Messy Leadership: Interrupting Marketplace Responses to Leadership in Learning and Teaching

Excellence, professional development, and educational leadership – all of these terms can be seen as unstable, dereferentialised, or empty signifiers - as their meaning (or the work they do) is not fixed. However, in spite of this, they have become ‘part and parcel’ of educational leadership in the Enlightenment institutions of the ‘not so’ modern universities and schools, which are in ruins. These terms are products of what Foucault (1977) termed regimes of truth, and they have become focused on meeting the perceived needs of the neoliberal marketplace. In this paper I address the regime of truth that is entitled: – Educational Leadership. Some have called this turn the ‘Learning Paradigm’ or the ‘Learnification’ of higher education. In order to reveal how this move is made possible, I have drawn upon the work of Hargreaves (1998) and Cary (2004) to investigate this epistemological construction with an increasing sense of urgency. Indeed, as a cis-gendered white woman and leader in learning and teaching I have turned back to the poststructural feminist theoretical understandings that informed my earliest work to theorise what ‘messy leadership’ might look like in this space, as a strategic move to work within/against these external reductive forces. We need to interrupt totalizing and exclusivist regimes of truth and I believe Messy Leadership has the potential to contribute to this. This helps move the discussion into the current context which I suggest is a major ‘legitimation crisis’. Sadly, this historic moment has revealed not only how unstable the notion of educational leadership is, but also how the current moves at work to stabilize and constrain leadership can be seen as a marketplace response. Finally, I suggest it is time to address the elephant in the room - if educational leadership is unstable and in crisis, how might we make use of a Messy Leadership to interrupt specific regimes of truth? As Manalansan (2014) reminds us, ““mess is seen not as aberrant but rather as constitutive of social realities and systems” (p. 99). By bringing this lens to our leadership work we can reveal the technologies of power at play, interrupt exclusive and reductionist understandings and create new spaces in leadership. We need to ensure previously erased stories and subjects are made visible and celebrated. This grounded approach to understand leadership ‘from below’, to listen carefully and constructively and to reorienting our stance as leaders has the potential to produce significant shifts in what it means to lead, by interrupting the masculinist dominant subjectivities of educational leadership.