme appeared in the subthemes of the experiences that participants shared regarding other leaders wielding performative care behaviors as a tool of manipulation, institutions performing caring allyship towards marginalized people, inadequate care for professional growth extended to racialized women, and how some of the participants in my study experienced additional expectations of care placed upon them as women of color in academe. 5.2.1 Additional Burdens of Care Expected of Women of Color Leader 9 reflected on the double-bind faculty and academic leaders of color encounter, both in the sense that they are sought out as mentors by students of color when career advancement in academia does not value student advising and mentorship in the same way it does other activities, such as publishing and securing grants. I think one of the biggest challenges that I've had throughout my career is balancing the needs of those individuals against what I know I need to do to keep my own career on 125 track, to keep the grants flowing, to keep the papers pumping out. At the same time, there are these protégés. This next generation that's coming along that you want to care for because you don't want the next generation to have to go through the same sort of things that you went through as you came through. I would say that's been one of my biggest challenges in terms of care. It doesn't get any easier or different as you go further and further up the pipeline…In my heart of hearts, I want to be there for every student of color, who aspires to get into and stay… I want to be able to help every single one of them and show that I care. At the same time, if I do that, I may not hit my milestones and therefore not be in a leadership position where I have money and influence and power and have the potential to rather than help one student at a time, help more students. That's a big challenge…our students, quite frankly, are dealing with these challenges not just at the institution, but they're dealing with it out in the community too. There's a double whammy but it's a part of care that I think is somewhat unique to underrepresented faculty who feel obligated - obligated is too strong a word - who want to give back and support other folks who are trying to get into the academy…We expect faculty to be mentors. We don't really define what a mentor is, and we certainly don't attach any value to being a good mentor, nor do we attach any punishment, for people who are lousy mentors. I hate to say it but when you look across the spectrum of people who “do well,” it's not uncommon that they're really crappy mentors, because they take care of number one. They don't worry so much about caring for the other folks around them. I certainly don't want my students who aspire to be number one in their field, to do that at the expense of being caring people who help others. A lot of it's about modeling the behavior 126 and hoping that by modeling the behavior, you're raising the next generation of scholars [of all identities] who are going to be thoughtful and caring and good people. Leader 9 highlights the tension between the work that is valued versus the work that is not – mentoring and advising – and the tensions that leaders from racialized groups often experience between wanting to support the inclusion and professional growth of historically excluded populations while doing so potentially undermines their own professional advancement or even security – doing well is often at the expense of caring for others. It also reaffirms the relegation of gendered caring activities to a devalued status that may reify the very marginalization and oppression that many institutions claim to be interested in undoing. She also notes that modeling caring behaviors is an approach she uses to hopefully instill similar values in up-and-coming generations of scholars and administrators. 5.2.2 Leaders Wielding Performative Care Behaviors as a Tool of Manipulation On the other hand, Leader 2 described an example of a former colleague at a previous institution who was not very competent in many ways, but who used the appearance of caring to manipulate other executives and retain networking contacts in order to advance her leadership career: She was this woman who was really not the sharpest knife on the block, right...she was a vice president, because she'd been there forever. But she had this really bizarre style of leadership. She was very coy and very, like, sweet and if you just saw her kind of from a network perspective, she had a kind of caring relationship with the executives. But it was very manipulative, and you could see that she knew exactly what she was doing. And it could be that even that word “manipulate” is gendered, potentially. 127 Recounting her former colleague’s manipulative use of a caring demeanor with distaste, Leader 2 simultaneously highlighted the possibility that gendered expectations regarding leadership impacted this person’s approach to her career advancement. She also expressed discomfort with the idea of leveraging that kind of strategy for herself, while observing that it yielded the results—career advancement—that her former colleague sought. Leader 8’s leadership practice, and its placement of care as a central value, was affected by a disingenuous example of caring leadership earlier in her career: One of the main emphases that motivated me to explore higher ed leadership—I worked under an awful dean. She was manipulative. She was horribly racist, and everybody knew it, and nobody cared enough to call her out on her stuff because status quo worked for everybody else. And she couldn’t keep people of color on faculty because the things that she did were so horrible and so just blatantly racist. And I look at - she had one occasion where one of the chairs said, “You know, you brought in all these new faculty, and they have children.” And so she had this day where she…had the faculty with young kids bring their kids over…I just stopped and I looked and I was like, “This is such an artificial showing of caring about people, because tomorrow when the balloons are all popped and the people come and pick up this inflatable bouncy house, she's going to go back to just being cruel and evil.” I believe in taking the bad and flipping it, and that right there, I think in many ways, was a motivation, and it showed me that care is important as a leader. Leader 8’s negative experience of a leader using performative and insincere care as a form of manipulation fueled her own path toward leadership. It also highlighted to her the importance of care in leadership, which informed her leadership practice. Her commitment to prioritizing care 128 was striking, as her reaction to inauthentic caring propelled her forward to try and make a positive difference to counteract the negative example she experienced. Leader 8 explained that she works to demonstrate authentic caring leadership in a number of ways. For instance, she takes time to connect on a personal level with those she supervises, privately checking in on things that matter to them (the health of a family member, how their children are faring, etc.). She also demonstrates authentic caring by advocating on their behalf to others in the university administration and navigating difficult political institutional situations to help ensure that those under her leadership are getting the resources that they need to do their work. These examples differ from the performative displays of ultimately meaningless care; in some instances, the care is rooted in private interactions, while in others the caring actions carry over into the public, political sphere of the institution – with the goal of actively preserving or improving the situations of those who Leader 8 is representing. 5.2.3 Performative Allyship Regarding Care of Marginalized People During our interview, Leader 2 expressed pronounced frustration at the performative theater of care as relates to racialized people at an institution at which she once worked: I was just, oh my God, like, again, it was kind of where we were 20 to 30 years ago with race in general…they don't feel authentic to me, those conversations…trust me, nobody in that department feels that they're caring for anybody else. And it's supposed to be a department that cares for the people. Leader 2’s exasperation at the inauthentic care exhibited at that workplace related to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion was palpable. Leader 9 also commented on a performative and superficial kind of caring that she has noticed as postsecondary institutions have also been called to come to terms with their 129 connections to historical oppression and biased practices: “Sometimes, it's done with a kind of ‘what's in it for me?’ angle. It's taking that very important caring piece and basically using it for personal gain.” Rather than engaging authentically in the difficult, reflexive work of facing and addressing the injustices that employees and students of color experience, Leader 9 observes that a number of leaders are driven by self-interest and politically expedient optics. Leader 9’s account of the lip service paid to caring for underrepresented people has come to be called performative allyship, which refers to someone from a nonmarginalized group “professing support and solidarity with a marginalized group, but in a way that is not helpful. Worse yet, the allyship is done in a way that may actually be harmful to ‘the cause.’ The ‘ally’ is motivated by some type of reward” (Kalina, 2020, p. 479), making the act inauthentic and transactional. 5.2.4 Inadequate Care for Professional Growth Extended to Racialized Women in Academe Leader 2 expressed frustration at her lack of clarity and self-perceived lack of career achievement (despite holding a leadership position). She highlighted how the struggles of women of color she looked up to meant that they also were less able to facilitate her career growth, and how basic survival needs superseded longer-term thinking regarding their professional trajectories, and her own career. I think about every five years, I kind of find myself sort of in this place where I'm kind of unhappy about my circumstances…it's really hard for me to advocate for myself. So, I find myself sort of in this place that I'm stuck. I don't know what my five, or 10-year goal is, honestly. 130 Leader 2 noted that she had not had mentoring around strategic career development and that she and her role models, who were also “women of color who came up scrappy” did not have the luxury of engaging in a lot of long-term career planning: “I'm trying to get a job like, tomorrow, to support my family. So having a five, or 10-year goal is foreign to me even still.” The precarity that Leader 2 describes and its tensions with career planning reminded me of observations made by Ivancheva et al. (2019) Cardozo (2017) regarding the particular precarity women – especially women of color – face in their career experiences within the neoliberal, prestige economy of the college and university. Leader 9 observed that expectations around how Black women are expected to care within academe—and the care they in turn receive—are not in keeping with the care their White counterparts receive for career development. She expressed frustration and anger that while she received care from other professionals as regards her physical and mental well-being, that the care she received did not extend to her professional development and opportunities in the same way that she witnessed it being extended to her White counterparts: For my White, female colleagues, I think the focus is not just that but also more on “I care about you as an emerging scholar and I want to help you to nurture your career.” The professional part of caring, I think, has been less expected of me than it has been of my White female colleagues. That makes me angry, because I think it comes from a place of not respecting the professional judgment of people who have my identity. And to be honest, that's not just about White men not respecting my professional judgment, it's also about White women not respecting my professional judgment, and that piece probably hurts more than others. 