Advocating a Post-structuralist Politics for Educational Leadership

Abstract

Post-structuralist discourses have usually been associated with forms of critique and deconstruction of social, cultural and philosophical phenomena. However, this article attempts to provide a generative approach to understanding educational leadership through Michel Foucault’s notions of power and subjectification, and Judith Butler’s notions of performativity and discursive agency through re-signification. We argue that leadership is not simply a list of traits, characteristics or behaviours to be implemented. Rather, we argue that leaders are performatively constituted through everyday practices and discourses. The aim is to interrupt prevailing discourses that often re-inscribe certain forms of meaning and understanding in educational leadership. This disruption subsequently provides possibility for putting forward otherwise silenced ideas about what leadership is and how leadership ‘identity’ (subjectivity) is formed, thus expanding the methodological tools scholars can use to talk about leadership.

Keywords:

• Post-structuralism
• Foucault
• Butler
• power
• subjectification
• performativity

Notes

1. ‘Interpellation’ and ‘hail’ are words drawn from Butler’s version of how the subject is discursively formed. Butler (1997, pp. 1–6) reworks Althusser’s famous example of a policeman hailing (hence the term) by calling out ‘hey, you there’ to a passerby on the street, and without calling a specific name, the passerby turns and responds. In that moment, the subject is inaugurated (comes into existence). For an easily accessible explanation of this, see Jagger (2008, pp. 90–94).