{"id":60902,"date":"2019-09-30T11:15:52","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T15:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=60902"},"modified":"2019-10-01T08:29:12","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T12:29:12","slug":"brock-researcher-launches-book-on-african-canadian-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2019\/09\/brock-researcher-launches-book-on-african-canadian-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock researcher launches book on African Canadian leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is there a crisis in African Canadian leadership? That was the question Brock University Associate Professor of Sociology Tamari Kitossa set out to answer when he launched a book project on the topic nine years ago.<\/p>\n<p>According to Kitossa&#8217;s newly-released book, <a href=\"https:\/\/utorontopress.com\/ca\/african-canadian-leadership-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>African Canadian Leadership: Continuity, Transition, and Transformation<\/em><\/a>, the answer to that question depends on how leadership is conceptualized and the degree to which that leadership threatens power structures and white neoliberalism ideas of race and multiculturalism.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I initially conceived this book around 2010, there were quite a few newspaper articles touting the death of black leadership in Canada,\u201d says Kitossa, who co-edited the book along with Erica Lawson from Western University and Philip Howard from McGill.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing a part of various black communities and the activism taking place there, the idea that there\u2019s a crisis in black leadership didn\u2019t make much sense to me because it didn\u2019t fit my experience. So I sat down to conceptualize a book that would challenge that notion,\u201d says Kitossa.<\/p>\n<p>The book explores commonly-held ideas of what constitutes effective leadership and how Eurocentric definitions of leadership in Canadian society tend to focus on charisma, ignore cultural and community dynamics, and tries to lump representation of black communities under one black leader.<\/p>\n<p>The book also presents alternative forms of leadership in various contexts, such as class, gender, sexuality and politics, saying there is a \u201cneed to imagine and recover innovative forms of leadership for the future,\u201d and calls for more research on the nature and implementation of African Canadian leadership.<\/p>\n<p><em>African Canadian Leadership: Continuity, Transition, and Transformation <\/em>is scheduled to launch Thursday, Oct. 3 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Rotary Room at the St. Catharines Public Library. The fact the book is launching in the same month as the Canadian federal election is an irony not lost on Kitossa.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe can think about the limited extent to which we have African Canadians elected to Member of Parliament positions, and from there, what role they play in their parties\u201d says Kitossa on the book launch\u2019s timing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is there a crisis in African Canadian leadership? That was the question Brock University Associate Professor of Sociology Tamari Kitossa set out to answer when he launched a book project on the topic nine years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":60913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,1,4,38],"tags":[8296,2524,522,565,8297,2723,1095,4280],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60902"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60964,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60902\/revisions\/60964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}