131 The experiences shared by Leader 2 and Leader 9 highlight the fraught aspects caring can take for racialized women when it comes to fostering their career growth. Leader 9’s account illuminates the obstacles she encountered with racism enacted by White colleagues; it calls attention to how vital it is that further research be conducted to understand the tacit expectations of professional mentorship for women of color and to develop interventions to address racist assumptions and consequential actions by White colleagues. Her experience has communicated to her that while caring is an aspect of her role as a leader, that care is not expected to encompass scholarly and professional development in the same way that she has observed it does with her White counterparts. It also has painfully signaled that her professional judgement is not valued within the institutions in the same way as that of her White counterparts, and connects into long-standing, broader racist discourses (Chance, 2022; Erskine et al., 2021; Gasman & De Gruyter, 2022; Gutiérrez et al. 2012; Hartlep & Ball, 2020; Ortega et al., 2023). 5.3 Superordinate Theme 3: Caring for oneself Caring for oneself surfaced in all of the participants’ discussions regarding care. Each had different perspectives on what self-care meant and what it looked like for them. Some discussed the challenges they had encountered in their efforts to engage in greater self-care; others connected self-care closely to caring for others. Still others reflected on the importance of self-care to their successful navigation of the challenges presented by their professional contexts. 5.3.1 What is Caring for Oneself? Leader 1’s initial response to describing how she defines care centered on prioritizing self-care, while also repeatedly emphasizing that prioritizing self-care can be difficult: For a long time, I thought caring meant just like caring of other people but not really yourself. …A lot of people say, “But you've got to make time for yourself,” and it's like 132 this different kind of terminology, but never really defined. Care is about doing what sort of -- it's the good outcome for yourself. Not necessarily anything easy. It can be hard, but something that will take care of yourself either financially, physically, mentally or emotionally or spiritually…It's not just about the immediate thing. There's a lot of different definitions of care. For me self-care, I guess, it's really reflecting back into yourself and thinking: “What's the best that I can do for myself?” It's not necessarily easy. Leader 1 seemed to be working through what care for herself means in different ways, while acknowledging that it means doing the best she can for herself at a particular juncture, and that it may not be something with immediate results. Caring, and the practice of caring, had also been centered outwardly for Leader 2, on others rather than herself. But she is making efforts (though she was describing it as difficult) to learn self-care. I think I'm also to my own detriment, I'm not including myself in that aspect of care. But I think I'm realizing it as I'm getting older: ‘What did you do this week for you?’ Well, I eat crackers. No, that’s not good. Okay. Um, so yeah so, it's really hard…I want to be good or helpful person, but I don't transfer that to myself. Leader 3 had stepped away from working in higher education leadership, and a part of the impetus for this was care for her family and for herself. She discussed slowing down and reflecting as central to her approach: I mean there is the obvious self-care, right? You know, like make sure you’re eating properly, make sure you’re taking time for yourself. So maybe that means getting a massage or doing your yoga. The stuff that everyone talks about. Oh self-care, self-care. Maybe you need to go talk to somebody. All of that is part of the umbrella of like obvious 133 self-care. But I also feel like self-care is way more than that. I think it’s also taking time to be reflective, and I don’t think people talk about that. Because you can just be doing all that stuff and it just is like not sinking in. It’s like, icing and just kind of patching things up. Oh, and then the hole reappears again and we patch it up. It’s like, I can’t afford five hours of massage every day. I probably could use it. But I think it’s about being reflective and really getting to the root of any ailments, issues, barriers, bumps…I feel like the only way to figure that out is taking the time…so for me it’s slowing down immensely because just left to my own devices I’m very productive and goal-oriented. Leader 3 noted that slowing down contrasted with her normal drive to be productive and ambitious; qualities that are considered admirable in a leadership context. For Leader 5, care of self is intrinsically connected to caring for others. She explained: I know the more I care for myself, the better I can care for my family. I also know that the better I care for my family in the world, the more that is self-care for me because it feels satisfying…It's valuable to distinguish caring for yourself and caring for other people because they give you different views into caring, but when they get set up as though they're in opposition, you get into trouble, I think. I've never thought that until this moment, but--I mean, I never articulated that, but I do think it’s true. She cautions against framing care of self as in opposition to care for others and derives meaning and a sense of self-care from the holistic experiencing of caring. Leader 7 connected her authenticity as a leader and incorporating her genuine self into her leadership practice as a form of self-care: I realized that there's core parts of my personality that make me really happy to make sure that those are visible, and I think those are all the layers for people. Some of the things 134 that I really like I decided, do you know what, I'm going to let them see that.…I believe exercise makes me happier. I think it's really important for everyone and I just started to be pretty open about that…I wear sneakers every day. As a result, I have a better connection with many people. Some that still doesn't resonate with, but I'm more comfortable so I feel like I'm happier in the job. For Leader 7, honoring her sense of self within her job is a form of self-caring has allowed her to find joy in her work and to cultivate connections with many of her direct reports. Leader 8 also noted that caring for oneself can be challenging due to the demands of the leadership role, but music, exercise, family and personal connections, and a practice of faith are all part of her self-care strategy: I play my piano when I'm so inspired or when the arthritis in my thumb isn't flaring up…I try and stay in touch with the folks that matter most to me. So, my mom and my aunt, we text every single day with these long conversations…And I pray, you know. When I'm out on my walks…I have good Jesus time, you know? I'll pull up a - YouTube is fabulous. YouTube is my friend these days. I'll pull up one of my internet pastor. I'll watch videos from my church…or I'll just pick one artist that I will play the entire week. But it's the little things that refresh and recharge your soul. Two weeks ago, I just spent the evening looking at Zora Neale Hurston quotes. I love Zora. Those are the things that make me feel good. And I think in these times I just have to identify those and stop and just take some of those things in as opposed to just letting all this cave in on me. Faith, connection to the people to matter to her, and creativity all play a role in Leader 8’s cultivation of self-care. Caring for oneself for Leader 8 referenced tapping into “the things that 135 make me feel good” as an antidote to the considerable complexities and demands intrinsic to academic leadership. Leader 4’s experience of self-care involved being receptive to feedback from others that she needed care: I think one really profound way of caring for someone is to say to them, “I think you need help.” I've always said if someone in my life says that to me, I will listen because sometimes you don't know when you need help. It's like having a very high fever. You don't perceive it yourself. You often perceive that you're very cold when actually you are very, very hot so I think if somebody says to me, “You need help,” then that's something you might perceive yourself but it also may be something that someone perceives for you. I think that a really important thing in my life has been at times and no sense of -- I don't know -- shame or difficulty, but I that I have gone and seen a couple of really, really great counselors and asked for their help and have found that was incredibly helpful to me and enabled me to be strong for my family and to cope at work in ways that I could not have done otherwise. For Leader 4, being receptive to hearing from others that she needed care, and then seeking out and receiving care, has been significant for her well-being. Engaging in the self-care of getting support allowed her to function in her personal and professional realms in ways she believes would not otherwise have been possible. I noted that she remarked on the fact that she did so “without self-reproach”; this hinted to me at another subtheme that surfaced during my research—the valorization of self-neglect or even self-harm that can occur in academic leadership within the “careless institution.” 5.3.3 Self-Neglect and Self-Harm in “The Careless Institution” 136 A sub-theme that arose within some interviews related to valorization of self-neglect or even self-harming amongst leaders within “the careless institution,” which suggested that part of the culture may extend beyond assumptions that leaders were assumed to have a lack of care responsibilities—or Tronto’s “privileged irresponsibility”—to the valorization of self-neglect or even self-harm in the service of academic leadership. Leader 6 observed that self-neglect and the damage it brings about is a significant issue in her work experience as leaders are sucked into the overwhelming demands and associated stress of their institutional roles: I have a life and I'm going to live my life outside that job, but I see too many people, it takes over. I noticed…the deans and associate deans--the physical toll it takes on people, the amount of stress and how it shows up physiologically in their bodies. We've had people hospitalized from pneumonia, from undiagnosed medical like “Here, take this strong antibiotic, see if it'll kill it,” -- all range of things. You could see that the stress pieces from the work is causing some of this because they all notice, and we all do. However, the unsustainability of this valorization of self-neglect or self-damage is also apparent. Leader 9 was hopeful that, as the realm of higher education changes, and the diversity of the people working in it expands, the culture of self-harm for the sake of proving oneself worthy in unhealthy ways in academe would diminish: These fields are increasingly female, they're increasingly Brown and Black. They're increasingly folks who are first generation who have a different -- when we think of the entitlements and the like -- that piece isn't there. I do think the demographic shift…it's going to have an impact; I think it's going to make a difference. It will take a while for that to trickle up to leadership. This is kind of a groundswell. It's a grassroots situation. I 137 think eventually, it may take a couple of generations. I think eventually, we will see a shift. I also think, honestly…it's going to be harder to retain people and to retain the good people who are more thoughtful, smart and creative. They're not going to stay in higher ed if we continue down the road of, you know, “I've got more lumps than you do.” “Look, I've got a gaping wound.” “Well, wow, I hacked off my own arm.” Who wins, doing that kind of foolishness? We're going to lose the good people that we need to keep academia going, so I think it'll change—maybe not in my career, but hopefully. Self-care, in various forms, was clearly valued by participants and was connected to their sense of meaning; a number of them also expressed that they found engaging in forms of self-care to be challenging. In addition to challenges expressed by some participants around self-care, concerns regarding self-neglect and the valorization self-neglect or self-wounding associated with achievement in higher education surfaced; the eventual unsustainability of this culture of self-neglect or self-harm for the sake of accomplishment was also raised. 