Transforming Society, Transforming Leadership

For several years, SIT Graduate Institute worked with the Ford International Fellows Program (IFP) to provide IFP fellows worldwide with training and reflection on their engagement as leaders for social justice. Out of this effort grew a conceptual framework on “leadership for social justice” and a capacity-building resource manual derived from the Leadership for Social Justice (LSJ) Institutes we carried out. Since that time, a few members of the LSJ project team have been undertaking further research on social justice leadership from varied perspectives. In addition, SIT Study Abroad Academic Director Azim Khan is an IFP and LSJ Institute alumnus, served as an alumni facilitator for the final LSJ Institute in Washington, DC, and is enacting leadership for social justice in his work in India. We would like to present case studies from our research and our experiences with leadership with social justice, along with the LSJ conceptual framework, at the SIT Symposium. The case studies narrate the stories of diverse initiatives focusing on social justice work in Mali, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia and several parts of India. Brief introductions to the case studies are included below. The case studies and experiences provide rich understandings of the strategies and challenges of making transformational social change in varied contexts, and of the nature of leadership for this purpose. The emerging learning from these experiences will provide a critical examination of the relevance and usefulness of the LSJ conceptual framework. In particular, this work will highlight the role of context, gender, education, and advocacy in relation to development and practice of social justice leadership. Social justice leaders are reimagining the meaning of leadership and reinventing it in practice on a daily basis. Lessons from their experiences go to the heart of our pedagogical purposes at SIT. We are also very interested in utilizing this opportunity to find colleagues in other parts of SIT and World Learning working on related topics, in either their research or their practice. We welcome them to suggest ideas for enhancing the session to include their thinking, research, or experiences