Educational Leaders and their Witnesses: An Arts-based Psychoanalytic Inquiry into the Performance of Ir/rational Administrative Acts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study endeavors to unsettle the normative assumptions that construct administrative rationality. It uncloaks illusions of control over self and others in educational leadership spaces through a psychoanalytic exploration of the inheritance of intergenerational trauma from one’s familial witnesses. The interrogation takes the form of an arts-based method of playwriting to create an encounter with some of the voices and characters that haunt the actors in educational administration. I call forth the concept of the specter with its etymological links to looking (del Pilar Blanco & Peeren, 2013) to think about the ways in which one’s witnesses bequeath psychological inheritances that wreak havoc with one’s capacity to be rational in administrative spaces. The first part of the study poses questions about the psychological conditions that make it possible for the appearance of witnesses. To that end, the study asks, how do one’s witnesses influence who one was, who one is and who one wants to become as an educational administrator? In pursuit of these psychoanalytic questions, I wrote a three act play called, Sincere Liars. The play explores the relationships between the witnesses who lurk in the unconscious and the pulse of countertransference that beats in many leadership performances. To speak about an administrative hauntology (Derrida, 1994), the third part of the study considers the inheritance of psychological distortions that live in the dreams, memories and the childhood dramas that are sometimes uncritically rehearsed in administrative spaces. Cautions about the practice of memorializing one’s capacity to overcome emotionally depleting struggles as a blessing in disguise are offered. The study concludes with a provocation to professors of educational administration to problematize the absence of psychoanalytic interpretations of leadership work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".