panel 20 Reframing Care through Leadership, Carer-Competencies, and Dependency Work
Leadership as Repair: Toward Community Care in Art and Design Education
Alison Place & Marty Maxwell Lane
In the post-pandemic age of loneliness (Essential Partners, 2023), academic cultures are marked by turmoil and despair. Workplace cultural norms of competition and ego are magnified, particularly in the U.S., by the increasing scarcity of resources, hostility of state politics toward higher education, and the looming “enrollment cliff” (O’Connell-Domenech, 2024). In art and design fields, where we work directly with people to confront what’s happening in the world in real-time, and our scholarship is often an act of expression of self, boundaries between work and life become blurred, further intensifying the need for healthy, caring workplace communities.
In their 2020 Care Manifesto, the Care Collective declared we are in a “crisis of care” caused by the rise of neoliberal capitalism and further exacerbated by the pandemic, which “has left most of us less able to providecare as well as less likely to receive it” (The Care Collective, 2020).Traditional models of hierarchical and anti-collaborative leadership fail to meet our current moment of loneliness, fear, turmoil, and need for community care. This paper will explore ways in which academic leadership in art and design fields can be reframed to establish structural practices of care that facilitate community and collaboration amongst faculty, staff, and students, and can work to repair the deficits in care.
The Care Manifesto identifies four core features of creating caring communities: mutual support, public space, shared resources, and local democracy. By applying these four pillars to academic environments, we propose strategies for care-centered leadership that co-create the conditions for caring academic communities. With a focus on structural change rather than individual “care fixes” (Dowling, 2018), we aim to address the vibrant potential for repairing art and design academic communities through sustainable systems rooted in feminist values of interdependence, reduced hierarchy, anti-exceptionalism, and plurality.
References
Aspen Ideas. (2017). The epidemic of loneliness. Aspen Ideas Festival. https://www.aspenideas.org/sessions/the-epidemic-of-loneliness
Dowling, E. (2018). Confronting capital’s care fix: Care through the lens of democracy. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 37(4), 332-346. https://doi.org/10.1108/edi-02-2017-0032
Essential Partners. (2023, September 18). Surgeon General: Loneliness epidemic requires investments in social connection. https://whatisessential.org/surgeon-general-loneliness-epidemic-requires-investments-social-connection
O’Connell-Domenech, A. (2024, January 10). College enrollment could take a big hit in 2025: Here’s why. The Hill. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/4398533-college-enrollment-could-take-a-big-hit-in-2025-heres-why/
Place, A. (2023). Feminist designer: On the personal and the political in design. MIT Press.
Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Care Collective. (2020). The care manifesto: The politics of interdependence. Verso Books.
Weiner, S. J., & Auster, S. (2007). From empathy to caring: Defining the ideal approach to a healing relationship. The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 80(3), 123-130. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248287/
Alison Place is a designer, educator, and writer who explores the intersection of design and feminist theory as a space for critical making and radical speculation. She is the author of Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design (MIT Press 2023), which illuminates design as a feminist practice through essays, case studies, and dialogues. She is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Arkansas, where she also serves as the director of the Graphic Design program. She has held several leadership roles in the design community, including two terms on the AIGA Design Educators Community National Steering Committee, and has earned multiple national awards for her research and creative work, including the Design Incubation Award for Published Scholarship.
Marty Maxwell Lane’s research critically examines leadership, design pedagogy, and collaborative practices to reveal more intentional ways of approaching how we work, learn, and build community. Her book, Collaboration in Design Education: Case Studies and Methodologies, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. Marty is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Arkansas, where she also served as the Director of the School of Art. Marty has served on numerous boards, including the Director of Education for AIGA Kansas City, Co-Chair of the national AIGA Design Educators Steering Committee, as well as the AIGA National Board. Marty is passionate about community building and improving access to opportunities in Arkansas and is proud to serve on the leadership board of Thrive in Helena, Arkansas.
Carer-Competencies for Human Resources Professionals: A Qualitative Analysis
Baniyelme D. Zoogah, Rick Hackett & Allison Williams
In this study, we sought to develop an inventory of carer-employee competencies for HR Professionals. Carer-employees are employed workers who simultaneously provide unpaid care to friends or family members and carer-employee competency is a cluster of related knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) defined in terms of the observable behaviours needed for success as a carer-employee. However, we are interested in the HR professionals who have responsibility for employees who happen to be unpaid carers at home. The competencies for those professionals refer to the cluster of related knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) defined in terms of observable behaviours needed for success in oversight of carer-employees (i.e., CCHRP). Because competencies must be observable and measurable, the development of the inventory encompasses the creation and pilot-testing of competency sets and profiles using a combination of qualitative (e.g., focus groups) and quantitative (survey measures) techniques. To achieve these goals the study involves three phases. In Phase 1, we use focus groups to generate a list of CCHRP and domains. The focus group discussions were recorded were coded to generate a list of competencies (Activity 1), which were emailed to HR professionals (those who participated in the focus groups as well as those who did not participate to determine the importance of the competencies for the levels of the HR profession (Activity 2). In Activity 3, we compare the CCCHRPs with general HR competencies. After that we proceed to Phase 2, which involves surveying organizations for validation, and subsequently to Phase 3 where a structured focus group involving subject matter expects will be used to finalize the CCHRPs to be used for certification and training. We expect to report on the process of generating the CCHRP inventory and the implications for human resources practitioners.
