School:

Boston University School of Theology

BTI Category:

Sociology/Ethnography/Research Methods

Womxn in Leadership (A-Term)

Through current feminist leadership research, findings reveal many womxn are hesitant to claim themselves as ?leaders?. Despite their leadership and impacts, their actions are dismissed as "followership" and their work is considered secondary to that of men. These trends are not solely self-identifiers but rooted in a larger colonial and postcolonial framework that has existed from the ancient to current era as upper-class male elites dominated leadership positions. This course aims to deconstruct and demystify ?leadership?, encourage active participation in discovering individual and communal leadership styles, and expand how we approach leadership through the lens of womxn. By exploring the ways womxn understand and practice their leadership (i.e., struggling and fighting for their communities), this class will provide the skills to analyze how society has systemically and culturally undervalued and/or suppressed womxn's leadership; reconstruct womxn's stories across sociohistorical periods as examples of leadership; examine the impact these stories have on current practices and meanings of leadership; and analyze these practices across different cultures. Exploring models of womxn leaders and understanding various contexts, we will re-define new meanings of leadership and create new models of leadership for ourselves and our society.

School:

Boston University School of Theology

BTI Category:

Sociology/Ethnography/Research Methods

Advanced Qualitative Research

This course is for students involved or interested in independent qualitative research, including interviews, ethnographic projects, and/or content analysis. It will function much like a workshop, providing extensive guided practice with project conceptualization and design, finding funding, meeting university ethics requirements, gaining access to communities, recruiting participants, managing and storing data, creating coding schemes and using software, integrating mixed types of data to support an argument, balancing "home" and "field," being reflexive, and exercising respect and care for both oneself and one's interlocutors. Relative attention to these issues will depend on the needs and interests of the students. It can fruitfully be taken either separately or in addition to TR 800, Ethnographic Research.