Ecological materialism: redescribing educational leadership through Actor-Network Theory

ABSTRACTIn the latest two decades, there has been an increasing number of publications in education studies drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). However, the uptake of ANT in education studies was not immediate, and the investigations on educational leadership through ANT have been rare. With the aim of promoting the study of educational leadership through ANT, this article shows that ANT is a vocabulary to counter modernistic thinking in education and brings ecological materialism to critical educational leadership studies. While modernity inscribes educational leadership in binary (mind vs body; people vs things; human vs machine) and humanist thinking (humans above things), ANT invites to see it as a more-than-human activity of (re)assemblage of people, technologies, and things for the (re)composition of the common world.KEYWORDS: Actor-Network Theoryeducation studieseducational leadershipecological materialismcritical studiesmodernity Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This article develops some arguments that have been anticipated by Landri (Citation2020)2 This is also consistent with research in organisation studies (Czarniawska and Sevon Citation1996).3 The idea of educational leadership as more-than-human activity follows parallel attempts to see for example health as more-than-human Lupton, D., Wozniak-O’Connor, V., Rose, M. and Watson A. (Citation2023).4 Here I follow Tummons’ strategy of updating Latour with Latour, but in a different way (Tummons Citation2020; Citation2021).5 An interesting philosophical work to develop a ‘things-centered pedagogy’ has been written by Vlieghe and Zamojski (Citation2019) that provides a lot of inspiration for this article.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaolo LandriPaolo Landri is Research Director of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS). Recently, he has published Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory London: Routledge (2020) and with Denise Mifsud (2021) Enacting and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership within the Mediterranean Region. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Sense Publisher. Currently, he Co-Editor in Chief of the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) https://journals.sagepub.com/home/eer