Baniyelme D. Zoogah (PhD, The Ohio State University), DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Ontario. His research is on development issues at the intersection of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies from a Management and Organization perspective. His primary focus now is on human resources management, strategic followership, and sustainability-related issues that impact development of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies. He has authored several books, some on strategic followership, and others on Africa. He is currently the Past President of the Africa Academy of Management.
Dr. Rick Hackett has held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance for the past 21 years (maximum allowable period). Currently he is Professor of Human Resources Management with the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, as well as a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association. He specializes in executive/managerial assessment, leadership, HR recruitment, testing, selection, work attitudes, absenteeism, and performance assessment. Several of his publications have involved healthcare settings. Rick is past President of the Canadian Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, past Associate Editor of the Journal of Business & Psychology, and past Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences. Over the past 38 years Rick has provided consulting to a variety of companies, including Hatch, RCMP, Marion Merrell Dow, General Motors, ABB, AFG Glass, IBM China and Hong Kong Post. He has led several executive workshops and presentations concerning leading effective teams, HR management best practices and HR resources planning and utilization. Finally, he teaches in, and served as Academic D irector, of DeGroote’s Executive MBA program in digital transformation.
Dr. Allison Williams is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University and the lead principal investigator of the Healthy, Productive Work Partnership Grant “Mobilizing a Caregiver-Friendly Workplace: A Partnership Approach.” As a leading expert in workplace policy for carer-employees (CEs) – those balancing paid employment with unpaid caregiving – Dr. Williams has focused her career on addressing the distinct challenges faced by this group. Her pioneering research focuses on developing carer-friendly workplace policies (CFWPs) that support the well-being, productivity, and health of those managing dual roles as employees and caregivers. Dr. Williams has held prestigious Research Chair positions, including a CIHR Research Chair in Gender, Work & Health and a Canada Research Chair in Caregiver-Friendly Workplaces. These roles have allowed her to lead innovative research projects that explore the intersections of gender, health, and caregiving, with a particular focus on how these factors influence work-life balance. Dr. Williams has advanced knowledge in the field, driving important discussions on caregiver support and workplace policies that promote health and well-being for carer-employees. Through her leadership in the Healthy, Productive Work Partnership Grant, she has brought together interdisciplinary teams across 25+ partners, 20+ researchers, and 60+ trainees, to bridge academic research with policy and practice, shaping both national and international conversations on workplace inclusivity and support for caregiving employees. Dr. Williams continues to drive innovation in creating carer-inclusive work environments, influencing policy at various levels and making a lasting impact on the lives of working caregivers.
Dependency Work as Witnessing: Able-Nationalism and the Limits of Labour Justice in Canadian Healthcare
Sarah Munawar
Hospitals, ICUs, and long-term care homes, are not just transitory places, or death-worlds, within colonial systems; for families like mine, in the netherworld of dependency care, and for care-workers, they are a critical setting for our most intimate struggles for labour, gender, racial and disability justice. Through critical auto-ethnography, I outline three anecdotal interactions between my family and healthcare workers, during my father’s hospitalization from covid-19, in which discourses on labour rights are weaponized by healthcare workers to shut down the complaints, and demands of, racialized, disabled, and elderly patients. I emphasize that a constitutive labour of dependency work is institutional mapping through naming, and documenting, policies, practices, actors, systems, and discourses that are used to enact and justify medical violence and carceral practices of care in healthcare institutions.
Dependency work includes knowledge-keeping and moral witnessing that is often suppressed by forms of affective and epistemic injustice. I explore how the complaints of racialized, disabled elders, like my father, are buried and dismissed in healthcare settings. However, when Black, Indigenous, and racialized patients, and healthcare workers, work together and mobilize caring labour to create phenomenologies of healthcare institutions for the sake of harm reduction, health equity, and transformative justice, they are punished and disciplined. I argue that demanding just ecologies of labour within settler-colonial healthcare systems requires Black, Indigenous, and racialized health workers and patients to forge, build and deepen relational affinities, homeplaces, and dissident friendships with one another by resisting anti-relational and white-orientated practices of settler governance in healthcare.
Sarah Munawar (she/her) is a Pakistani-Muslim and settler living on and sustained by the occupied and unceded land and waters of the Coast Salish peoples including xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (TsleilWaututh) Nations. She was a Visiting Professor at the Elizabeth Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership (EDR) at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston from January 2023 to April 2024. She is also a political science instructor at Columbia College (Vancouver). She earned her PhD in political science at the University of British Columbia in 2019. As a neurodiverse Muslim, mother, and political theorist, her research not only articulates a vision of health equity, disability justice, and care ethics that is intersectional, Islamic, and de-colonial but also centres the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims as knowers of Islam, Muslim practices of care, and care-based modes of knowing Islam. Whether it's naming the medical ableism and racism endured by her father in ICUs, theorizing through her own experiences of medical racism in postpartum care, or accounting for the invisible labour of primary caregivers like her mother, Dr. Munawar offers a vision of disability justice and collective accessibility that draws upon various lineages of anti-oppressive Islamic knowledge.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman