Thinking with Michel Foucault in Educational Leadership

Richard Niesche is Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Denise Mifsud is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK.

• Series Editor’s Foreword, Mark Murphy (University of Glasgow, UK)AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Bringing the Work of Michel Foucault to Educational Leadership and Policy, Richard Niesche (UNSW Sydney, Australia) and Denise Mifsud (University of Bath, UK)1. Michel Foucault and Educational Leadership: The State of the Field and Where to from Here?, Denise Mifsud (University of Bath, UK), Richard Niesche (UNSW Sydney, Australia) and Adam Bongers (UNSW Sydney, Australia)2. Feeling the Way in the Dark: Archaeological Research in Educational Leadership, Adam Bongers (UNSW Sydney, Australia)3. Subjectivation as Ethopoiesis. A Tool for Critical Social Research, Roberto Serpieri (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)4. Foucault, Decolonial Thinking and Critical Leadership Studies in Education: Expanding the Epistemic and Ontological Toolbox, Francesca Peruzzo (University of Birmingham, UK) and Emanuela Spanò (University of Cagliari, Italy)5. Inanimate Leadership: The Ability of Inanimate ‘Things’ to Govern in Education, Christina Gowlett (The University of Queensland, Australia)6. Doing Dispositive Analysis on Educational Policy: Applying Inclusive Politics as an Example, Bjørn Hamre (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)7. ‘What’s Happening to Me?’: School Leaders Resisting the Impossible Bargain, Chris Dolan and Robert Hattam (University of South Australia, Australia)8. Experiencing the Dispositif of Educational Leadership: Performativity and the Ethics of Leading Critically, Saadia Adnan and Stephen Kelly (University of Adelaide, Australia)

This book demonstrates that the field of educational leadership is not intellectually dead. So many public resources have been wasted on ‘what works’ agendas that do not work for educational leaders, leading and leadership. Instead, thinking with Foucault is methodologically necessary because the authors show that educational leadership is educative.