The Transmission of Spirituality in Broader Landscapes of Power

When spirituality moves—from one religion to another, from religious to secular fields, or from private to public spheres—it can change in many ways, based on who is sending and who is receiving the practices, and the local and broader institutional contexts in which practitioners abide. Yet scholarship seldom interrogates how strongly different cultural and structural layers of social settings impact spiritual practitioners’ experiences, and the pluralistic forms of spirituality that result. To show how peer and institutional cultures can shape spirituality in their own likeness and to serve their own needs, I provide illustrative examples of how, in order to resonate with new audiences, spirituality changes. These examples reveal how deeply socially situated American spirituality is in broader social and institutional fields, in contrast to common perceptions among the public and scholars that describe spiritual practices as typically individualistic private means of transcending social life.

Cultivating an Institutional Culture that Values Teaching Developing a Repository of Effective Practices

Educational researchers developed an online repository of effective practices contributing to or enhancing the teaching culture at multiple higher education institutions as part of a larger project exploring institutional teaching culture. The repository was designed to be a companion document to the Institutional Teaching Culture Perception Surveys (ITCPS), a resource for administrators, educational developers, and Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) striving to cultivate institutional cultures that support the development of teaching and learning. This paper outlines the methods for developing this repository, summarizes findings, identifies some of the practices included and highlights areas for future development.

Institutional culture and academic career progression: Perceptions and experiences of academic staff

Orientation: The South African higher education system is highly dependent on institutional cultures to enable the progression of academics with the aim to unlock the research potential of the country. Institutional cultures are directed by the values, practices and behaviours of its members.Research purpose: Establish and present, from the academics’ point of view, the values, practices and behaviours that facilitate an enabling institutional culture, which supports the career progression of academic staff.Motivation for the study: A comprehensive and deeper understanding of any higher education institutional culture requires analysis beyond the structural elements and established procedures of the institution. An understanding of how individuals interpret their environment, to support their career progression, is equally important.Research approach/design and method: A qualitative, phenomenological approach was followed, through individual, semi-structured interviews with 17 academics, across all career phases.Main findings: An institutional culture in support of academic career progression includes three major values of: equity and inclusion, an ethic of care and collaboration, that are interconnected to practices such as performance management, a career management system, a comprehensive induction and orientation, a collaborative structure, remuneration, as well as resources and support, together with behaviours, comprising the articulation of team values, alignment of individual and institutional values, as well as a systemic approach.Practical/managerial implications: Understanding the values, practices and behaviours within the context of higher education offers leaders and talent management practitioners the necessary factors to consider as they grapple to understand a culture that enables the career progression of academic staff.Contribution/value-add: Deeper understanding, from the academics’ point of view, the values, practices and behaviours that facilitate an enabling institutional culture, which supports the career progression of academic staff.

Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda

Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers’ moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda’s top universities. We identify three groups of researchers—Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and who orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of “fit” with their respective institutional cultures, but the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers’ moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market.

Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Through an interrogation of hybrid social dance/jazz concert events held in Atlanta in 1938, this chapter presents the book’s guiding questions and methods, which also stem from the author’s own experience as a social jazz dancer. Applying Susan Foster’s model of choreography as a broadly applicable analytic for the socially reinforced structuring of movement in space, it asks how and why jazz audiences’ default listening postures have moved from standing and dancing to relatively motionless sitting and listening. Exploring this question requires a critical, reflective look at the role of bodies in intellectual and aesthetic hierarchies and the complex webs of desire and anxiety that have shaped American institutional cultures’ conflicted relationships with music, with dance, and with all things corporeal. Critiquing the valorization of transcendence and universalism in American aesthetic discourses and in jazz music history specifically, this chapter advances an embodied approach to jazz history where dance becomes a point of entry into stories that de-center the pillars upon which jazz music’s canonic historical and ideological narratives rest. Following choreographer/folklorist Mura Dehn’s description of social jazz dancing, this book thus advances a perspective that operates “between the beats” of jazz history’s canonic time-spaces, seeking to focus on dancing and musicking as practices that begin within the body and to dig into the complex and messy viscera underneath the skin of those narratives that form the so-called jazz tradition.

Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda

Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but have paid less attention to how producers’ moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda’s top universities. We identify three groups of researchers— Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. While Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of “fit” with their respective institutional cultures, the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers’ moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market.This article is forthcoming at the American Sociological Review.