The Sage Handbook of Critical Educational Leadership

The Sage Handbook of Critical Educational Leadership reimagines leadership as a transformative, justice-centred practice for navigating an increasingly complex and contested educational landscape. The Sage Handbook of Critical Educational Leadership brings together educational leaders and scholars from across English-speaking scholars to rethink what leadership means when it is criticalized. Rejecting narrow managerialist models and traditional hierarchies of schooling, this handbook embraces a broad, socially engaged conceptualisation of leadership rooted in critical theory, ethical praxis, and transformative pedagogies. Rather than offering a "how-to" guide, the handbook foregrounds leadership as an embodied, relational, and deeply political practice. Contributors draw on diverse positionalities, cultural traditions, and theoretical frameworks to explore how critical educational leadership is enacted in classrooms, communities, institutions, and public life. They illuminate the tensions educators face amid rising authoritarianism, surveillance, and assaults on academic freedom, arguing for leadership that resists reductive accountability regimes and instead fosters justice, solidarity, and democratic renewal. Structured into thematic sections, the Handbook begins by establishing robust philosophical foundations which challenge neoliberal governance and reimagine leadership as emancipatory and ethical. Following are advances of research-based strategies for equity, anti-racism, sustainability, and culturally responsive practices. Offering cultural and ideological critiques of teacher education, the following chapters shed light on how whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalist norms shape leadership discourses. The volume concludes by envisioning alternative futures for critical educational leadership, calling for structural, pedagogical, and policy shifts that centre human dignity, radical hope, and collective flourishing. The Sage Handbook of Critical Educational Leadership is a rigorous, imaginative, and urgently needed rethinking of educational leadership as a site of justice, inclusion, and possibility in difficult times. Section 1: Philosophy Section 2: Critically Sustaining Leadership: Doing EDI in a Time of White Oligarchy Section 3: Putting Hope back into Messy Leadership in Challenging Times Section 4: Critical Research and Cultural Studies of Leadership