Sensemaking in Turbulent Contexts: African Student Leadership in a Postcolonial Context

Abstract

This study revealed the ways that student leaders make sense of their approaches to leadership in African student organizations in the United States. Seven leaders of recognized African student organizations in universities from the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and the South took part in interviews. Discourse analysis of interview data revealed the complexity of leadership discourses and practices in a postcolonial context in showing that African student organizational leadership (a) proceeds through the accommodation and resistance to dominant Western organizational and/or colonial discourses and (b) enables leaders to make sense of theirs and their organizations’ identities in the context of discourses that marginalize African forms of cultural expression.