Experiencing the Dispositif of Educational Leadership: Performativity and the Ethics of Leading Critically
Date
2026
Authors
Adnan, S.
Kelly, S.
Editors
Niesche, R.
Mifsud, D.
Mifsud, D.
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Book chapter
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Thinking with Michel Foucault in Educational Leadership: Methodological and Conceptual Challenges, 2026 / Niesche, R., Mifsud, D. (ed./s), Ch.8, pp.207-236
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Saadia Adnan and Stephen Kelly
Conference Name
Abstract
When asked to respond to the effects of policy demands, educational leaders might pose three key questions. First, how is my work being constituted; second, how am I being asked to perform as a leader and third, how will I act according to my (critical) interpretations of the expectations placed upon myself? We invite readers to engage with these questions which serve as a pedagogical through line to help reader’s respond to their encounter with critical theoretical concepts presented throughout this chapter. In this chapter we draw on Foucault’s (1980a) key analytic concept of dispositif, which we bring into conversation with Butler’s (1997) notion of performativity to help make visible and sensible the struggles educational leaders face when responding to our questions and negotiating the performative demands of leadership. As we will discuss in greater detail, the analytic concept of dispositif is multifaceted, within which we note the institutionalized presence of knowledge-making practices (discourses), the production and dissemination of regimes of truth that are invested in the management of human populations, the circulation of power relations between existents and the formation of particular selves (subjectivities) (Foucault 1982, 2005). In doing so, this chapter captures the notion of performativity in the work of educational leaders and how their relations are composed out of a complex network of sense-making practices that appear as a (fabricated) set of intelligible reasons to act in particular ways. We will use these conceptual tools to problematize how educational leaders can be caught in a complex web of power relations, conflicting ideologies and external pressures specific to their contexts. The contexts we draw upon surface from policies that govern educational leaders’ work in Pakistan and Australia. However, we wish to move beyond the contingencies and constraints of questions one and two to examine how Principals may not only critically recognize the circulation of knowledge-making practices on their subjectivity in an unfolding dispositif but also express a certain autonomy and, through acting out of an ethical commitment to the conditions they are experiencing, contribute to the dispositif’s shaping. In acknowledging differences and similarities between these contexts, we hint at an enveloping and organic dispositif that may, in its emergence, appear as practices that are familiar to educational leaders across the world. Before discussing the concept of dispositif with its intersecting modes of discourse, power/knowledge, regimes of truth and subjectivity, we introduce two contexts that we will use to ground our discussion.
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