Engagement and Leadership for Social and Political Change: New Directions for Student Leadership.
Abstract
Youth leadership initiatives can help young people engage in democratic life, participatory governance, and social and political change. Leadership education oriented towards political and social change must continue to evolve in response to the lived experience of youth. This volume explores those new meanings through examining the theories and practices constituting the emerging ground of public leadership, including: research spanning secondary and higher education programs, local and international contexts, school-based and out-of-school time initiatives, and a broad diversity of youth.
A substantial professional literature now exists for college and university faculty seeking advice and practical tips about how to start, expand and sustain an on-campus civic engagement program. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the distinct challenges faced by campus administrators—including department chairs, program leaders, center directors and deans—who bear responsibility for promoting and evaluating faculty work in this arena even while protecting a wide range of other institutional interests. This chapter—written by a civic engagement center director (and former department chair) at a mid-sized midwestern state university—highlights several of the distinct administrative questions that arise regularly in the context of faculty-led work on democratic and community engagement. It argues that with careful and context-sensitive planning, administrators can play key roles in supporting the efforts of their civically-engaged colleagues even while avoiding a range of political, logistical and institutional pitfalls that can otherwise imperil program success.
This chapter investigates the hashtag battle #BlackLivesMatter vs. #AllLivesMatter and considers its ability to promote cyber race. It assesses the implications of constructing racial boundaries within the online space, its impact on identity politics and the viability for cyberspace to exist as a post-racial epoch in the digital age. This study takes an affordance and architectural approach to its analysis of BLM and ALM, incorporating a thematic analysis of the hashtags on Twitter. The research uses a theoretical underpinning of framing theory to analyze tweets from the ALM and BLM twitter timelines. It demonstrates that the hashtag battle, although, configured, and framed by the mainstream media as one that encapsulates a race war of Black vs. White, that actually, findings reveal that the battle consists of the tension and friction between mainstream media frames and what is termed digitized frames.
Theoretical frameworks, specific skills for leaders, and guidance to effectively work with others across difference as well as practice freedom to facilitate transformational social movements are explored in this chapter.
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