Rethinking emotions and educational leadership

The literature on emotions and educational leadership is in need of a viable conception of 'emotions'. Recent studies of emotions and educational leadership have unwittingly inherited serious problems from current research on educational leadership and consequently misunderstand the political force of emotions. In this article we argue that a viable conception of emotions and educational leadership needs to understand emotions with two key conceptual shifts. First, emotions need to be understood as publicly and collaboratively formed, not as individual, private and autonomous psychological traits and states. Second, leadership needs to be seen as an enacted, emergent phenomenon rather than socially expressed or constructed. A sustainable and distributed model of educational leadership cannot be achieved without understanding how both feelings and leadership are 'constituted and operate interactively at the level of both individual personal experience and wider social formations... [and] power relations' (Harding and Pribram 2004: 863). This article summarizes recent research that has pioneered new space for emotions within educational leadership studies, and analyzes how this research could extend analyses to engage questions of power and cultural hierarchies that are embedded into cultural norms.