Postcritical school leadership encounters

Establishing quality education as a human right, public undertaking, and common good representative of humanity and the planet through imagining a “new social contract for education” is an ambitious endeavor and crucial to (post)humanity’s myriad ways of knowing, living, and being. This article introduces postcritical educational leadership as an indispensable element in shaping the future of education by informing and implementing new social contracts within schools, the wider education system, and other potential spaces of response-ability and intra-action (Barad in Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007; Derrida Today 3(2):240–268, 2010). Within complex, rapidly changing, and self-generating systems, modes, models, and mechanisms of governance become re-territorialized, constantly forming new assemblages consisting of new structures, actors, and context-dependent educational landscapes. Dynamic and heterogeneous assemblages make a static understanding of governance not only superfluous; they make it impossible. We need to loosen power, stability, and neoliberal structures to generate new forms of participative leadership—particularly at the school level—characterized by cooperation, solidarity, trust, and justice. We therefore reframe educational leadership as becoming among all actors within multifaceted, rhizomatic (education) system(s) (Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1987). We argue for a multi-perspectival view of leadership that includes a focus on how school leaders perceive their own becoming (e.g., their needs, positionalities, emotions) and how this becoming intra-acts with increasing social, cultural, political, and ecological complexity. Deeper engagement through introspection, self-analysis, and a processing of self-in-context together with exploration of school leaders’ experiences with entanglements and assemblages will inform new governance arrangements and just and sustainable future-thinking and future-acting in education.