What is Academic Leadership?

In the first couple of weeks, through articles and class discussions, we have been able to understand more about the course and its goals. To me, the concept of Academic Leadership revolves greatly around understanding what true leadership is, and, through that, being able to turn activities and topics that we really enjoy learning more about, and turning them into academic subjects. It has been emphasized to us that anything we enjoy – as non-academic as it may seem – can easily be turned into something academic, which we will be working more on on our individual projects. As the video linked below states, for me, academic leadership broadly involves "looking beyond the leadership of the institution to ways people think more broadly about their academic work." In my perspective, this means expanding our knowledge on what "academic" really means, and how we can relate other things that we are interested and passionate about, turning them into academic topics that we are eager to work on.  

For the purpose of this post, watch the video below from  0:00 to 0:46

A topic that I have found myself being eager to learn is psychology; I have always been interested to learn more about how our mind works, and what leads people to do the things they do. Last year, in our English class, after watching some of Sam Harris’ lectures, we discussed the topic of religion and free will. These caused great controversy in our class, for everyone either strongly agreed or disagreed with Harris’ argument. Since we only looked into a couple of topics, I would be very interested to look into other concepts that have been presented, not focusing only on Sam Harris, but also integrating other psychologists, such as Steven Pinker. I think it would be extremely intriguing to look at various different arguments and perspectives, being then able to make my own conclusions and sophisticated opinion on the different topics being analyzed. However, I do have other interests that are very different from this specific topic, and I will definitely have to ponder more on the subject in order to make the correct decision for my Individual Project.