Admining beyond certainty: generating new educational imaginaries through more-than-faculty roles

ABSTRACT

In higher education, the discursive establishment of ‘faculty’ vs. ‘administrator’ creates a dualistic, hierarchical structure, informing relationalities between/within ourselves and faculty. As administrators, we found/find ourselves in relational encounters, entanglements of material-discursive bodies, that we were/are a part of producing. In these relational encounters, we experience ethics, care, and response-ability within immanent decision-making processes that bear the imprint of tradition and hierarchy. We think-write-live with our academic roles, gendered-racial-cultural-ethic identities, and experiences as administrators in higher education to consider how various philosophical concepts inform how we do admining. We ask, how do post-philosophical perspectives come into being with/in/through administration(ing), especially in the current political, higher education context? We think with relational encounters and post-philosophical concepts to illuminate that contemporary, care-full contestations of admining can create new educational imaginaries in hope-full renewals.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• administration
• post-philosophies
• binary
• academy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Candace R. Kuby

Dr Candace R. Kuby is Associate Provost for Faculty Success and Professor of Learning, Teaching and Curriculum (LTC) at the University of Missouri. She served as the LTC Department Chair from 2019-2022. Dr Kuby's research centers on pedagogies as relational in two ways: 1) pedagogies that support children creating literacies with artistic and digital tools, and 2) approaches to and pedagogies of qualitative inquiry when thinking with poststructural and posthumanist philosophies. She has (co)authored several books including Go Be a Writer!: Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children and Speculative Pedagogies of Qualitative Inquiry. Journals in which her scholarship appears include Qualitative Inquiry; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Journal of Literacy Research, and Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.

Aaron M. Kuntz

Dr Aaron M. Kuntz is Dean of the School of Education and Human Development and also holds the Frost Professorship of Education and Human Development at Florida International University. Before becoming Dean, Dr Kuntz served for three years as Chair of the Department of Counseling, Recreation, and School Psychology. Previous to FIU, Dr Kuntz was a faculty member at the University of Alabama and served as Chair of the Department of Educational Studies from 2014-2020. As a professor of research methodology, Dr Kuntz has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications, including five books.