Our article examines the challenges that “outsiders” face as academic leaders in higher education, with a special emphasis on the specific complications prevailing in the rhetoric and composition fields within English studies. We survey descriptive statistics and historical evidence to locate several of the problems confronting women and others newly and provisionally admitted to—and more often, still excluded from—the highest levels of academic leadership. Then, we bring together feminist-revisionist advocacy tools and Ernest Boyer’s alternative vision for “engaged scholarship” to suggest ways that leadership work formerly categorized as simply administrative duty or mere service be recognized for its broad-ranging impact both on campuses and the public domain.

Extending Bakhtin's chronotopic theory to the interpretation of nonfictional texts, this article examines the role of narrative conventions in the epistemological development of a health care field. The authors argue that changes marking the emergence of occupational therapy as an autonomous profession illustrate how explanatory narrative frames emerge from and embody assumptions about the world. Taking up pivotal lectures by key figures in this field as material for analysis, the authors demonstrate how biomedical, psychosocial, and dialogic-intersubjective narrative genres frame the dynamics of the therapeutic situation for clinical practitioners and other members of the field. By using chronotopic analysis to understand the narrative-epistemic transformation of academic and professional fields, the authors provide new ways to think about the long-term dialogue between explanatory frameworks in knowledge-making communities.