Fertile ground of negative spaces: Material methodologies for (education) leadership

This thesis critically explores leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, to challenge conventions of theorising the managerial and leadership structures of education and set methodological possibilities in motion. In seeking to contribute to new ways of rethinking and re-making leadership and the very real problems of imagining affirmative, equitable futures, I propose a practice research approach to methodologically conceive the visual-material as spatial and becoming. The necessary architecture is constructed through a Deleuzian-informed assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) presenting heterogeneous possibilities for the synchronous and asynchronous leadership practice of now. The purpose of this is threefold: in the first instance, through an interdisciplinary, practice research with Deleuze and abstract expressionism, emergent material methodologies will de-centre the canon for agential and spatial education becoming.

Secondly, in doing so, I intend to show that by disrupting linguistic paradigms through a visio-tacit lens, leadership practice can be liberated and affirmatively re-made as an immaterial becoming. Lastly, I aim to evidence that if schools are to educate for unimaginable futures, matters of practice are fertile ground for re-making equitable, post
-pandemic education.