Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

This dissertation concerns how Jewish-Muslim and Israel-Palestine grassroots activism can persist in the face of threats to the safety, freedom, lives, or even simply the income and employment of those engaged in acts of sustained resistance. At the heart of the study are the experiences of participants in the Hashlamah Project, an inter-religious collaboration project, involving Jews and Muslims. Across chapters and even nations, chapters of this organization faced similar threats and found universally-applicable solutions emerging for confronting those threats and persisting in the face of them. This raised the question of whether revolutionaries and activists in general can persevere with such work in the face of this sort of menacing. The study found answers to this in determining what methods were most widely employed and which had the best results. The results of the study showed an array of widely-employed methods for navigating threats in high risk activism, and persevering with such work in the face of these threats. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Committee: Philomena Essed (Committee Chair); Jon Wergin (Committee Member); Anne de Jong (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; History; Holocaust Studies; International Law; International Relations; Islamic Studies; Middle Eastern History; Middle Eastern Studies; Multicultural Education; Near Eastern Studies; Peace Studies; Religion; Religious History; Social Psychology; Sociology

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2014, Leadership and Change

The purpose of this study is to examine professional hurt across the public services of the Commonwealth Caribbean with a view toward creating what could probably be the first body of knowledge that will offer insights into its nature and relationship with the practice of leadership. The study also sought to explore an understanding of professional hurt that could inform the design of leadership development programs to help develop leaders who can navigate or avoid hurt. I utilized the biographical research approach to access the lived experiences of 20 public sector leaders across 9 independent Commonwealth Caribbean islands. Narrative thematic analysis data from the experiences are summarized and presented using six emergent themes, illustrated with thick narrative descriptions. The findings suggest that professional hurt is a combination of the deep hurt a leader experiences as a professional, pooled with the undermining of his/her sense of professional pride, dignity, confidence, capability, credibility, and worth as a leader. While all facets of the leaders' hurtful and humiliating experience are sometimes stretched over a period of time, there is actually an identifiable point at which professional hurt occurs. The findings suggest that professional hurt is not necessarily a planned attempt to destroy a leader, but the result of a poorly managed complex social system. This study may thus offer some useful insights for a holistic and transformative change in the practice of public service leadership in the Caribbean. A video author introduction in MP4 format accompanies this dissertation. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at OhioLink ETDCenter, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Committee: Philomena Essed PhD (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Booysen DBL (Committee Member); Paula Kibbelaar PhD (Other) Subjects: Caribbean Studies; Organizational Behavior; Psychology; Public Administration