The Aesthetic Pursuit of Educational Leadership for Social Justice: Grace in the Struggle

Abstract

Attention to aesthetics in educational leadership literature and organizational leadership has increased over the last two decades. However, this attention has seldom included grace. We highlight emerging contemplations of grace to bring attention to conceptions of injustice and justice (i.e., transitional justice, global justice) through micro and macro-lenses (i.e., affective economy). This pairing of ethics and aesthetics provides an entry point for developing ways of being and doing educational leadership to enter the struggles against social injustices in and beyond schools and school districts. We first trace grace as a philosophical construct of European discourse up to the eighteenth century, including how it has become more broadly conceived as physical movement and within political movements and how some conceptions of it can undermine leadership intending to advance (social) justice. We then illustrate shifts away from conceptions of

A self-study in agentic independent schoool leadership: authentic listening toward collaborative partnership with African American families

“…You can't learn if your amygdala is on overdrive (Firat et al, 2017). And yet, still the scholarly record shows that research around aesthetic leadership remains slight (Agosto, 2020). In 1985, Meindl (1985) said, "the romanticized conception of leadership results from a biased preference to understand important but casually indeterminate and ambiguous organizational events and occurrences in terms of leadership.…”