Workshop: Using Narrative as Sociolegal Method to Advance Professional Learning and Diversity in the Academy

Ohio University, Athens OH

Investigators

Abstract

The project seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars who focus on law and society in order to explore how professional failures can be integrated into models for professional success. The academic job market, the tenure and promotion process, attempts to move into full-time administration, publication and other realities of academic life yield stories of success that are often passed on in mentoring and professional development workshops. It is relatively rare, however, to confront and share the many more instances of failure that occur in any given career. Failures are typically hidden and can even become part of a destructive identity of shame or secrecy. How might such stories be transformed and integrated into a holistic approach that enables scholars, teachers and administrators to develop in relation to stories that present fuller pictures of professional life? The workshop will integrate law and social science with psychological research to advance theories about how cognitive biases affect the understanding of how to resolve problems. It will broaden participation across several scientific disciplines that are challenged by failures to understand interdisciplinary work, the limited breadth of knowledge and experience of women and men of all races and ethnicities, full- and part-time professors at different career stages, students and practitioners, and parents and other caregivers. The goal is to formulate and disseminate initial conclusions designed to be the basis for an ongoing conversation through traditional and newer platforms (such as online blogs). This discussion will inform many disciplines and industries about the significance of recognizing loss, error and failure as the keys to individual and institutional success. In short, this workshop will seek to understand achievement in the academy by examining loss, error, and failure. The workshop will explore the idea that the traditional view of achievement is warped by survivorship bias. Professionals often hear advice from those who have succeeded that then offer advice based on those successes. Individuals receiving such advice then tend to attribute outcomes to their own individual efforts rather than to institutions and structures outside their control. The traditional approach is blind to the impact of structures of power such as those that create challenges to underrepresented scholars. However, it also ignores the ways in which narratives that include tales of failure can provide enormous opportunities for structural, institutional and personal change. The workshop will integrate sociolegal scholarship on failures of law with the psychological and sociological literatures on survivorship bias.