5.4 Superordinate Theme 4: Caring Identity as Mothers and its Effects on Career Trajectories A number of participants’ first responses when asked about their definitions, experiences and values around care immediately spoke of care in relation to motherhood (interestingly, none of the participants referenced eldercare). In some instances, that connected to their approach to leadership practice, and in others it connected to care’s impacts on their career choices and trajectories. 5.4.1 Motherhood Informing Caring Leadership Leader 7 commented: 138 In an academic leadership position, I think care means a responsibility to think about others and the well-being of others…where care for me as a mother and care for me as an academic leader intersect is the care for others around me generally, and that’s where it bleeds—from my family into my friends, into relationships at work, whether direct reports or others, and then out into my community. Leader 7’s perception of caring started with her role as a mother and then threaded through other roles and people in her life, outward to her professional leadership practice. Leader 5’s sense of care also began within her sense of self as a mother and radiated outward from her children to her partner and home life and then further onward to her professional world as a leader. I'm the mother of one and the stepmother of two, and so those are the most immediate beings that really demand my care and on better days request it politely, but most days demand it. I have a lot of thoughts about caring in the context of a blended family with three young people who are teens and preteens, and caring for your partner in that context, and maintaining caring relationships with the children's other parents, and how that kind of ebbs and flows. That's kind of what care encompasses in my home life. At work…it has really surprised me. It shouldn't have surprised me, but I have found myself surprised by how much caretaking is involved in supervising my lovely instructors and staff. Care for Leader 5, as with many participants, begins from the personal sphere and then ripples outward into her public, professional life, recognizing that the humans in her workplace also are in need of care in their own context. 139 Leader 2’s definition of care at the very start of our interview centered on her role as a mother and how she tries to teach caring. Care is helping people that you love, family, children, your relatives, people at work, sort of facilitating things to make them go more smoothly…and I wonder if it's just me, or if it’s all women, but I feel like I always want to make a situation better than what it was. And it's funny because when I talk to my daughter, she doesn't get it, because I try really hard not to put these gender roles on to them, right? So, when I tell her she's like “what do you mean?” You know…don’t pick on your sister…leave the place better than when you got there. And that's being, I think, part of who I am and I think it took me a really long time to realize that's just really central. And so it kind of affects a whole lot of different aspects of my life, personal and professional. Like Leader 7 and Leader 5, Leader 2’s relationship with caring is centered on her role as a mother, and expands outward. Leader 4 recognized that, as a mother, she had been able to afford child care, which then allowed her to pursue career opportunities she otherwise would not have been able to. In her current leadership role, she felt it was important for her to try to expand opportunities for other parents by fundraising for enhanced childcare at her institution: I realize that my career had been made possible by good childcare, so I was part of a team that fundraised for the new infant and toddler childcare center…. It's not enough, but that was something that I did in early career when I had children of my own, when I realized that there was no infant childcare center…and yet our maternity leave policy was 18 weeks at the time. What were you to do with this infant? You’ve got daycare started at two years old. I saw this gap and I thought I can't solve this for myself but I can solve it 140 for other people. I really tried to be looking, kind of reaching behind me and saying, “Okay. You're coming after me and I'll try and make this path easier for you.” Her experience as a mother—and the associated challenges she had encountered balancing parenting responsibilities of young children with her desire to advance in her career—contributed to Leader 4’s awareness of, and empathy for, other parents working in academe, and led to her advocacy of childcare resources for them. 5.4.2 Caring Responsibilities of Parenting Affecting Leadership Trajectory While she was still active in higher education and its leadership, Leader 4 described navigating the challenges of balancing motherhood and academic leadership trajectory: You can map my career against my family life very carefully and it fits. There’s definitely a sense that I waited to take certain roles until I was in a certain stage with my family.” She further noted that she had been able to leverage her position of privilege to outsource some childcare responsibilities: Ever since I've had this job, my husband and I made that decision. We said we're working really, really hard. We're going to pay for help and we're going to pay for--it has been childcare help. I had excellent, excellent childcare. We've paid for domestic help. We've paid for a person who has helped us to renovate our house. We haven't tried to be all things, but that is--I am very aware that is a privilege. Leader 4 reflected on the outsourcing of care responsibilities—including childcare—she had opted for in order to make pursuing her academic leadership goals possible, and the privilege she was able to draw upon in order to delegate caring for her children and for her home. 141 Leader 1 reflected on the bounded aspirations she and other women she has known have had for leadership, noting how her responsibilities as a mother had required a great deal of her time and energy during her child-bearing years: Where your child bearing years are…that's where it hits, while men don't have that - women feel more compelled that they have to withdraw from the workplace, while the men stay. I mean that's part of it too; that's how they elevate themselves. But I think part of what makes a great leader is having those caring characteristics, which is missing …they can say that, “Yeah. We empathize with you,” but until you walk in their shoes, you have no idea. I am stereotyping but those people in power, men--do they go home? Do they have to bathe their children, do they have to put them to sleep, do they have to— just in terms of the energy level that they have to expend—would they be able to do what they're supposed to be doing if they were in the same shoes? It was with a sense of frustration that Leader 1 noted both the gendered expectations leading women to withdraw or scale down their academic leadership aspirations, and the lack of understanding about the requirements needed for caring demonstrated by men who remained in leadership positions without the same hands-on expectations of child care. Leader 3 explained her decision to leave her leadership role—and academe entirely—in part due to her desire to be present for her child. She shared that she had been told by a mentor to care less about projects and people in her leadership role for the sake of effectiveness: “At work I found that when I have less empathy, I could really be desensitized to things a bit more…it’s certainly easier to get things done when you don’t care, sometimes.” She felt that she had succeeded in doing so for a time, until she became a mother, when she found that it “came back to the forefront of everything I did…that empathy came back…and then outside the higher ed 142 profession on my sort of new pathway…empathy is back in there for real.” Ultimately, she realized that her values and priorities, including empathy as a value, and being present as a mother for her child, caused her to reconsider her career in higher education leadership and to choose a different professional pathway she felt was more in alignment with her focus on empathy and care. Whether a central part of their identities informing their sense of care in the professional realm, or a factor in the decisions they made about their career paths, many participants’ experiences of motherhood have impacted their academic leadership in significant and meaningful ways. In some cases, it informed their approach to leadership; in others, they explained that their role as mothers were at odds with the underpinning culture of the “careless institution,” at times resulting in circumscribed opportunities or the sense that continuing a leadership trajectory in the academy was not worth the tradeoff to their parental caring. 