Practical Leadership through Education: exploring complexities in education programmes aiming to enhance local leadership and challenge humanitarian power dynamics
Two noticeable trends in humanitarian practice in the recent decades are the push for professionalising humanitarians and the exploration of national, racial and gender power imbalances within humanitarian organisations. The panel will focus on the conjunction of these trends. It will explore whether humanitarian qualification programmes re-create or challenge existing power relations, and if so, how? Through the panel papers and discussion, we aim to examine how future leaders in the humanitarian world are envisaged, trained, encouraged, and incorporated into decision-making roles.
The panel will invite papers from academics and practitioners, especially those who are currently completing or have just finished humanitarian educational qualifications, to describe and analyse how their experiences influence their practice, modify their capacity to innovate and lead in the humanitarian sphere and highlight issues such as discrepancies in access to education and professional development in the sector. The panel’s focus would be on the experiences of those traditionally marginalised from advanced humanitarian educational opportunities due to their language, nationality, educational level, organisational status or funding.
The panel will be chaired and led by academics from the Leadership Education Academic Partnership (LEAP) and will solicit papers from current students working in the field and beyond.