The emergence of the Occupy movements along with other social movements in 2011 elevated the idea of radically decentralized 'leaderless' social movement organizations. We argue that looking at such an alternative, horizontalist form of organizing presents an opportunity to reframe how we understand leadership. This paper illustrates how the coordination of the Occupy London movement was accomplished horizontally in the absence of formal organization, leadership or authority structures. Using an ethnographic approach, we show how this movement generated a 'multimodal' repertoire of protest that included: i) the politically effective occupation of urban space; ii) the ability to deploy symbols as compelling forms of aesthetic questioning; and iii) the creation of politically-charged spectacles that allowed the movement to appropriate the news agendas of established broadcast media. The findings of this paper challenge the language of leadership and contribute to understandings of feminist forms of leadership and leaderless organizing by explaining one way that 'leadership' occurs in horizontal organizational structures such as social movements. Namely, we demonstrate how the modes of space, symbols, and spectacles effectively replace the role of 'leader' in the absence of formal organizational structures.

In this paper, we describe a mechanism for subverting the institutional-level neo-liberal hidden curricula of responsibility learning in universities by using a positive hidden curriculum based on extra-curricular activities partnering staff and students. In our study, we leverage projects from an institution-sponsored Justice, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) initiative as notional ‘Trojan horses’ to instil within university students a more reflexive awareness of responsibility that they can take with them when they graduate. In delivering this positive hidden (extra)curriculum, staff are seemingly performing the formal agenda of the institution’s responsibility agenda while undermining its managerialist hidden curriculum by working in tandem with students. Our key findings – student reflection and voice – are evidence of the positive hidden curriculum implementation. Our contributions are twofold. First, we demonstrate that positive hidden curricula can serve as a tool of micro-activism to subvert managerialist hidden curricula. Second, we offer another dimension to Semper and Blasco’s interpersonal strategies for challenging the hidden curriculum by showing that collaborative projects between students and staff can be sites of a positive hidden (extra)curriculum. Collaborative initiatives such as the ones we describe in this article provide a tangible foundation for reconsidering creative and intrinsic approaches to responsible learning environments.

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