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In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu's key concepts of "habitus," "field" and "capital," as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational administration academics who share a scholarly disposition towards critical approaches to theory and practice. Such a location positions our work as marginal at best in educational administration scholarship and research, for it is a field characterized primarily by an orientation towards problem-solving and scientific rationality. We explore how our positioning as "outsiders within" the field, combined with our multiple positions in fields such as feminism, unionism, schools and academia, has shaped a disposition towards critical scholarship. We suggest that the resources, which a disposition towards the critical may engender, are urgently required forms of capital at a time when there may be a powerful political investment in ignoring or overlooking the moral, ethical and political life force of educational administration scholarship as a potentially fertile site of intellectual activity. (Contains 2 notes.)

Much contemporary educational research draws upon Bourdieuian concepts such as field and the metaphor of the game for its inspiration. Yet his theory of practice remains an under-explored concept in educational leadership. Perhaps this is because the preceding concepts are better equipped to perform the required conceptual labour compared to earlier Bourdieuian theories of practice. However, an alternative possibility is that the emphasis on field and the analogy of the game has obscured subaltern readings of leadership practice. This paper draws on Alan Warde's argument for a "reconfigured" notion of Bourdieuian practice, based upon Alasdair MacIntyre's differentiation between the competitive logic of practice of a field and the cooperative logic of practice. Drawing on an autobiographical academic leadership story, the paper examines how an analysis of the characteristics of these overlapping but conceptually distinct logics of practice may expand understandings of academic leadership practice, and of practice "per se". (Contains 5 notes.)

An emergent strand within mainstream educational leadership scholarship is an engagement with notions of diversity. This is part of a belated recognition that in an increasingly globalising world the largely masculinist, white norms from which most accounts of leadership derive, lack sufficient explanatory power for educational systems. Utilising critical, black and Indigenous feminist work on the recognition of difference, as well as recent feminist scholarship deconstructing diversity discourses in educational leadership, this article outlines the origins of the key diversity discourses from which the educational leadership field draws. It then analyses recent articles on diversity and educational administration, noting how the various diversity discourses have been taken up and the subsequent implications for educational leadership theorising and practices. It concludes by arguing that critical feminist research about the politics of difference, amongst others, provides an important body of scholarship from which to develop self-reflexive and nuanced engagements with notions of diversity and leadership. (Contains 72 footnotes.)

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu’s key concepts ofhabitus, fieldandcapital, as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational administration academics who share a scholarly disposition towards critical approaches to theory and practice. Such a location positions our work as marginal at best in educational administration scholarship and research, for it is a field characterized primarily by an orientation towards problem-solving and scientific rationality. We explore how our positioning as ‘outsiders within’ the field, combined with our multiple positions in fields such as feminism, unionism, schools and academia, has shaped a disposition towards critical scholarship. We suggest that the resources, which a disposition towards the critical may engender, are urgently required forms of capital at a time when there may be a powerful political investment in ignoring or overlooking the moral, ethical and political life force of educational administration scholarship as a potentially fertile site of intellectual activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which senior female academics' leadership practices are informed and negotiated in relation to a multiplicity of fields. As part of the shift in the logics of practice underpinning the Australian academic terrain, there has been a movement from the implementation of equity policies to that of diversity in relation to the employment of academic staff, characterised by neoliberal discourses of new public management which favour the production of the individualistic, entrepreneurial academic identity as opposed to notions of collectivity and the public good. However, diversity policies are not the sole texts that inform the ways in which many women leaders operate, nor the most important in guiding the practices they produce. Drawing on a larger study of representations of women's leadership in the media and academia, this paper examines how two leading female academies drew upon a range of logics of practices within the different fields of academia, feminism and Indigenous rights to inform their leadership practices. In so doing, the women contested the emergent logic of practice underpinning the contemporary Australian academic field. Such contestation can be considered one of the "subaltern" consequences of policy regimes and forms an integral part of policy fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]