5.5 Superordinate Theme 5: Boundaries and Shielding as an Aspect of Care Many participants reflected on the importance of boundaries between professional and personal worlds to their experiences of caring and caring leadership. Others discussed a concept I framed as “shielding” – employing boundaries within the workplace context in order to protect or preserve those with whom they work. 5.5.1 Boundaries Between Work and Personal Lives Some, like Leader 6, felt that boundaries between their personal and professional lives were essential to their ability to function as leaders and as human beings: The biggest takeaway…I think it could be useful for a lot of women in this job, “Do not take business personally. This isn't personal.” You got hired to do this job, to administrate a faculty. You're not here to be their friend. You're not here to be buddies. You're here to 143 oversee these people. You literally have to not care because I'm not insecure about “Oh my god. If I'm not there, the house of cards is going to fall down.” I don't go like that. It's like, “It is what it is.” I have a life and I'm going to live my life outside that job, but I see too many people where it takes over. Leader 6’s boundaries between her professional and personal areas of life were expressed with unusual vehemence and clarity. She had observed the negative consequences others had encountered when diminishing those boundaries, and it was important to her to avoid them. Leader 7 noted that she initially refused an invitation to apply for a high-level leadership position: “The provost at the time reached out to me and asked me why I hadn't applied… I said, ‘Well, that's a horrible job. That won't work with my family…I don't want that job. It looks like it has no boundaries.’” In an unprecedented move for that institution, the provost then asked her what would make taking the position tenable in terms of boundaries between professional and personal lives, and provided the resources to make that possible. She acknowledged that it was an ongoing balancing act to manage boundaries: It's so easy to say, “We need more diverse representation.” Well, okay. If you don't want to have a 65-year-old White male with a stay-at-home wife and grown kids as every leader, let's shift it up a little bit. I think it's really hard for them to envision and it also requires -- I don't want to represent that it always works. It requires me to be incredibly diligent and sometimes to blow over the top of it like anyone who's honest will say. The self-care isn't this. Self-care is this. You lose it. You recognize you've lost it. You rein it back in. 144 While Leader 7 took a leadership role at her institution, and in turn uses that as a platform to advocate for care for herself and those in her area, it remains an ongoing challenge to claim and re-claim boundaries. Leader 3 connected boundaries with respect as a facet of care: “It’s related to thinking of others and wanting to be respectful. For me, there is that respect which is linked to care, because you’re respecting people right? Their time and who they are.” For Leader 3, maintaining appropriate boundaries is connected to caring for others and therefore respecting their time, their role, and who they are as people. Leader 3’s explanation of respect as related to boundaries and care also informed her own decision to step away from higher education leadership, as she felt she was not giving her school-aged daughter the respect of being present for her while she was working in academe: It was a lot to manage, and I’m just like “Oh my gosh, I can’t.” I really could not do that and still be a good mother and wife, and care for myself as a person. I just, it was a lot for me. I just needed to slow down. There was no way to slow down. Even when I would go pick up my child after work, I’d kind of try to clear my mind and it’s hard, you know? It’s still kind of running…and I would know she’s talking, and I’m not listening. That feels awful, and you’re like “Oh my gosh.” And then she catches you not listening. For Leader 3, it became too difficult to maintain boundaries between her professional and personal consciousness; this became a source of distress for her, as she felt she was not being present and thus showing respect to her child, and to her own role as mother and wife, while in her leadership role. Leader 4 shared a nuanced approach to personal and professional boundaries that she had experienced with colleagues through collaboration: 145 Well, I think one of the things that I have done, which has been hugely helpful, is to do a lot of collaborative work. Many of my research projects have been deeply collaborative, co-published, co-authored and co-authored equally…We're very clear that we're equal partners in our research. That has enabled things that happened in both of our lives to be things that we could cope with. We reckon that things come out at 50-50 in the end but in any given moment -- there've been moments when the one has carried a bit more to enable the other person to deal with something. I presented a paper while she gave birth to her first child. She was present at the university when I was caring for my father who was dying. Our collaboration has spanned many different life events, and we're very clear with each other that we value one another as whole human beings, so that's something that I really cherish about that research relationship. It has enabled my career to progress. She's not the only person I've collaborated with. My first major publication was also collaborative; I think that collaborative work has helped me to progress in my career partly because it enabled me to have children, to care for my family in ways that otherwise maybe I couldn't have. While the examples Leader 4 shared centered on scholarly work rather than administrative roles, her example of collaboration as a way of navigating work/life boundaries in a humane way benefitted her and her colleagues, and was an intriguing concept to consider in the management realm. I found this approach to managing the demands of higher education leadership worth further investigation; however, it appears that the existing research on this kind of collaborative job sharing in higher education is currently rather limited (Chanana, 2020; Watton et al., 2019). 146 Leader 9 pointed out the impacts the growing remote work culture (accelerated by the global pandemic) has on maintaining boundaries between the professional and personal, and the role she believes academic leaders have in maintaining those boundaries: I think that's part of it, part of the challenge. I think we used to be -- even that 15-minute car ride home was the dividing line, which is not to say as leaders we don't come home and immediately get right back on our laptops. Without that, it's even harder to find that balance, to find the dividing line. Let's face it. More and more of us are going to be working remotely. As time goes on, more and more of us will likely be working out of our homes. We're going to have to find a way to strike that balance. I'm a big believer in the idea of modeling the behavior that you want to encourage. As we're nurturing and growing the next generation of leaders, I think we have to model that behavior for them. It starts with taking care of ourselves, and showing them there's nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, and that you can be more productive and in better position to care for and help the folks that you care about if you take good care of yourself. Leader 9 mentioned “taking care of ourselves” can be modeled a number of ways, including resting while sick rather than trying to push through illness at work, and by having boundaries between work and personal life spheres. 5.5.2 Boundaries Within the Workplace Another subtheme that surfaced during analysis had to do with boundaries within the work setting, rather than between work and personal spheres. Some participants explained how they had benefitted from boundaries (which one participant aptly referred to as “shielding”) maintained for them by supervisors. Others discussed how they themselves employed boundaries within the work setting in order to protect themselves or those around them. Still others noted 147 how they had leveraged nuanced boundaries between work and professional roles by sharing professional responsibilities with colleagues. Leader 2 shared experiences regarding boundaries reflecting care in the workplace from a former supervisor at a previous job. Her experience with that supervisor was mixed, as while on the one hand there were insufficient boundaries between work and personal life, which led her to ultimately leave: She would care for people. But then she would also expect a lot, beyond reasonable. So, she worked your ass off. I had to leave her because I have kids, I have a family, you know? For her work is, you know, 12 to 17 hours a day. And that is her expectation of her staff. But on the other hand, Leader 2 conveyed that the same supervisor had “shielded” her subordinates from the political fallout of the workplace, thus creating and maintaining a boundary between some of the challenges she herself addressed: She sheltered me, she protected me a lot. She protected her staff quite a bit because she was always brought in to change the status quo, to implement new processes, and so she would always rattle everybody’s cage. People either loved her or hated her, right? But her staff was always really protected by her, for the most part. There was an interesting juxtaposition between the professional caring behavior of the former supervisor’s “shielding” of her staff by enforcing boundaries and protecting them from political fallout within the workplace, while also simultaneously demanding excessive time and energy of her staff, to the detriment of their boundaries between the professional and personal, which ultimately lead Leader 2 to leave that long-established relationship with her former supervisor. 148 Leader 8 also spoke of shielding her staff as part of her caring leadership role in the workplace: Let me speak about my faculty. They were exhausted - exhausted from dealing with the constant barrage of critiques and criticisms and “you're not doing this,” and really laboring... And, quite honestly, I think what they wanted in a dean—and one of the ways that in which I believe I show care—is that I'm protective of my folks. I don’t let people just run all over my faculty. And I have to speak up, I have to give voice to them. In some ways, it's almost like they wanted somebody to slay the dragons, because they were just so exhausted from doing it themselves, you know? And not trying to make myself into this hero, but I think that's part and parcel of care. And that's—going back to Patricia Hill Collins—that's the politicized, womanist approach to caring, where I'm going to take care of my own. Leader 8 intentionally leveraged her knowledge of caring as a political act to support and shield those who reported to her from a fraught workplace environment by stepping in to protect them from unreasonable demands on their time and rebutting or addressing external critiques made about her faculty by others. Leader 5 shared her account of learning about enacting boundaries from her supervisor, who also shielded her from inappropriate and/or difficult workplace situations: She really clearly established with me at the beginning, “We're not going to be calling each other on the weekends, but during work time, we're here for each other. We are each other's team…not by getting too involved with each other outside of work, but by in the context of work, acknowledging: “That was a really tough one,” or “Wow, you pulled that one out of the fire.” “You did a great job there.” That goes both ways between the two of 149 us. I think that's the kind of care that I offer her, and that's the kind of care that she offers me. Leader 5 has carried forward that heightened awareness of professional boundaries to the employees who report to her, which is particularly valuable when they are helping the vulnerable students at their institution address difficult situations: Particularly because my instructors are very sensitive to that, they often really work hard to provide not only the academic support that you think you're signing up for, but also the student services side of things, like actually walking students over to counseling services if that's what they need, or actually sitting down with them to work on how to find financial support or that kind of stuff, in some cases, how to problem-solve housing. My faculty are doing that, and my staff are doing that…helping them calm it down, helping them then problem-solve what we can and cannot do for the student as an educational institution, and then kind of patching that faculty member back up and saying, “You're doing your best. These are the limits. Now you need to go home and take care of your own family,” that kind of thing. Leader 5 extended her own sensitivity to boundaries between the professional and personal to those who worked for her, which was particularly important as the employees in her area care greatly about their students, and it can be challenging to set limits when there are at-risk students needing care. In a somewhat similar fashion to Leader 3, Leader 1 also connected boundaries as a demonstration of caring to having respect for others, being mindful of their positionality within workplace situations that arise: 150 I think it's very important to have respect too - respect of boundaries. Naturally reciprocated; not forced, but just if they're for you, be good and be there for them too. I guess part of care, it's respecting boundaries - like part of it is having that respect, so you don't overstep or impose at the workplace. Different people have their own positions, different responsibilities, and if you overstep and you're trying to use your influence to get something done for yourself, that you're putting that -- the other person, your colleague in a very, very difficult situation. So having the respect, professionalism and to be mindful of their needs too. For Leader 1, respect for others was central to her valuing of boundaries within the workplace. She acknowledged the sometimes politically fraught nature of work in academe, and how one could in advertently put colleagues in a difficult situation if one did not keep respect for them at the forefront of one’s thoughts and enact boundaries accordingly. 