Women who “keep the fire” are the activists, changemakers, and thought leaders in their community of belonging. In this edited book, Keeping the Fire: Narratives of Women Leaders Embracing Community, part of ILA’s Transformative Women Leaders series, published by Emerald Publishing, we seek to explore the theme of women as community leaders and how women lead through relationality, harnessing their agency, influence, and understanding of relational dynamics. This work will capture how women engage in relationality within their communities, including how they make sense of, navigate, and influence others to create change, wellbeing, and thriving within their communities. As community leaders, we describe community as a place in terms of location and proximity to the women, evoking feelings of home.

Alice Eagly and Linda Carli’s (2009) seminal work, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders (Center for Public Leadership), launched the notion of women’s “leadership” and has since been more prominent in scholarship and literature. In these efforts to bring women forward, researchers and authors have continued to use mainstream theories, often developed, and measured with masculine systems and organizations in mind, to explain how women lead (i.e. Gaucher, Friesen, & Kay, 2011; Koenig et al., 2011). In doing so, we propose that the same binary and contrasting evidence is found, which depicts women and how women engage in influencing relationality, through the same lens. Not only does this severely limit the authentic understanding of women as leaders and people of influence in their communities, but also continues to perpetuate the linear notion that leader = leading = leadership, negating the complex dynamics between individuals, groups, and communities.

While scholarly efforts have helped promote an investigation into women’s leadership, using dominant, male-centered paradigms and methods has resulted in evidence and findings that present a limited view of the complex ways in which women lead and engage in relationships. Furthermore, there is research to suggest that only stereotype-consistent information will be generalized across members of a group (see Stangor & McMillan, 1992), which not only reflects in how (epistemology and assumptions) research on women is conducted, but also carries assumptive theoretical applications, as well as participant implicit biases and the like.

The theme of this volume focuses on women within community and how they develop their use of agency, influence, sense of responsibility and accountability, and their understanding of relationality as an organic evolution of leadership, and as an embodiment of other aspects of leadership. This notion goes beyond the leader paradigm asking authors for insights into how women think about relationality, including context, responsibility towards, and personal accountability, and how they engage in collective work for the greater needs of the community. We seek chapters that highlight stories, narratives, and portraits exploring the lived experiences of women who inspire, influence, and ultimately transform their communities. The intent of capturing these stories of women “who keep the fire” is to center the everyday work of women who create and sustain change for the betterment of their communities.

We are specifically interested in authors who examine intersectional identities by capturing the stories and lived experiences of women leading in their communities outside of the traditional leadership models. We seek chapters from various perspectives and methodologies illuminating stories of women community leaders. These chapters should focus on, but are not limited to:

1. Women community change agents and people of influence in history;
2. Narratives of transformative women community leaders as individuals or with a connected group.
3. Critical qualitative studies of women community leaders and ways in which they disrupt traditional notions and applications of leadership within community.
4. Global women change agents/community leaders, providing accounts of non-Western forms of keeping the fire through care work, advocacy, policy change, and more.
5. Phenomenological, ethnographic, portraits, narratives, case studies, and/or auto ethnographic insights into the essence of what it means to “keep the fire.”
6. Future directions of community leadership for women considering questions such as: What new challenges might arise? What new practices should be considered when furthering community leadership/change agency for women?
7. Critical qualitative methodologies to further the practice of community leadership individually and collectively.
8. Ways of being in order to move out of a leader=leadership paradigm and towards a collective system and communityship understanding.
9. Ways in which the intersectional identities and roles of women contribute to or challenge the work of being a community leader/change agent.