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.

Alysha Farrell is Assistant Professor in Department of Educational Leadership and Administration and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Brandon University, Canada.