5.6 Chapter Summary In this chapter, the exploration of caring in leadership across participants’ experiences surfaces as deeply intertwined with leaders’ identities and sense of integrity. Authentic caring in leadership is deeply rooted in cultural, religious, and personal beliefs. Authenticity manifests in actions that demonstrate honesty, moral principles, the courage to confront and acknowledge others' pain, and the responsibility to hold people accountable. The leaders participating in this study also indicated that they draw from their own experiences of marginalization in order to advocate for others. The chapter also sheds light on the unique challenges faced by women of color in academic leadership, including the tensions between expectations they will mentor other marginalized faculty and students, versus activities that are rewarded as departments and 151 institutions consider career advancement. The chapter included accounts of performative caring; instances where optics of care were put forth for personal gain, and the concept of performative allyship, or inauthentic, superficial support for marginalized groups that lacks genuine commitment. The chapter also considered the disparity in support for professional growth racialized women leaders in academe receive compared to their White counterparts. The role of self-care for leaders was discussed; consideration of it expanded beyond physical and emotional well-being to include professional and personal development, or lack of attention to those aspects of care for one’s career. Another theme that surfaced in the course of the project is the experience that participants encountered of the valorization of self-neglect or self-harm in some academic settings. Motherhood's influence on leadership also surfaced as a theme during analysis; its impacts on leadership approaches and tensions participants experienced between their roles as parents and their career advancement. Participants’ experiences of motherhood influenced their leadership practices, serving to inform their leadership roles and also at times coming into conflict with their academic leadership careers. The chapter also discussed the emphasis participants placed on establishing boundaries for effective leadership and personal well-being. Shielding, a form of care within the workplace, involves protecting team members from unnecessary stressors such as political land mines or distractions. Respecting others' boundaries was also highlighted as an integral part of care and professionalism. These themes have emerged as significant to help in our understanding of participants' experiences and perspectives of care in their leadership practices. In our next, and final chapter, I 152 will discuss the findings in connection with the original research questions posited at the beginning of the study. 153 A piece Now, caring at work? One of the ways that I stay sane in the world is by remembering how much care I want the world to have. Care for the world, big picture, agape kind of way I act like a person with a lot of privilege. I speak like a person with a lot of privilege. I'm in a position to speak on behalf of people who have much less power than me, but I also own a little piece of the standpoint of the oppressed. And so, I bring that knowledge to the conversation. Hmm, what does it allow me to do? Sometimes, it keeps me tenacious A piece of a remedy for vicarious trauma is connecting to something bigger than yourself. It's my volunteer work, it's the boards that I sit on all those ways to care and connect with the people around me, and through them, care and connect to the world. (Leader 5: The Problem-Solving Advocate) 154 Chapter 6: Discussion and Conclusion I came to this study wanting to understand more about the experiences and perspectives of women in higher education academic affairs leadership regarding care. When considering the valuable experiences and perspectives shared with me by the leaders participating in my study, it is useful to return to the original research questions and related literature. The research questions being asked are: 1. What are the perspectives and experiences women in postsecondary academic leadership positions associate with care and caring leadership, and how does it inform their approach? 2. What perspectives do women from traditionally excluded or marginalized populations (e.g., racialized communities, LGBTQIA+, etc.) have about care and caring in their professional lives? It should be noted that while the cross-case analysis described in Chapter 5 organized participants’ accounts into somewhat tidy categories distinct from one another, as participants shared information from their lived experience, these themes were often interrelated to one another rather than artificially siloed. For instance, as described below, authenticity can connect with motherhood, which can, in turn, also connect to setting boundaries. As I returned to the original research questions in this journey, it seemed more authentic to speak of participants’ accounts in this holistic way. 6.1 Research Question 1: What are the Perspectives and Experiences Women in Postsecondary Academic Leadership Positions Associate with Care and Caring Leadership, and How Does it Inform Their Approach? 155 6.1.1 Authenticity, Care of Self and the Holistic Experience of Caring Across One’s Experience When I asked the participants what the term “care” meant to them, it became clear that care, in specific, personalized ways, was deeply important to each of them, and that it connected with a sense of authenticity for them as people and as academic leaders. Most initially described their definitions of care in ways that were directed outwardly, with an emphasis on caring for others, sometimes with an initial emphasis on those with the closest relationships, including children (Leader 7). However, Leader 1 and Leader 5 immediately incorporated care of self in their initial definitions of care; as Leader 1 put it, she had learned to center self-care after years of not doing so. Some participants very clearly made distinctions between caring in a personal, private context versus care in a professional context (Leader 4, Leader 5, Leader 6, Leader 7). Others conveyed their relationship with care in ways that did not so readily distinguish between public and private (Leader 2, Leader 3, Leader 8). All eventually did talk about their experiences of self-care as important to their lives and to their professional practice, and all framed care as fundamentally relational. I found the nuances of what my participants shared relative to their contextual caring very interesting in light of some of the observations made by previous researchers. For instance, Ivancheva et al. (2019) indicated that the concept of work/life balance in the discourse assumes there is a clear boundary between the two, while the lived experience in the life-worlds of people do not separate the requirements of work and outside responsibilities, including care and relational obligations. That may indeed be true—the experiences are indeed centered within each of the women I interviewed—but there clearly were varying lenses with which they were approaching the boundaries of care and work and within the work place. Boundaries between the 156 work components of life and the personal/family aspects of it emerged as a prominent theme across multiple participants in my study. 6.1.2 Neoliberal Institutions and the Locus of Care Responsibility Another interesting intersection with the literature that arose within my study findings regarding RQ1 was the locus of responsibility placed upon individuals as regards care responsibilities, in a neoliberal institutional context of audit culture that does not reward work regarded as more pastoral in nature, such as mentoring, over other more itemizable “products” of academic work, such as fundraising or publishing culture; nor is it geared toward those with significant care responsibilities outside the workplace. As Lynch et al. (2020) noted: The ideology of ‘work–life balance’ masks how workplace structures disregard their dual commitments. They are left to blame themselves for ‘failing’ to manage unreasonable work demands… But the problem of overwork is not individual but structural and there is no legitimate language to name over-working for the structural problem that it is (p. 164). Indeed, this lack of acknowledgement of the structural problems of higher ed as a workplace with regard to care resonated with a number of my study’s participants: Leader 7 who experienced bitter disappointment about missing important events with her children due to the scheduling of work meetings (which she later took upon herself to change for her own calendar and for others who reported to her), Leader 2 who left a previous workplace and long-time supervisor in search of a way to find bandwidth to be present for her young children, and Leader 3, who left academia altogether when the rift between caring responsibilities and the “careless” or carefree construct of leadership in her workplace became too pronounced to bridge. It is striking to me that much of the recent discourse in higher education’s trade publications, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, remain focused on what individuals can and should do to 157 navigate caregiving responsibilities while working in academe rather than addressing the institutional issues that cultivate these problems (Whitaker, 2018; Hartig et al., 2017). However, recently some attention is starting to be given to institutions’ roles in supporting care needs of their employees. For instance, the March 28, 2023 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education includes an account of the research done by LaborED into institutions’ parental leave policies in the United States. The collection of data from 142 institutions showed that 67% of institutions offer faculty members less than 10 weeks of parental leave, while more than 50% of institutions offered staff five weeks or fewer of parental leave (Zahneis, 2023). While parental leave allotments in Canada and elsewhere are often not so starkly meagre, the tensions involved in parenting and meeting professional expectations were often conveyed both by the leaders who participated in my study (Leader 7, Leader 4, etc.) and in the literature. As Gaudet et al. (2022) noted in their study of Canadian women academics: Academic mothers are also, in most cases, the primary caregivers for their actual children, and these caregiving roles beyond academia are incompatible with its organizational culture. Some interviewees who were mothers testified to this fact. Circumstances related to pregnancy (e.g. decline in energy or postpartum depression) and efforts to balance work and family after birth exert tremendous pressure on female academics, threatening their physical and mental health (p. 81). 