Welcome
COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE is a semester-long learning laboratory, a rare (in my experience) opportunity to cultivate, without fear of failure or punishment, practices associated with generative human collectives. How do I, you, and we co-create the kinds of collectives–workplaces, classrooms, clubs, families, dorms, committees, co-ops, and research teams–we dream of? Organizations that are adaptive and accountable … organizations that empower us to do good, engaged, meaningful work … organizations that uplift and challenge us to stretch into our unique human agency … organizations that foster connection, clarity, and growth out of the normal stuff of conflict, miscommunication, and mistakes. Being human together is inescapable; we must work and live together to achieve shared goals and to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Being human together is also complex and messy, sometimes frustrating, sometimes harmful. What organizational (un/re) learnings and restorations are possible when we intentionally muddle through the messiness? LET’S FIND OUT, BY PRACTICING TOGETHER.
Meet your Professor
An eclectic teacher-scholar, Dr. Junisbai studies authoritarianism (with a focus on post-Soviet Central Asia), organizational culture and learning, and liberatory education. Her work investigates subjects that uncover the good, the bad, and the ugly of a wide range of human collectives, including internal challenges to strong-man presidential regimes, the promise and problems of prison education in Southern California, and how U.S. employers support (and fail to support) workers’ complex family-building journeys. She has been a faculty member in the Organizational Studies field group at Pitzer College since fall 2016, has taught in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange since fall 2018, and has been instrumental in the design and implementation of Pitzer’s Inside-Out Pathway to B.A.Program. Dr. Junisbai’s first book, The Pitfalls of Family Rule: Patronage Norms, Family Overreach, and Political Crisis in Kazakhstan and Beyond, is out now from Cornell University Press (2025).
