Hanson, "Herding Cats," in Ratcliffe and Rickly, _Performing Feminism and Administration_, 2010

Summary: This piece follows the pattern of narrative and reflection/theorizing. The narrative centers on Hanson's experience coordinating the Basic Writing program at Ball State. She identifies three main goals she focused on during her tenure--strengthening the community of the writing program, revising the undergraduate curriculum, and revising (and expanding) the faculty reward system. She discusses how her gender and her commitment to feminist goals influenced her administration. The most developed section is that in which she discusses community, and appropriately so, since a strong community is at the heart of the rest of her goals. It was also this section I found to be the most interesting, and I saw strong ties between Hanson's descriptions and the theme of "directed chaos" (I'm sure I'll come up with a better term than that) that is emerging from these recent readings. Hanson discusses how she strove to open lines of communication among her colleagues, how she chose to be titled "coordinator" to emphasize the community rather than a top-down leadership model, and how the faculty shared research, inquiry, and problem-solving. There is also a strong thread of locality and the contextual nature of solutions present in the work. Hanson writes that "contextual knowledge is ultimately what we must learn from, and the context is not a single administrator's, but that shared by every member of the community" (185).

Response: This was an interesting narrative. Hanson labels many of her leadership choices as feminist--seeking input from many sources, trusting her intuition over authority, privileging human relationships. These are certainly consistent with what I know of feminist theory; however, I think they are also consistent with other management suggestions/styles in many of the other readings that were not operating from a feminist viewpoint. This is interesting to me. Is it because feminist ideas/theorists/practitioners have successfully changed the way we manage from the more "male," autocratic practices of the past? I'm sure different people would answer that in different ways. Personally, I think there's a lot of merit to that interpretation. I know some would say that means we're post-feminist, but I think there's still a need for explicitly feminist praxis.

Uses: How to "manage" as a WPA.