6.1.3 Homo Economicus, Privileged Irresponsibility and Motherhood for Academic Leaders Postsecondary institutions’ approach to caring responsibilities is within the wider societal context, where caregiving is assumed to be outsourced in a neoliberal market landscape, including the rational and independent actor construct homo economicus. Privileged irresponsibility is a key concept that applies to the prestige economy of the higher education 158 sector– academic leaders outsource care of children, elders, dwellings, pets and other essential elements of life to a less privileged person or people, who in turn often outsource care. As Tronto noted: If there are care needs that you cannot meet for yourself, then use market solutions; and finally, if you cannot afford market solutions, or prefer to care on your own, then enlist family (and perhaps friends and charities) to meet your caring needs (2017, p. 30). This concept of outsourcing care, or not outsourcing care, surfaced multiple times in my interviews with participants, especially in the context of motherhood (Leader 1, Leader 3, Leader 4, Leader 5, Leader 7). Participants discussed grappling with this, both in terms of tailoring their academic career trajectory in light of the care needs of their children, and their desire to not outsource care in order to pursue academic careers, or to leave the field of academic leadership altogether in order to avoid outsourcing childcare. (It should be noted that this outsourcing of care is pervasive across nearly all realms of modern life and not limited by any stretch to work in academic leadership within a postsecondary context.) I was reminded often of the neoliberal construct of homo economicus and Tronto’s critique of that construct—humans construed as independent agents in a rational market economy, rather than interdependent, embodied and vulnerable people in a web of relationships (Tronto, 2017). While the implications of homo economicus are pervasive throughout society, since the objective of this study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of care as shared by women in postsecondary academic leadership, it’s worth noting that motherhood, and the care responsibilities associated with it, informed participants’ relationships with this career field substantially. 159 6.2 Research Question 2: What Perspectives Do Women from Traditionally Excluded or Marginalized Populations (e.g., Racialized Communities, LGBTQIA+, etc.) Have About Care and Caring in Their Professional Lives? Firstly, I think it is important to acknowledge that this is an initial and by no means comprehensive attempt to engage in this study in such a way that it does not fall prey to the oft-repeated mistake of representing women in higher education leadership as monolithic – all White, cis-gendered, straight, middle or upper-middle class. While a portion of the participants in my study—approximately a third of my participants—fit this description, two thirds did not. I found it particularly difficult to find and recruit academic leaders in Canada who did not fit within those categories, perhaps in part due to the fact that there are fewer postsecondary institutions in Canada than there are in the United States. Of course, I do not want to be reductive and claim a sameness of experience or contributions by any of my participants, but I thought it was important to note the bounded and limited nature of this study. I also feel it is important to acknowledge that I have included all participants in my consideration of the research questions, so it’s not as though I only discussed RQ1 in terms of participants who are not racialized or otherwise do not necessarily fit into the dominant norm descriptors of race, ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation. However, I incorporated RQ2 as a conscious effort to move towards greater inclusivity in the research, albeit in a modest way. 6.2.1 Caring Academic Leadership as a Public, Political, and Authentic Activity While care is often framed in the broader world as a private thing, a significant motivation behind my choosing to focus on Tronto’s framing of care is that she points to care as a public, political activity (2013, 2017). While I did not know it when I went this route, I later learned that there are parallels between Tronto’s view of care as political and public and the view of care put 160 forward by scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Audrey Thompson (1998), and Lisa Bass (2012). While they were addressing intersectional, and, more specifically, the Black experience and relationship with educational caring, the framing of care as a political act in the public sphere is clear. The act of caring leadership in an educational setting as a public and political act also surfaced in the experiences shared by my participants as they discussed advocacy as part of their authenticity as caring leaders, (Leader 4, Leader 7, Leader 8, Leader 9). While this was certainly conveyed by racialized leaders, the act of demonstrating care was described as conscious, public and political across many of the study’s participants. 6.2.2 Performative vs. Active Allyship: Optics vs. Authenticity One of the key themes that was revealed in multiple participants’ accounts was the idea of performative allyship – occasions when they experienced institutional lip service or hollow performative demonstrations of care from within their institutional contexts (Spanierman & Smith, 2017). One way this surfaced was in institutions’ claims to support marginalized members of their community, including in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement as many institutions were challenged to come to terms with their racist roots and historical oppression. Leader 9 commented on a performative and superficial kind of caring that she has noticed as postsecondary institutions in the United States have also been called to come to terms with their White supremacist roots and connections to historical oppression, noting that she had encountered people who were motivated by self-interest and who were not truly interested in contributing towards greater equality and inclusion: “It’s taking that caring piece and basically using it for personal gain.” As Bucher observes “Performative allyship allows the ally to claim a commitment without taking any personal responsibility for impact or outcomes. The potential for 161 performative allyship is high for academic leaders, given the attention to optics and public relations by leaders” (Bucher, 2021). Bucher and other scholars contrast performative allyship with active allyship. While definitions of what constitutes active allyship vary, Luthra (2022) suggests these approaches in practicing active allyship: Deep curiosity: Understand diversity and intersectional identities; Honest introspection: Recognize and address personal biases; Humble acknowledgement: Admit lack of understanding and reflect on one’s privilege; Empathetic engagement: Ask non-judgmental questions to unpack biases; Authentic conversations: Foster psychological safety for open discussions; Vulnerable interactions: embrace vulnerability and confront unconscious biases; and Courageous responsibilities: Take action to include and amplify marginalized voices. However, there are disincentives to authentically engage in active allyship with marginalized people in many institutional contexts. As Bucher notes: Too often academic leaders pursue efforts of social justice with additional, or simultaneous, efforts to placate White, cis, male, heterosexual members of the campus community. In trying to make sure that members of these groups are not offended, do not feel guilty, and do not resist, the leaders dilute or subvert the change initiatives. This protection of privileged groups is an obstacle to an academic leader’s own allyship, and it prevents the leader from doing a key part of active allyship – and that is expanding allyship across the institution (Bucher, 2021). 162 Clearly, the experiences shared by participants align with wider conversations about how individuals and institutions can authentically work towards greater diversity, equity and inclusion. 6.2.3 Tensions Between Career Advancement and Care Amplified for Marginalized Women My study participants shared that care for them and for marginalized women in higher education leadership often tends to be at odds with career advancement (Leader 2 and Leader 9, for instance). While the literature explores this in general as regards women (Grummel et al., 2009; Lynch, 2010; Gaudet et al., 2022; Kandiko Howson et al., 2018), racialized workers are often, and sometimes tacitly, expected to take on additional workloads that are not rewarded in academe’s culture, such as mentorship of faculty and students who are likewise from marginalized groups. Persistent biases framing people of color as lacking scholarly qualities, contribute to the underrepresentation of faculty of color in tenured positions and top administration. As Cardozo put it: “those who embody racial difference in the academy do a disproportionate amount of the ‘diversity work’ that is also a form of care work, e.g., in identity-based mentoring of junior faculty and students” (Cardozo, 2017, p. 412). This sets up a conflict for academic leaders from marginalized groups – they may feel ethically driven to support the development of other people from that group, but doing so will take up their finite resources – of time, attention, and energy, for instance— that otherwise would be leveraged toward advancing their own careers. It also models for mentees the dynamic of marginalized leaders shouldering additional care work, thus contributing to the perpetuation of the cycle. Further, the care extended to them may not include cultivation of their academic careers. Leader 9 observed that the care extended to her by White colleagues did not include care for her career development; 163 Leader 2 also reflected on the lack of care she had received for her career development, although she centered it on her own agency rather than on a systemic failure to support her as a marginalized individual. The experiences Leader 2 and Leader 9 share resonate with observations made in the literature, including the presumed lesser competence of women of color (González, 2014; Gutiérrez y Muhs, et al., 2012; Padilla, 2020), the corresponding microaggressions racialized people experience in White institutional spaces (Evans & Moore, 2015), and the broader discourses around race in higher education (Ahmed, 2012; Chance, 2022; Gasman & De Gruyter, 2022; Gutiérrez et al. 2012; Hartlep & Ball, 2020; Ortega et al., 2023) and society at large (Bell & Schatz, 2022; Davis, 1983; Erskine et al., 2021; Kendi,, 2019; Oluo, 2018). 