This counternarrative study positions two distinct bodies of literature in conversation: mid-level district leadership in the literature on educational change and anti-racist approaches to leadership framed through Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Interviews with twelve, mid-level district leaders committed to anti-racism in Ontario, Canada, reveal fundamental differences in leaders’ knowledges and capacities compared to those identified in the literature on educational change and promoted in the corresponding leadership frameworks in Ontario. In centering power, racialization, and whiteness as a logic of oppression, anti-racist approaches to leadership fundamentally reconstitute conceptions and enactments of leadership. Findings speak to the importance of knowledge(s) about race and racialization, racism and intersecting oppressions, and how whiteness subverts anti-racist efforts. Findings also speak to developing capacities such as: visioning that both owns historical injustices and imagines future possibilities; organizing and collectivizing as a means of power sharing and decentering the individual leader; facilitating difficult learning in the face of racist resistance and multiple frameworks; securing accountability for rights by building informal accountability structures while advocating for formal ones; aligning resources and creating structures in support of students from historically oppressed communities; and, sustaining the self in the face of the impending harm in doing this work. With a focus on whiteness, this study invites scholars and practitioners to turn the gaze upward and consider what might need to be undone and unlearned from multiple and intersecting systems of oppression, what the authors refer to as unleading.

During the past 30 years, there has been a growing discussion of how women's lived experiences have been absent from much of the research on issues related to women's lives (see, for example, Harding, 1987;Nielsen, 1990;Riger, 1992). Theory in the social sciences has often developed without the benefit of women's voices on their experiences. Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1994) describe ways in which models developed from the experiences of men have been assumed to be universal models of human behavior and functioning, a process of ignoring how gender may operate as a key variable, which they term beta bias. They also critique research that focuses exclusively on exaggerating gender differences, what they call alpha bias. The result of such critiques has been a call for research that uses more complex notions of gender-understanding its intersections with race and socioeconomic status, for example-and that places women's experiences at the center of the formulation of questions, design of methods and measures, and interpretation of results.Two special issues of Violence Against Women-Bringing Women's Voices to the Center: Innovative Methods in Violence Against Women Research, Part I (October) and Part II (November), with a few articles opening the December issue-were conceived to highlight methods used in research dedicated to putting women's voices at the center of inquiry in studies of violence against women. Although it would seem logical that in research on violence against women the voices of women would be heard, this is not always the case. We have documented (Williams, 2004) that violence-against-women research may be designed without benefit of any discussions with women about their lived experiences or with the practitioners who work in the field with survivors of violence. Surveys, questionnaires, and interview and focus group protocols may be designed and carried out far away from the real lives of women.These special issues begin to remedy the limitations of some of the research on violence against women by including articles that

How do leaders make the impossible choice between harm enacted on racially oppressed students and families, and harm enacted on them as advocates for racial justice in systems steeped in whiteness? How do they negotiate multiple harms in Black and Brown bodies? Purpose: Situated in between the literature on tempered radicalism and Applied Critical Leadership (ACL), this study explores the experiences of six Black and Brown mid-level and senior-level district leaders in Greater Toronto Area, in Ontario, Canada. Research Methods/Approach: We draw on counter-narrative methodologies including in-depth oral history interviews and ongoing communication with participants to explore the impossibilities and possibilities of leading for racial justice. Findings: Impossibilities include complicities and complexities, accountabilities and alliances, and different metrics, different expectations. Possibilities include present and future hopes, personal power and voice, and joy and fulfillment. Implications for Research and Practice: This study adds to the literature on critical race-tempered radicalism by offering three important shifts in perspectives about leading for racial justice that blur revolutionary leadership and ACL. These include challenging a politics of representation and the necessary change in metrics, accountability measures, and systemic necessary to demonstrate the readiness for anti-racist leadership; anti-racist leadership as messy, ambiguous, and contextual that make space for complicities and complexities of this work; and anti-racist leadership beyond anti-racist leaders, which recognizes leadership beyond any one person, role, location, or generation.