Earlier this week, I participated in a leadership workshop in which we talked about the importance of empathy. This led me back to a concept to which the @humetricshss team and I return regularly - ethical imagination.
#EthicalImagination moves beyond empathy, which means to suffer along with another, to feel one's way into the position of another. Empathy is a condition for the possibility of ethical imagination. But ethics concerns character; it is a question of disposition. Imagination moves beyond present reality toward what is possible. It is a turn toward justice - it animates just actions.
Ethical Imagination is the capacity to imagine one’s way into the position of another in order to discern and enact together the just conditions for mutual flourishing.
#HuMetricsHSS #ValuesEnacted #Leadership #HigherEd #Empathy #Imagination #Ethics
This week marked an important milestone for the #HuMetricsHSS team: we were able to bring an amazing group of #HigherEd leaders at the University of Washington through the full story arc of the transformative work we hope to empower.
It begins with a reflective conversation about values that builds toward a values framework designed to inform every aspect of the work. We then deconstructed products of scholarship into their constitutive processes so we could identify ways to infuse our values into the micro-transactions that shape our work.
Then we invited colleagues to identify a meaningful change they want to make. We asked them to reflect on their positionality, the power they have to effect the change, and who they would need to enter into coalition with to be successful. We ended the workshop with four concrete areas of focus, a map of relationships that influence each area, and a set of values that will shape the way the coalition works together.
The #HuMetricsHSS team is at the University of Washington this week doing a series of workshops on #ValuesEnacted scholarship and institutional transformation.
Our work here in Seattle is based in part on our article entitled “The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship”
The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative, this essay argues that by aligning values with practices, recognizing the vital processes that enrich the work produced, and grounding our indicators of quality in the degree to which we in the academy live up to the values for which we advocate, a values-enacted approach to research production and evaluation has the capacity to reshape the culture of higher education.
Chris Long
Sonja Fritzsche