‘Outsiders within’? Deconstructing the educational administration scholar

Abstract

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, field and capital, as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational administration academics who share a scholarly disposition towards critical approaches to theory and practice. Such a location positions our work as marginal at best in educational administration scholarship and research, for it is a field characterized primarily by an orientation towards problem-solving and scientific rationality. We explore how our positioning as ‘outsiders within’ the field, combined with our multiple positions in fields such as feminism, unionism, schools and academia, has shaped a disposition towards critical scholarship. We suggest that the resources, which a disposition towards the critical may engender, are urgently required forms of capital at a time when there may be a powerful political investment in ignoring or overlooking the moral, ethical and political life force of educational administration scholarship as a potentially fertile site of intellectual activity.

Notes

1. We are indebted to our colleague Laurette Bristol, for her insightful observations in this section.

2. Many thanks to our colleague Laurette Bristol for this point.