NASPA is the largest student affairs professional organisation in the world and its annual conference of 2023 drew over 6,000 participants. What a huge circus - what an amazing knowledge space to be in. Knowledge overload. The international symposium on Sunday was a great start to the conference - a smaller space, a smaller group. From the 4-person international student affairs researcher consortium made up of Dr Lisa Bardill-Moscaritolo (UAE), Dr Brett Perozzi (USA), Dr Birgit Schreiber (D), and I, all but Birgit were there to present and receive a NASPA award for excellence in international research!
Lisa, Brett and I made two presentations together, one was an analysis of our student affairs Covid-19 and SDG data using a very big lens of Global South / Global North.
The question 'how far have we come with the professionalization of student affairs in Africa' sparked some interesting comparative discussion among student affairs practitioners in the session where I presented alone. The participants in the session included a South African expatriate in the USA as well as several SAS practitioners who have international experience. It was a lively session and as the photos attest I was clearly in my element :) :)
I did feel that the more practice rather than research oriented audience in the session would have preferred a different empirical approach with more textured case studies etc. while my presentation was based on a content and discourse analysis of the professionalisation discourse in 10 years of publications in the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa.
I also attended a knowledge community luncheon of the 'masculinities KC', which talked a lot about organisational matters and less about the way SAS practitioners actually work with masculinities (affirming, shaping, etc.) on university campuses. It also seemed to me a very LGBTIQ+ focused discourse - which is a discourse that has moved from the margins more towards a normalised centre - but at the same time very little talk has been on the 'toxic masculinities' that one so often encounters on university campuses, on GBV, heteronormativity, and also affirming positive 'straight' masculinity (alongside various kinds of queer masculinities). Altogether a very interesting set of conversations at the KC, a plenary session and a panel I attended on these topics. Something that Dineo found peculiar about the American way of talking and making a point is what she called 'oversharing', that is pre-cursoring everything with a self-positioning (in terms of one's personal background, upbringing, family life, personal and familial tragedies, career and career struggles, sufferings etc.). It appears in order to be able to make a 'legitmate' point one had to establish - by rule - one's point of departure as one of pain and suffering so as to appear authentic and elicit an emphatic audience. Oversharing to fake authenticity and establish legitimacy?
At Boston College in Newton I had the wonderful opportunity to meet up with the colleagues at the Centre for International Higher Education (CIHE), especially, Dr Rebecca Schendel, Dr Chris Glass, Prof Gerardo Blanco and, of course, Prof Phil Altbach.
I had long conversations with Rebecca and Gerardo in the morning; Rebecca and Phil over lunch, and eventually, after my seminar presentation, I interviewed prof Phil Altbach.
My presentation was on "International Comparative Student Affairs" and what we can learn about this as a 'field of study' from the research that Lis, Brett and I presented just days earlier at NASPA. I also included in that analysis my work on student activism with Phil and Didem Turkoglu, which was published in International Higher Education in February 2020 and June 2022 respectively.
Part of the 'Boston Tour' were two more meetings with wonderful higher education experts. I spent an afternoon with Dr Manja Klemencic from Harvard talking research, life, family, publishing, projects, funding, etc. etc. as she and her daughter took me and Dineo around Harvard Yard, Harvard Square, and Kennedy Park, and eventually the tall (and ugly) Humanities building. Manja just finished editing a new Handbook on Student Representation and I proudly contributed an Africa introduction chapter for it.
The second expert and fried that I met in Boston is the wonderful Monroe France who just relocated from NYU to Tufts to take up a new role in Boston. Discussions resolved around the shocking anti-Social Justice and anti-Critical Race Theory legal debates in many US states, as well as the ongoing case against the use of race as criterion in affirmative action (university admission criteria) and related worrisome topics (e.g. legislation against gender reaffirmations / transitioning). I don't think I would have known so deeply and intimately the depth of these ongoing conversations in the US, how polarising and threatening of freedoms and social justice gains they are, and how conservative and highly problematic some of the debates and demands have become.
So much for the Boston Tour - 31 March to 9 April 2023.