6.3 Summary Through this project, I sought to gain insights into the experiences and perspectives of women in higher education academic leadership in relation to care and caring. The research questions were twofold: 1) To understand how women in postsecondary academic leadership positions interpret care and its role in their leadership, and 2) To explore the perspectives of women from traditionally excluded or marginalized populations on care in their professional lives. The leaders in this study conveyed a deep connection between care, authenticity, and their roles as academic leaders. Care was often seen as both an outward-directed responsibility towards others – including children - and an inward responsibility for self-care. They emphasized the importance of relational aspects of care. They also conveyed the importance of boundaries between personal and professional aspects of life—and at times within the workplace itself. I 164 also sought to include perspectives of academic leaders from marginalized populations. While further studies will certainly be important, I found value in exploring the experiences of participants who did not fit the dominant, often tacitly-assumed norm, descriptors. These experiences confirmed the political and public nature of caring; participants shared their framing of caring academic leadership as a conscious, public, and political act. This research journey has illuminated the structural issues that contribute to tensions between caregiving responsibilities and the demands of academic leadership. These challenges include the pressure to meet institutional expectations, particularly in a neoliberal context, where the care-centered aspects of academic work—mentoring, and advising, for instance—are not valued, and in fact can prove detrimental to women leaders’ career advancement. The study also highlighted the impact of caregiving responsibilities on academic mothers and the broader societal context of outsourcing care. It surfaced issues related to performative allyship, where institutions may engage in superficial demonstrations of care towards marginalized people without meaningful action. The concept of active allyship, characterized by deep curiosity, honest introspection, humility, empathy, authentic conversations, and courageous responsibilities, was contrasted with performative allyship. The study highlighted the challenges and disincentives for authentically active allyship in academic institutions, particularly for leaders from marginalized groups. In the next sections, in addition to considering the limitations of the study and implications for practice and for future research, I reflect further on the impacts what I have learned from this project will have on my own professional practice. I also connect this work back to the context of the EdD program. 165 6.4 Limitations of the Study One of the notable limitations of this study is that is not meant to be broadly generalizable or transferrable; Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is a form of qualitative study meant to be idiographic, to capture these specific participants’ experiences and perspectives. As Van Manen (2016) stated: “A phenomenological description is always one interpretation, and no single interpretation of human experience will ever exhaust the possibility of yet another complementary, or even potentially richer or deeper description” (p. 31). It’s possible that future studies will have findings that may challenge or expand upon things that I discovered through this work. While one of my initial hopes for the study was to include racialized women academic leaders from both Canadian and U.S. institutional contexts, despite my best efforts I didn’t find success locating and recruiting women who were not White in Canadian leadership contexts. While women academic leaders of color remain underrepresented in Canadian postsecondary leadership, and thus there are not many racialized women in Canadian academic leadership positions from which to recruit (Cukier et al., 2021), and while the Canadian academic leaders I was fortunate to interview provided significant insights, it would be beneficial for future studies to include a broader array of academic leaders. While participants across both countries often conveyed similar or shared perspectives on care in some ways, the fact that this study focused on the experiences of individuals across their careers rather than in a specific institutional context, makes me reluctant to draw conclusions regarding US versus Canadian contexts. Locating future studies in more of an institutional context or intentionally as relates to country, provincial or state-specific issues could be a worthwhile avenue of inquiry. 166 Finally, the worldwide disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to protracted time recruiting participants, conducting interviews, doing analysis, poetry sharing, and the other elements of this study. While I managed to reconnect with most of the participants to get their feedback on poems, it probably would have been optimal to be able to do so more quickly, so as to reduce the time that lapsed between the interview and follow up. 6.5 Future Research, and Suggestions on the Use of IPA and Found Poetry Although this study appears to have been the first to approach the care experiences of postsecondary female academic leaders from a stance that is explicitly taking pains to not default to a White, middle-class assumptive model, there are many aspects of this topic that would benefit from further research. For instance, my study’s sample size, while not considered small for an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis study (Smith et al., 2009), was intentionally limited so as to delve more fully into idiographic facets of each participant’s experience of the phenomenon. Further, additional work understanding more deeply the impacts of socioeconomic class and factors such as first-generation status are clearly warranted. Exploration of the experiences of women academic leaders in differing types of disciplines, such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), for example, could be useful, as could expanding the research to include a wider array of roles, such as earlier-career administrators or university presidents. Additional studies exploring policy elements of institutions, such as evaluation of faculty and administrators and leave policies, could prove illuminating as well, as could research delving in a more focused way into care and power relations within specific institutional contexts. Although I did not encounter particular demarcations of difference based on institutional context from the experiences shared by my participants, it is possible that further research might uncover additional facets or layers which could add additional perspectives. 167 Future research could also more directly explore constructs related to vulnerability and embodiment. While vulnerability was not explicitly named as a separate theme in this study, its presence was implicitly woven throughout the discussions of the themes. For instance, the theme of Caring for Oneself intrinsically included the vulnerabilities associated with balancing personal and professional lives, including the stress and self-neglect that can occur in juxtaposition with the construct of the "carefree" or "careless" leader (Grummel et al., 2009; Lynch, 2010; Morley, 2013). Similarly, Boundaries and Shielding touched upon the vulnerabilities faced by leaders as they navigated the complexities of maintaining personal and emotional limits in their professional roles, while Authenticity as a Caring Leader, as conveyed by this study’s participants, involved acknowledging one's limitations, seeking help when needed, and being open about their struggles, all of which inherently involve vulnerability. It underscores that vulnerability in this study surfaced not as a separate, isolated theme, but as an integral part of the themes related to caring academic leadership practice. However, vulnerability is an important concept, worthy of additional exploration. It would be beneficial for future research to focus more explicitly on vulnerability; it could perhaps also engage more directly with the embodied nature of women academic leaders’ experiences. It is worthwhile to consider recommendations for those who may wish to use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and/or found research poetry in future projects. To that end, some recommendations are included below. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) can be a rich avenue by which to explore the meaning and impact of life events or experiences from the perspective of each participant. It also has well-defined yet flexible steps to its process, which can be user-friendly for a less-experienced researcher (Braun & Clarke, 2013). I recommend that students and scholars 168 considering the use of IPA in the future engage in their own reflexive practices (Engward & Goldspink, 2020), as the double-hermeneutic nature of this work “offers the room to encourage and challenge the IPA researcher to work with the personal, interpersonal and professional domains of the lived experience” (p. 51). I also encourage those interested in IPA to avail themselves of the wonderful online community of over 2,000 IPA researchers available at https://groups.io/g/ipaqualitative. The daily activity of this international community explores the many nuances of using IPA in various contexts and has been a source of a great deal of food for thought and solidarity over the many years of my dissertation journey. While poetry has been used in conjunction with phenomenological analysis in previous studies (e.g., Brown et al., 2021; Spiers & Smith, 2012), its application remains uncommon, offering a promising avenue for deeper exploration and insight. As regards advice for those considering the use of found research poetry, in addition to taking on board the reflections and advice of Laurel Richardson (1992; 1994; 2003) amongst others, I would suggest considering a question raised by Bhattacharya (2008) to be useful both before embarking on poetry generation and throughout the process: What decisions drive the selection of certain text data over others in constructing a found poem? Should vigilance be placed on the researcher’s subjectivities when selecting and juxtaposing texts for found poetry? (p.88) I believe that while it can be deeply challenging, the opportunities offered through the use of found research poetry are considerable, particularly if one of the aims of the project, as was the case here, is to re-position emotional knowledge alongside the intellectual (Jaggar, 1989). As discussed more fully in Chapter 3, Section 10 of this dissertation, a significant aspect of 169 engaging via poetry was shifting my positionality from the analytical distance (“looking at”) my participants to “sitting with” them and the human experiences they shared. 6.6 Implications for Policy and Practice Care, and our experiences related to caring in an educational work context, are embedded in broader contexts. While the COVID-19 pandemic raised some awareness of the importance of caring and the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities (Collins et al., 2021; Johnson, 2022; Stratti et al., 2021), the overarching climate in both Canada and the USA reflect a greater precarity for academic employees and increased financial pressures on institutions in both countries (Moody, 2023; Ngan, 2023). Given that higher education’s culture already generally rewards highly-valued activities, such as publishing and securing grants, and does not reward (or, in fact, invisibilizes or penalizes) “caring” activities such as mentorship and advising, in an increasingly fraught and competitive environment, it would seem that the challenges to re-positioning caring work within academe are considerable. Institutions need to look at how their policies related to leave, evaluation, promotion, and a number of other areas are biased by tacit normative assumptions in order to better center care and to create a more inclusive space rather than leaving it to individual leaders to do so. As Statti et al. (2021) note: Like the institutions themselves, employees in higher education positions are facing unprecedented challenges and are attempting to navigate as best as possible, and at times with few resources. Women in higher education denoted that organizational factors such as absence of family friendly policies and inflexible work schedules and being assigned excessive duties have negatively impacted work life-balance. 