Crafting Homeplace in the Academic Borderlands: Humanizing Education, Research, and Relationships

"I am moved deeply by the vision, passion, idealism, and hope expressed by this intergenerational collective of writers of Crafting Homeplace ." --From the Foreword by Margo Okazawa-Rey, San Francisco State University

This volume highlights a case study of one diverse institution of higher education that was transformed to support faculty and students with varied cultures and identities.

Increasingly, faculty with intersectional perspectives are challenging many aspects of higher education and urging a radical reimagination of the institution itself. This volume explores the successful strategies and contradictions of working within, against, and beyond a university with the goal of creating a humanizing educational experience for students and faculty alike.

Providing a glimpse of what is possible, chapter authors describe their efforts to build alternative core curricula, research apprenticeships, community partnerships, ways of interacting with one another, and models of leadership. They reimagine academic milestones and processes like hiring, tenure and promotion, faculty support, research, funding, publishing, collaboration, and more. Each essay details the institutional structures and supports that were effective at improving academic work in teaching and research contexts.

Crafting Homeplace in the Academic Borderlands is a much-needed examination of what it means to create a homeplace in academia where humanization is practiced as the foundation for a new way to teach, learn, know, and be in relationships.

Book Features:

• Demonstrates what scholar practitioners can accomplish when working together to collectivize their practice in the academy.
• Shares stories of scholar practitioners working across P-20 formal and informal educational and youth development spaces to humanize praxis in community work, research, teaching, activism, and leadership.
• Unearths contradictions and tensions that manifest among institutional demands, community needs, and the crisis around us.
• Provides a case study of transforming one institution of higher education to support faculty with diverse cultures and identities.