Reimagining Higher Education: Lessons from Covid and Contemporary Racial Reckonings
23 March - 25 May 2023
Biography
Mary P. Sheridan is Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she Directs the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society. Her teaching and research focus on community literacy, digital media, and feminist methodologies. Dr. Sheridan’s work has been recognized through numerous accolades, including two national book awards, a Scholarship of the Year Award for a collaborative webtext, and numerous grants from organizations as diverse as the National Endowment for the Arts and Verizon.
Professor Sheridan’s current research investigates how to build engaged infrastructures that foster equity, particularly as Covid 19 and racial reckonings have intensified questions about what higher education should be. These lingering questions must engage with ongoing budget shortfalls, a shrinking demographic of college-aged students, and the drum-beat of pundits denigrating higher education more broadly. Combined, these factors make clear that higher education is at an inflection point in determining what it will become.
Questions about this becoming are evident in Tom Bartlett’s description of 2020 as the year universities raced to claim the moniker of being the anti-racist university, just as in past years universities raced to be community engaged or sustainable. Such claims may be aspirational, but they are also public relations, a recognition that universities need to curry favor from those who pay the bills. In the public relations rush, structural obstacles to enacting universities’ values may be overlooked, leading to scattered implementation and uninspiring outcomes. Broadly understood, my research attempts to redress these problems by examining who is doing the unrecognized work of (re)mediating university values, who pays the costs for this lack of recognition, and how might we change this. The goal of this examination is to help universities align their values and practices and to engage stakeholders within and beyond the university in this process.
Research Summary
To contextualize how universities build equitable structures, I draw from black feminist epistemologies, affect theory, and posthumanism that capture the entangled forces materializing bodies in a particular time and place. This methodological framework will guide UofB collaborations with those researching how ad hoc groups hold institutions accountable to espoused racial and gender equity. For example, in my current academic research, participants address the pervasive yet invisible “black tax,” a concept that certain groups “pay” the additional emotional labor to care for traumatized students, faculty, and staff of color; to educate well meaning (or not) white colleagues; and, to suppress the ongoing despair at seeing people like them murdered by government representatives without consequence. Compounding this tax is the additional cost of being used as cover—paraded as an anti-racist institutional accomplishment—for institutions with deeply racist legacies that continue to shape everyday practices. This scholarship resonates with scholars in the School of Education such as Professors Watermeyer and Lucas, as well as with UoB Centres, such as CHET, and TLC. In addition, I hope to build these partnerships to develop potential funding bids for cross-national research into the changes affecting higher education globally.
Professor Sheridan will be hosted by Professor Richard Watermeryer in the School of Education and Director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET)
The following lectures and seminars are planned for her visit, details will be posted in due course:
The Cost of “Caring”: The Gendered Work of Higher Education
In the US (and elsewhere), there is a precipitous decline in the percentage of women in upper levels of the professorate. This is partially attributed to unacknowledged, often gendered “caring” work. This CHET workshop explores that gendered labor before exploring ways to institutionally legitimate this work.
