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| author |
Ian Lee Brown
| | title |
From Struggle to Belonging: A Journey of Resilience, Forgiveness, and Love with Deep Insights into the Power of Authentic Leadership in Health Care — A Creative Dissertation
| | abstract |
This dissertation explores the transformative potential of authentic leadership grounded in lived experiences of marginalization. Using critical autoethnography and narrative methodology, the study centers the author's identity as a Black, gay, formerly undocumented and unhoused immigrant to examine how personal narrative can function as both method and theory. The work asserts that storytelling is not only a means of personal healing but also a critical tool for challenging dominant paradigms within health care leadership. The central argument is that authentic leadership—emerging from the fractures of exclusion and refined through self-reflection—creates deeper trust, fosters inclusive organizational cultures, and advances social justice. In contrast to hierarchical, detached leadership models, authenticity demands vulnerability, ethical clarity, and relational engagement. Within health care systems often marked by systemic inequities and institutional harm, authentic leadership becomes not a soft ideal but a necessary intervention. Key themes include the relationship between identity and leadership, the role of belonging in organizational transformation, and the capacity of narrative to disrupt dominant epistemologies. By positioning lived experience as valid and essential knowledge, this dissertation contributes to leadership theory by offering a more humane, culturally responsive, and justice-oriented model of influence. Ultimately, it bridges the gap between personal and professional, theory and practice, street and academy—reimagining leadership as a practice of both survival and systemic change.
| | school |
The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University
| | degree |
D.M.H. (2026)
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| advisor |
Merel Visse
Liana Piehler
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| full text | IBrown.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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