Educational Leadership As a Culturally-constructed Practice ― New Directions and Possibilities

Adopting an intersectional lens, this book’s main objectives are to interrogate and extend the scholarship examining leadership as a culturally-situated practice. In so doing, it challenges existing bodies of research in three ways. Firstly, it challenges cross-cultural and multi-ethnic approaches to leadership practice and research, which continue to perpetuate unexamined constructions of culturally inclusive leadership practices as an unproblematic binary, primarily focussed on what (frequently white, male) leaders ‘do’ to (generally non-white) ‘others’. Secondly, it extends critical theories for and of leadership practice. Most frequently these approaches examine leadership and a particular category (e.g., ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status) from a unitary approach. Rarer still is scholarship which examines the intersectionality between leadership and a range of social categories, that is, which examines, for example, how leadership operates as a raced, gendered and classed construct. Finally, the book extends critical leadership research approaches by interrogating the frequently unexamined assumptions underlying the employment of different theoretical frameworks to examine leadership practice. It asks how these theoretical lens are employed by researchers in ways that may enable and/or occlude particular aspects of culturally specific leading practices.

Jane Wilkinson is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, Monash University.

Laurette Bristol is Assistant Director of the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education; and Lecturer at the School of Education, Charles Sturt University.