Intellectual Leadership, Higher Education and Precarious Times

This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education. The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, ambivalences, and disruptions that now mark everyday life and interactions. Rather than thinking about ’freedom from precarious times and precarity’ they consider ’freedom from within’ and how the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual to think and speak within the public realm might be retained, if not reclaimed. In the precarious present and in times of precarity, what has changed and why? What might now be the new social reality within which we work?

Each of the contributors have been invited to take up their own perspective on what is precarious, and to examine the impacts on intellectual leadership. What does it mean to do intellectual work and be an intellectual leader? What are the implications for intellectual work and leadership if the academy itself is in precarious times?

Tanya Fitzgerald is Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia, Australia.

Helen M. Gunter is Professor of Educational Policy at the University of Manchester, UK, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Jon Nixon was Honorary Professor in the Center for Lifelong Learning Research and Development at the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, UK.