Being heard: a post-structural feminist narrative inquiry into how women in education have used Twitter to find their leadership voice

This thesis is a story of how gendered silencing in our education leadership world is a real thing. This is a study of how women leaders in education have used Twitter to find their leadership voice. It is the story of how women’s voices are marginalised, hidden, and silenced through the panoptic of sexism and misogynism which infuses everything. As a woman leader in education, gendered silencing is part of who I am, what I have become. It is my world. This thesis is a post-structural feminist narrative inquiry. I have found my voice. I have found my researcher storyteller voice.

The narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2016, Bochner and Ellis, 2016) enabled women to tell their story of how they have sought to use social media, Twitter, to find their leadership voices. It was an unmasking process (Bruner, 2003) enabled through listening, detailed exploration of Twitter and discussion. Together, my research partners and I, through telling and retelling our stories, were able to hold up a lens to the constructs of power in the online world. I construct a narrative portrait for each of the women in my study. In telling their story, they challenge the normalised discourse that ‘women have it all now’ (Sieghart, 2021, p. 16). Despite claims purporting that social media enables the ‘massification’ of communication (Seymour, 2019, p. 24), in telling and retelling their stories the women in my thesis relive their world of navigating a leadership world, a masculine world.

Post-structuralism is disruptive. It challenges how we see the world and how we research the world. Working within a feminist standpoint paradigm and a relational ontological worldview (Clandinin and Murphy, 2009), my thesis challenges constructs of what is valued in our leadership research worlds. My thesis may be considered risky in our world where letting the science speak is privileged. It is unapologetic in saying that individual’s stories are important. This is how it really is for women navigating the education leadership world. It is volatile, it is uncertain, it is complex, it is contradictory, it is messy. But it is real. This is our truth.