1st Edition
Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership Psychoanalytic and Arts-based Methods
Bridging the gap between academic parlance and arts-based inquiry, this unique text presents a socio-affective exploration of educational leadership. The text challenges inherited ideological and normative assumptions and invites its reader to reimagine leadership as a dynamic, emotional, and relational process.
Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership combines the ambiguity of arts-based work with the interpretative power of psychoanalysis to illustrate the role of mutuality, personal interpretations, and formative relations on leadership practices. By emphasizing leadership as the constant striving for recognition, the chapters expose the affective dimensions that infuse educational leadership practice and in doing so, propose a new way for educational leaders to respond to complex and emotionally charged incidents in school contexts, thereby promoting democratic practice and positive collegial relations.
An engaging and insightful text, this book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and professionals in the fields of educational leadership, educational research, and psychoanalysis.
List of Photos
List of Poems
List of Plays
List of Episodes
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Affect as a Shadow in the Field of Leadership
Fantasies of Objectivity
Affect Shadows
Psychoanalytic Shadows
Beauty Shadows
Part Two: Dancing with the Unconscious – Relational Affective Forces
You Bring Something Out in Me
This Feels Familiar
Memoirists
Ghosts
In Your Dreams
Part Three: Communicative Bodies in Sensuous Encounters
Word Play
Narcissistic Signalling
Denial of Loss
Confession
Living with the Paradox
The Unbidden
Recognition
Part Four: Relational Leadership as Socio-aesthetic Inquiry
Staging Educational Leadership as Psychoanalytic Theatre
Images of Practice
Arts-Based Research
The Field of Educational Leadership
Conclusion as Distillation
References
Biography
Alysha Farrell is Assistant Professor in Department of Educational Leadership and Administration and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Brandon University, Canada.