🌟 Presented by Advancing Mentoring and the Professoriate for Inclusive Excellence

The Office of Advancing Mentoring and the Professoriate presents Engagement & Research Seminar Series

Examining organizational change: Faculty leveraging whiteness as a credential to support or resist faculty diversity

Deborah Southern, PhD

University of California Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Education
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

In her research on organizational change in higher education and where there are opportunities to advance social justice and transform institutions, Dr. Southern explores how faculty at two departments used their agency to resist or support organizational change to increase faculty diversity. In this presentation, Dr. Southern shares how leaders exercised their agency to either leverage legitimacies of excellence to resist change, or leverage a reconceptualization of excellence to support change within their department. Dr. Southern discusses key ways faculty exerted their proximity to whiteness as a credential to either resist or facilitate change to advance faculty diversity, further shaping the department’s culture.

Lunch served starting at 11:30am, research talk with Q&A from 12:00 - 1:00pm.
Everyone interested is welcome.

About

Dr. Southern uses her expertise in organizational theory, change, and leadership to critically examine higher education organizations and power with the goal of identifying how to transform our institutions to be socially just. Her research, teaching, and mentoring center a critical awareness of historical and ongoing structures of power and oppression in education as one way to raise critical consciousness, pursue transformation, and redress systemic injustice in education. Dr. Southern earned a PhD from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. She earned a MA in Higher Education at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor where she also worked as a practitioner in student affairs for five years. Dr. Southern earned a BA in Asian Studies and History at Occidental College after transferring from community college.