170 Institutions would be well-served to consider approaches such as flexible work schedules (Dousin et al., 2021). Ireson et al. (2018) emphasize the vital economic contributions of caregiving employees, who balance participation in the workforce with providing care for individuals facing disabilities, ageing, or serious health conditions. They stress the importance that employers and governments develop approaches that enable these caregivers to effectively combine their professional responsibilities and unpaid caregiving roles. When recently discussing ways that institutions can cultivate a more inclusive, democratic approach to care, Joan Tronto (2023) referenced the work of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). One of the core premises of that work is that within pressured work environments, employees have three primary options: 1) to leave; 2) to voice their concerns in the hope of some remedy; or, 3) when the cost to the employee for the first two is too high, to absorb the distress of the conditions, say nothing and continue to work there. Tronto observed that not all employees have the same power positionality to exit or to voice their concerns; she recommended that organizations should make sure that the cost of employees exercising their voice is lower—for if you create conditions under which people can speak, then you will be creating the conditions necessary to have a more democratic outcome. She also advised institutions seeking to become both more democratic and more caring to “pay attention to the voices at the bottom” of the organizational hierarchy. Providing opportunities (and greater safety) for employees to voice their experiences and concerns is one avenue towards creating workplaces that better support many forms of care for a plurality of people. Berdahl and Schultz (2024) provide additional recommendations for incorporating care into the work of academic leadership. They argue that adopting a leadership approach informed by care ethics can enhance the efficacy of leadership, and recommend strategies for academic 171 leaders aiming to implement a care-centered approach. First, leaders must become aware of and recognize the emotional labor they and their team members perform. By observing patterns and impacts on time and energy, leaders can better appreciate this often-invisible work. They also support fostering an environment that acknowledges and values emotional labor, including initiating open discussions about the effects of emotional labor, particularly on women and underrepresented groups, and acknowledging those who shoulder the most significant burdens. Further, they posit that creating intentional space for emotional labor within academic work is also valuable, as is staying connected to teaching, since it can help academic leaders cultivate empathy and connectedness to the students and faculty their administrative leadership work affects. Berdahl and Schultz conclude their recommendations for incorporating care ethics into academic leadership by noting “…everything we do is a result of people working individually and together. Bringing care into the conversation helps. A care-centered approach can transform how leaders work — and transform academia itself (para. 13).” 6.7 Some Final Reflections on My Practice I’ve observed, over the past 30 years, the increase of neoliberal capitalism and its effects on academia – the management culture and the shifts to audit culture and the accompanying changing public viewpoint of higher education as job preparation rather than as a fuller, developmental educational experience. While enacting all aspects of the above-recommended policies and organizational approaches is beyond my individual scope, having awareness of this as a leader and a reaffirmed commitment to contribute to a more inclusive and just workplace means that I will use the influence I do have to promote change. For me, care is a core value of higher education, or at least my practice within it. I identified higher education as a realm of care due to my own experiences as an undergraduate student (after all, the actions of university 172 employees, including academics, saved my life). The insights created through my interactions with the academic leaders in my study were invaluable to my own practice moving forward. While my understanding of what they shared is naturally subjectively informed by my own individual experiences and the interactions with the participants, I believe the findings have potential relevance for the practice of postsecondary academic leadership and efforts to create more inclusive institutions. Engaging in this study has strongly affirmed that one demonstration of authentic care I can enact in my own practice is to further develop as an ally for racialized and otherwise marginalized colleagues. There is value in taking active steps as defined by Bucher (2021), or Luthra (2022) for instance, to ensure I am serving as an active ally rather than engaging in the optics of allyship. From a care ethics perspective, this can include being open and actively finding out what “care” means and looks like for the people around me. What do they want or need? Engaging in this study has taught me to move away from making assumptions about what care is for people with whom I come into contact. It appears to be important to many, and it is certainly not monolithic in its interpretations. While there is an extensive body of critical feminist literature regarding the challenges women in academia face regarding care, there was little attention to how to develop caring academic workspaces based on differing definitions of caring. For my practice, being more fully aware of context allows me to reflexively evaluate my decisions and actions as a leader, supervisor and mentor. Always top of mind for me: care as an embodied and political thing in the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and the university, including the wider sociocultural context (some human rights, such as reproductive rights, are actively being rescinded in United States, for instance). It is worthwhile, and humbling, to 173 consider the journeys, stories and even traumas that people around me have experienced and are working through – even those in positions of leadership and relative power. Exploring the perspectives of these leaders, having the benefit of learning from them, has reinforced the importance to me of locating care and continuing to support it, cultivate it, in my neoliberal postsecondary work context. It may be challenging, there may be downsides; there may be limitations on my own career trajectory as a consequence of this, but it’s a big part of why I got into this line of work in the first place. For me, there’s little point in continuing to work in higher education if I don’t support that element of things as a human being. This journey has brought into focus one of the things at the heart of my leadership philosophy: how can I help reduce the suffering of the people around me? In my work, I have come to understand that caring leadership is not about achieving instant happiness or avoiding the complexities of struggle. Rather, it’s about recognizing the weight others carry and seeking to lighten that load, even in small ways. This notion of care as a response to the embattled social, economic, and political landscapes in the U.S., Canada, and beyond underscores the importance of receptivity and attention to the individual’s needs. Whether it's assessing workloads of those who report to me, or simply offering the space for someone to be heard, care serves as an avenue toward, ultimately, helping to reduce suffering. At the beginning of this journey, in our initial class meeting as an EdD cohort in July 2014, one of our faculty, David Coulter, asked our group: “What do you stand for?” That simple, direct question has prompted significant and often uncomfortable introspection. The discoveries gifted to me through this dissertation journey have reaffirmed my commitment to caring as a human being, and as a leader in higher education. While I hold no illusions of making a seismic impact on the culture of academe, I hope that my conscious commitment to a more inclusive and 174 just workplace as part of my practice will in some small way influence those around me, just as I’ve been impacted by those who have demonstrated caring to me during my travels. On the next page, I leave readers with a final poem that conveys experiences and highlights a question one my participants asked. I hope it may resonate with you in some way; it reinforces that the issues raised through the course of these explorations are by no means now neatly resolved. My thanks to you for reading. 175 Who wins? In my heart of hearts, I want to be there for every student of color, I want to be able to help every single one of them and show that I care. At the same time, if I do that, I may not hit my milestones And, therefore, not be in a leadership position where I have money and influence and power and have the potential to rather than help one student at a time, help the whole generation of students. To be honest, in my generation, there was some pride in being careless and even self-careless. I'm tougher than the system. I can make it. I don't need anything. I think a very healthy development— the millennial generation, they're saying, “No, that's really stupid. You shouldn't do it that way.” It's going to be harder to retain people, retain the good people. 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Gender and Education, 26(3), 200-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.901718 196 Appendices Appendix A: Interview Questions 1. What does the term “care” mean to you? 2. What comes to mind when you think of the role care plays in your experience as a leader? 3. In your experience, what makes a leader caring? a. Prompt: What impact do you think this has on others? 4. Can you think of any leaders you have known or worked with that demonstrate caring as part of their leadership? If so, how have they demonstrated it? 5. Can you describe how your personal background influences your views on caring and leadership? Is there a particular story that comes to mind? 6. Do you believe that any aspects of your personal identity affect your experience of caring, or others’ expectations on you as regards caring? 7. Have you experienced challenges related to care in your work? Are there any examples that come to mind? 8. Can you describe a time when your experience or needs related to caring were at odds with institutional needs? How did this make you feel? 9. Have you experienced instances where care served as an asset to your work? Can you describe these? 10. As we’ve been speaking, have any other thoughts about care and your leadership work come to mind that you’d like to share? 197 Appendix B Consent Form 198 199 Appendix C Invitation to Participate in Study
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Educational Leadership and Policy
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Kelly, Deirdre M.
Taylor, Alison, 1959-
The caring practices of women in higher education leadership : an interpretative phenomenological analysis of care
Text