On Wednesday 28 February, join the School of Environment, Education and Development at The University of Manchester for inaugural lectures from Steven Courtney, Professor of Sociology of Education Leadership and Deljana Iossifova, Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies, from 4.30pm - 6.30pm.
Our inaugural lectures provide an opportunity to celebrate the achievements and career progression of recently appointed professors as they share insights into their research and highlight the latest developments in their discipline.
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Steven Courtney, Professor of Sociology of Education Leadership
TOWARDS A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR CRITICAL LEADERSHIP AND POLICY SCHOLARSHIP
In this lecture, I will draw on my intellectual journey as a researcher to elaborate the need for, and features of a new methodology for critical researchers: “critical education leadership and policy scholarship”.
Methodologies in education leadership, management and administration (ELMA) have long been inadequate, partly because most ELMA research is functionalist, and so uses positivist methodologies. For functionalist ELMA researchers, leadership is fetishised and largely seen as the product of individuals’ traits, behaviours and activities, with ‘context’ reduced to a variable. Critical researchers, including me, reject these ideas, seeing that we are part of the research process and our dispositions and histories inevitably influence our data. Critical ELMA researchers must therefore look beyond functionalist methodologies. However, one of the most common alternatives, policy scholarship, over-compensates for functionalism’s limitations by enabling arguments that merely using the word ‘leadership’ is dangerous, or that researching it is frivolous. I argue in this lecture for a new methodology that neither fetishises nor demonises leadership, one that enables critical researchers to recognise and work with a form of leadership that is always co-constituted with policy and which merits conceptual and empirical recognition. I call this new methodology ‘critical education leadership and policy scholarship’.
Deljana Iossifova, Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies
ENTANGLEMENT AND CONTRADICTION
I reflect on efforts to reconcile contradiction in research on entanglement as a metaphor for interconnectedness and interdependence across presumed borders and scales.
Borders and boundaries are conventional constructs often used to demarcate spaces of difference, both geographically and metaphorically. Entanglement suggests a state of interconnectedness and interdependence, blurring the lines that typically define such spaces. In this talk, I use the metaphor of entanglement to work through my interest in the messy relationships between objects, bodies, people, practices, lifeforms, events, and processes as they unfold across spatial and temporal scales. I briefly reflect on efforts to reconcile ontological, epistemological, and methodological contradictions in my research and close in asking: what’s architecture got to do with it?
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Following the lectures, guests will have the opportunity to ask questions to our speakers before being invited to join us for drinks and networking from 6.00 - 6.30pm.
This is an in-person event, a recording will be published following.