We are thrilled to welcome our newest host joining the Student Affairs NOW team, Dr. Mamta Accapadi! On today’s episode, Drs. Heather Shea and Keith Edwards chat with Mamta about her excitement for joining the team and the conversation and guests she is looking forward to hosting. The conversation touches on groundedness, consciousness blooms, healing, and timelessness.

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Experienced residence life leaders Dana Olivo, Erin Simpson, and Dr. David Hibbler, Jr explore different ways of doing residence life work in our current and future contexts. They explore structural possibilities and methods of reimagining our day-to-day work. They discuss innovative ways to integrate the proactive work of student learning, community building, and belonging along with the reactive work of crisis response.

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Higher education and student affairs has long needed to address attrition, retention, and leadership to create sustainable careers and better workplace cultures. ACPA President Dr. Andrea Domingue called for a Task Force on 21st Century Employment in Higher Education, which Dr. Roshaunda Breeden chaired. In this conversation, these two share the report from the task force, which describes the challenges, explores the roots in supremacist cultures, and offers recommended antidotes for action.

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Editors and authors discuss practices, principles, and processes for being in our self work, relational work, and community work for transformation. Guests discuss the why, what, and how of the theory of Being in the contexts of practice, teaching, research, conflict, and even family. They share tools to help folks be more productive and effective in working toward transformation of individuals, communities, and systems.

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Guests discuss governance issues, including overreach, ethics, and effective board governance. We unpack recent events at Michigan State University as a case study to explore governance issues for higher education institutions across the United States. Drs. Brendan Cantwell, Felecia Commodore, Demetri Morgan, and Kris Renn discuss engagement vs. overreach, negative partisanship, board accountability, and the possibility of today's challenges being leveraged to create transformational change for reimagining boards for greater effectiveness for higher education as a public good.

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This conversation features the two editors of the new book, Identity Interconnections. Lisa Delacruz Combs and Dr. Aeriel A. Ashlee discuss concepts and connections from their book, including compassionate cautions, liminality, threshold theory, healing and transformation, paradox and nuance, aspiring allyship, and even a Rihanna quote.

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Student persistence, retention, and success are the central roles of higher education. Many campuses are centering belonging in their efforts. This conversation brings together Drs. Erin M. Bentrim, Terrell Lamont Strayhorn, and Vasti Torres discuss insights from the new book, The Impact of the Sense of Belonging in College: Implications for Student Persistence, Retention, and Success. They clarify definitions, untangle related concepts, and explore individual and institutional responsibilities for creating belonging.

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The guests on this episode move beyond restorative justice in campus conduct processes to talk about the proactive and responsive ways higher education can utilize restorative philosophy, practices, principles, and justice processes. Special co-host Jessi Benveniste joins Keith Edwards in conversation with Drs. Léna Crain, Desirée Anderson, Patience Bryant, and Valerie Glassman. They discuss restorative approaches to community development, the critical roles of both accountability and grace, and the complexities of restorative justice's history and implementation.

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So many candidates and so many hiring authorities share that traditional approaches are no longer working, and the issues they always elicited are worse than ever. We need new approaches to hiring processes. Today's guests were all recommended as folks who are doing hiring radically differently. They discuss people-centered processes that honor the humanness of all involved, retaining current employees as the best hiring practice, taking a recruitment mindset rather than running candidates through an obstacle course or gauntlet, and making the processes reciprocal for the mutual benefit of candidates and organizations.

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Many student affairs professionals are considering leaving the field for so many reasons. In today's conversation, three folks who moved away from traditional student affairs roles, years ago, share their experience, transitions, and insights. They discuss disconnecting work from humanity, unlearning capitalistic mindsets, separating a work role from identity, centering our purpose to find clarity, and making sure that purpose doesn't keep us stuck in unhealthy situations.

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