NSLC Program—Mastering Leadership
Mastering Leadership (1 or 2 credits)Course Description: In this course, you will engage leadership from both the academic and practical perspective. We will explore what it means to be a leader; different leadership styles; attributes of good leaders; and the role of vision, goals, and strategy. Our means of exploration will be through instructor-led discussions, class exercises, and lectures which build on the framework of leadership covered in the NSLC Mastering Leadership program and focus on the most important aspects of leadership.
Professor for sessions at the University of California, Berkeley: Leah Gates is a fourth-year doctoral student at American University’s School of International Service, where she specializes in military organizational behavior and gender issues. She has taught and assisted courses in human rights, world politics, and peace and conflict studies. Outside of academia, she is an active participant in health education programs, designing innovative strategies in collaboration with Washington, D.C., organizations like The Women’s Collective and V-Day D.C. She also devotes time to young women’s leadership development through mentorship and skills workshops. Leah was proud to present at the AIDS 2012: World Conference on HIV and AIDS, Global Village as a health educator discussing public/private partnerships in health promotion. She is active in national scholastic communities around military behavior, wartime human rights abuses, and women and political leadership, where she regularly presents her own research on these topics.
Professor for sessions at George Washington University: deRaismes Combes is currently completing her doctoral degree at the School of International Service at American University. She is looking at the security/power implications of the discursive framing of 9/11 on contemporary American identity. deRaismes received her AB in French and War and Peace Studies at Dartmouth College and later completed a dual Masters program in Paris on international relations and ‘la sociologie des conflits.’ She has lived in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, which has helped foster a strong interest in power and identity, the effects of words and images, and why/how the world gets constructed in specific ways. Her scholarship has included work on the Arab/Israeli conflict, ethnic and civil wars, as well as the more broadly theoretical underpinnings of international relations. She now wants to be a [benevolent] dictator of a small country, but she was a shy child who once assumed she was not cut out to be a leader. Since then, however, she has headed a number of organizations, as well as a small business. So what, therefore, makes a leader, and what types of power are associated with leadership? Such questions not only help inform her studies but also how she acts in the world.
Professor for sessions at Northwestern University: Namalie Jayasinghe is currently completing her doctoral degree at the School of International Service at American University, studying the gendered impact of natural disasters in South Asia. Namalie received her BA in economics from New York University and later obtained an MS in environment and development at the London School of Economics. She has been active in the field of sustainable development, as a volunteer at a rural microfinance group in Uganda and as a researcher for Global Witness, a human rights group. She has a strong interest in global environmental issues and has worked with the UNDP in Sri Lanka on community-led solutions to environmental concerns, in areas such as biodiversity, climate change, and land degradation. Namalie has taught classes relating to gender and international development, as well as global politics. She most recently comes from working at a national social justice foundation in New York, focusing on economic development, gender inequality, and post-disaster rehabilitation, particularly in the Gulf Coast and across the United States.
