Liberal F(R)ictions: Identity Tensions in Liberal Arts Colleges

Pushi Prasad will be presenting the results of an in-depth field study of faculty encounters with diversity in three liberal arts colleges (one of which is Skidmore College) in the northeastern U.S. Drawing on data from 165 interviews with faculty and administrators, institutional reports, internal correspondence, and personal observations, her study examined the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion with a focus on recurring tensions around diversity in all three institutions. The presentation will discuss the presence and influence of different narrative communities in all three colleges, and the experiences of Faculty of Color and international faculty. The presentation will be followed by a discussion of the study’s relevance to different stakeholders at Skidmore College.

Presentation

Intended for Faculty and Staff
Fri. September 30, 2022
1:30–3:00 p.m.
Wyckoff Center

Biography

Pushkala Prasad is the Arthur Zankel Chair Professor of Management and Liberal Arts at Skidmore College, where she teaches in the Management and Business Department and the International Affairs Program. Before coming to Skidmore, she was a faculty member at Clarkson University, the University of Calgary, and Lund University in Sweden, where she held the E-on Chair Professorship in Corporate Social Responsibility. Professor Prasad received her Ph.D. in management and social theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a prolific scholar whose research has looked at resistance to technological change, tensions within workplace diversity, corporate social irresponsibility, and the changing contours of global capitalism. Her work has been published in such pinnacle journals as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Research in the Sociology of Organizations,and the Journal of Management Studies. She is the author of Crafting Qualitative Research (Routledge), which has been translated into Japanese, and co-editor of Managing the Organizational Melting Pot (Sage Publications) and the Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies. Dr. Prasad’s research has been consistently funded by such agencies as the Alberta Energy Corporation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Swedish Quality of Worklife Foundation, and the Jan Wallander Foundation of the Bank of Commerce of Sweden. At Skidmore, Pushkala Prasad teaches courses on International Business, Diversity, and Discrimination in the American Workplace and Racialized Global Capitalism. She is currently working on two book projects. One explores diversity tensions within liberal arts colleges and the other examines the development and trajectory of racialized global capitalism.