Meet Macharia Gatundu
Graduate research assistant, Leading Change Institutes
gatundu@k-state.edu
Learner | Intellection | Ideation | Individualization | Relator
Campus Office: Leadership Studies Building
Responsibilities
As a research assistant in Leading Change Institutes, my work focuses on community and belonging, and community engaged scholarship with a particular attention to emotions, social positions and the everyday, “mundane” and “whimsical” practices of being human. Within Leading Change Institutes, I also serve as a collaborative research lead in the African Leading Change Institutes Curriculum for Educators – a program that seeks to develop, through collaborations with diverse African(ist) scholars and practitioners, a leadership curriculum that is in dialogue with the realities of leadership work across Africa.
- M.A. in Sociology, Kansas State University
- B.Ed. in English and Literature, Kenyatta University
In addition to being interested in leadership in everyday life—the ordinary, quirky, and whimsical ways people show up as human, I am a sociologist of emotions. My thesis, “Visions and Re-visions of Community: Praxis and Narratives of Belonging among International Students,” introduces the idea of “translation labor.” Building on Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor, translation labor names the emotional work international students do—often unseen and unrecognized—to make themselves visible and understood, emotionally, socially, and intellectually, in unfamiliar social and academic worlds.
Staley School of Leadership
252 Leadership Studies Building
1300 Mid-Campus Dr. N.
Manhattan, KS 66506
785-532-6085
leadership@k-state.edu