Ph.D., Antioch University, 2022, Leadership and Change
Reframing Leadership Narratives Through the African American Lens explores the
context-rich experiences of Black Museum executives to challenge dominant cultural perspectives of what constitutes a leader. Using critical narrative discourse analysis, this research foregrounds under-told narratives and reveals the leadership practices used to proliferate Black Museums to contrast the lack of racially diverse perspectives in the pedagogy of leadership studies. This was accomplished by investigating the origin stories of African American executives using organizational leadership and social movement theories as analytical lenses for making sense of leaders' tactics and strategies. Commentary from Black Museum leaders were interspersed with sentiments of “Sankofa” which signify the importance of preserving the wisdom of the past in an effort to empower current and future generations. This study contributes to closing the gap between race and leadership through a multidimensional lens, while amplifying lesser-known histories, increasing unexplored narrative exemplars, and providing greater empirical evidence from the point of view of African American leaders. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).
Committee: Donna Ladkin Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lemuel Watson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Damion L. Thomas Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Arts Management; Black History; Black Studies; History; Museum Studies; Museums; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior