ABOUT ME
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Advanced Studies, Leadership, and Policy at Morgan State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies. I am also a research associate on the Delphi Project for the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education. I study the organization and administration of colleges and universities, focusing explicitly on the dynamics of the higher education workplace, the labor subjugation it engenders, the processes and priorities of contemporary organizational leadership, and the political forces that shape institutional and organizational structures. I am an interdisciplinary scholar who leans on various field/disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, Black studies, feminist studies, political science, critical theory, and organizational studies. I regularly consult with colleges and universities interested in advancing liberatory organizational change. I am the author of Higher Education Leadership: Challenging Tradition and Forging Possibilities, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2024. I received my Ph.D. from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California under the direction of Adrianna Kezar.
A recently updated version of my CV can be found here.
CURRENT PROJECTS
My current book project, Keeping House: Administrative Assistants and the Impossible Demands of the Modern University, dives into the distinctive and often unpredictable lives of administrative assistants in American universities. These individuals, whose voices and perspectives have long been marginalized, play a crucial role in sustaining both the university and the people within it—holding intimate personal and institutional knowledge, as well as secrets few can know. The book sketches the notion of “nuclear labor,” a profoundly political type of labor that entangles bureaucratic institutional reproduction with social and emotional reproduction, mirroring the nuclear family's contours. The concept of ‘nuclear labor’ exposes how workers’ labor is shaped by privatized love and care, mothering, selflessness, nonreciprocity, ensuring order, and the constant pressure to meet impossible demands. This book explores both its detrimental effects on workers and how institutions are privileged as a result. However, the book also illustrates how administrative assistants rebel against nuclear family ideals through community building and individual and collective acts of resistance. The book is under contract with SUNY Press.
I am working on a series of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical projects related to understanding the evolving landscape of the higher education workplace, particularly in light of the surge in unionization and union activity. These projects include theorizing the struggle to enact social justice unionism in higher education, exploring how staff leverage their unions to navigate organizational constraints and how they organize out of union limitations, examining higher education leaders' perceptions of the contemporary higher education workplace, and framing labor organizing as an emerging civic engagement movement for students.
RECENT JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS
If you do not have institutional access to any of my publications, I would be more than happy to send PDFs - just send me an email.
Harper, J. (2024). Organizing leadership education and learning for liberation. New Directions for Student Leadership. [link]
Harper, J., & Saltmarsh, J. (2024). Pausing in pursuit of a new social contract between higher education and society. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. [link]
Harper, J. (2023). Hiring and cultivating equity and social justice‐committed community college presidential assistants. New Directions for Community Colleges. [link]
RECENT open & accessible work
Below is a sample of my public scholarship. Click on titles to be directed to the site where the open & accessible work is published.