Tuesday, June 6, 2023, 12:30 pm ET

Successfully Navigating Academia: Structural and Agentic Lessons for Workloads, Writing, and the Workforce

There is no single solution for thriving in academia. In reality, a constant interaction exists between forces under our control (i.e., agency) and forces outside of our control (i.e., structures) that impact and impede our ability to successfully navigate academic careers. In this session, Dr. Damani White-Lewis will consider this duality within three essential elements of academic training: workloads, writing, and the workforce. Suitable for graduate students, early career faculty, and professional staff, attendees will learn personal strategies and the necessary structural conditions that can be advocated for to improve their workload balance, scholarly writing, and hiring prospects.

Recording of Dr. White-Lewis’ keynote

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Damani White-Lewis

Assistant Professor of Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education

Damani White-Lewis, PhD, is an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. White-Lewis studies racial inequality in academic careers and contexts using multiple methods and theories from organizational behavior and social psychology.

Dr. White-Lewis’ work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has appeared in The Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, and others. His dissertation received the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Association of Chief Diversity Officers. He has also received honors and awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education, and the American Educational Research Association. As a public scholar, he has been featured in outlets such as Inside Higher Ed and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and regularly advises college campuses and external organizations on addressing issues related to the academic profession, racial equity, and institutional transformation and systemic change in higher education. Learn more

This keynote will be held on Cornell University central campus and open to faculty and staff as well as all registrants of the full institute, and livestream access will also be available to remotely participating graduate students and postdocs.