Faculty Agency in a U.S.-Colombia University Development Partnership: Bending Toward Justice
2017-06
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Faculty Agency in a U.S.-Colombia University Development Partnership: Bending Toward Justice
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2017-06
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This dissertation explores faculty engagement at the crossroads of higher education and international development policy through a comparative case study of a U.S.-Colombia human rights university partnership. There is a tendency for ideologies, policies, and practices to flow from North to South in university development partnerships, which reinforces deeply entrenched hierarchies and structural inequalities within the global political economy. This study investigates the cumulative effect on faculty working within such partnerships. Faculty engagement is examined through interviews with faculty participants and international development specialists across five universities and two development agencies in the United States and Colombia. Interviewees reflect on faculty engagement at various stages—design, initiation, negotiation, collaboration, and conclusion—of a three-year partnership. A focus on faculty engagement—namely faculty agency perspectives and behaviors—across four dimensions—individual, institutional, partnership, and geopolitical—highlights multiple layers of influence and inequality within these partnerships. This study advances two key arguments. First, this study calls for greater attention to the role of professional capital —a product of human, social, and decisional capital—in perpetuating or overcoming inequalities within university development partnerships. Second, this study affirms the importance of empathy and the potential of individual participants to reduce and even reverse the power dynamics inherent within many North-South partnerships. Although university development partnerships do not occur on equal terrain, this study reveals opportunities for participants to make them a little more equitable and expand faculty agency in the process.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.June 2017. Major: Educational Policy and Administration. Advisors: David Chapman, Joan DeJaeghere. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 228 pages.
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Pekol, Amy. (2017). Faculty Agency in a U.S.-Colombia University Development Partnership: Bending Toward Justice. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/190510.
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