Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership: Psychoanalytic and Arts-based Methods [1 ed.] 1138359548, 9781138359543

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Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership

Bridging the gap between academic parlance and arts-based inquiry, this unique text presents a socio-affective exploration of educational leadership. The text challenges inherited ideological and normative assumptions and invites its reader to reimagine leadership as a dynamic, emotional and relational process. Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership combines the ambiguity of arts-based work with the interpretative power of psychoanalysis to illustrate the role of mutuality, personal interpretations and formative relations on leadership practices. By emphasizing leadership as the constant striving for recognition, the chapters expose the affective dimensions that infuse educational leadership practice and, in doing so, propose a new way for educational leaders to respond to complex and emotionally charged incidents in school contexts, thereby promoting democratic practice and positive collegial relations. An engaging and insightful text, this book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics and professionals in the fields of educational leadership, educational research and psychoanalysis. Alysha J. Farrell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Administration and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Brandon University, Canada.

Routledge Research in Educational Leadership series

Books in this series: Leading for Change Race, intimacy and leadership on divided university campuses Jonathan Jansen Restoring Justice in Urban Schools Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline Anita Wadhwa Generational Identity, Educational Change, and School Leadership Corrie Stone-Johnson Educational Leadership in Becoming Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid Educational Leadership for Transformation and Social Justice Narratives of change in South Africa John Ambrosio The Hermeneutics of Jesuit Leadership The Meaning and Culture of Catholic-Jesuit Presidents Maduabuchi Leo Muoneme Advancing the Development of Urban School Superintendents through Adaptive Leadership Sarah Chace Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership Psychoanalytic and Arts-based Methods Alysha J. Farrell For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Educational-Leadership/book-series/SE0393

Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership Psychoanalytic and Arts-based Methods Alysha J. Farrell

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Alysha J. Farrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Farrell, Alysha J., author. Title: Exploring the affective dimensions of educational leadership: psychoanalytic and arts-based methods / Alysha J. Farrell. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in educational leadership | Includes index. | Summary: “Bridging the gap between academic parlance and arts-based inquiry, this unique text presents a socio-affective exploration of educational leadership. The text challenges inherited ideological and normative assumptions and invites its reader to reimagine leadership as a dynamic, emotional, and relational process. Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership combines the ambiguity of arts-based work with the interpretative power of psychoanalysis to illustrate the role of mutuality, personal interpretations, and formative relations on leadership practices. By emphasizing leadership as the constant striving for recognition, the chapters expose the affective dimensions that infuse educational leadership practice and in doing so, propose a new way for educational leaders to respond to complex and emotionally charged incidents in school contexts, thereby promoting democratic practice and positive collegial relations. An engaging and insightful text, this book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and professionals in the fields of educational leadership, educational research, and psychoanalysis”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026495 (print) | LCCN 2019026496 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138359543 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429433672 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Educational leadership—Psychological aspects. | Psychoanalysis and education. | Arts in education. Classification: LCC LB2806 .F37 2020 (print) | LCC LB2806 (ebook) | DDC 371.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026495 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026496 ISBN: 978-1-138-35954-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43367-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Trent, Vanya & Kirill

Contents

List of Photos List of Poems List of Plays List of Episodes Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

ix x xi xii xiii xv 1

PART 1

Affect as a Shadow in the Field of Leadership

7

Fantasies of Objectivity 7 Affect Shadows 10 Psychoanalytic Shadows 13 Beauty Shadows 22 PART 2

Dancing With the Unconscious—Relational Affective Forces

27

You Bring Something Out in Me 27 This Feels Familiar 36 Memoirists 42 Ghosts 49 In Your Dreams 105 PART 3

Communicative Bodies in Sensuous Encounters Word Play 109 Narcissistic Signalling 113

109

viii

Contents Denial of Loss 118 Confession 123 Living With the Paradox 127 The Unbidden 133 Recognition 138

PART 4

Relational Leadership as Socio-Aesthetic Inquiry

147

Staging Educational Leadership as Psychoanalytic Theatre 147 Images of Practice 151 Arts-Based Research 157 The Field of Educational Leadership 165 Conclusion as Distillation 175 References Index

178 188

Photos

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Aural Phantoms Enactment Self-study Relational Echoes

175 176 176 177

Poems

Preface The Researcher Who Wants to Know About Your Feelings Blue Light Filter Take Charge Moment What Is Called for Now Cigar Puffery The Substitute Everybody Loves Linda Big O Avoids Baby Depressives What We Become After the Freeze Frame Burdens of Listening Social Dis/Location Wrecking Ball Disclaimer: All poems have been produced by the author.

xiii 11 12 19 20 25 111 117 120 137 145 148 168

Plays

Secret Thoughts Three Ways Last Call for Sincere Liars The Principal Goes Into the Hallway Disclaimer: All plays have been produced by the author.

32 38 51 115

Episodes

Clean Up Blue Haired Consultant Warm Mittens Aural Phantoms The Moth Women Anti-Social-Mediations The Reunion Blood Pressure Turn on a Word Solo Martini People Think Drew Ruins Every Meeting Memo Thank You for Your Time Searching for Higher Ground Shift Battling the Cops in My Head She Doesn’t Go to the Coffee Shop Much Anymore Catholic Girl Scratch and Win To Know We Make Room for the Unknown Blue High Heels Dweeps Lit Up Bunny Dance Ordinary Specters What You Bring Rally Disclaimer: All episodes have been produced by the author.

28 30 37 37 44 47 47 48 111 112 112 114 114 117 119 121 124 125 126 129 130 131 135 137 143 144 145

Preface

Lately I’ve been feeling like Nadia Vulvokov in Russian Doll Classrooms full of students an inescapable 44th birthday party Where I repeatedly die A return to the scene A return to the scene A return to the scene elicits a forensic audit of my expirations I collect, sort, categorize Meticulously label the jarring moments to impose a system on the cases, niches, drawers and boxes This cabinet of curiosity filled with peculiar nested encounters is an impressive inventory of my emotional paper cuts Hey, I get social on social media too But this—oooh this, this is some next level curation If you’ll permit me a verbal selfie— Don’t put his micro-aggressions on the same shelf as your faculty councils That petri dish is oozy Keep your peer review totems In the same drawer as your meeting autopsies Swallow y/our secrets When you stand back the reality of the single subject

xiv

Preface in the lecture hall feels a little illusory to me Maybe it was our private collections that turned us into completion maniacs to make us see the school as an exhibit Can we still improvise?

Acknowledgements

Endless thanks to Dawn Wallin, Kristen Kusanovich, Jerome Cranston, Jessica Senehi and Maxx Lapthorne, who provided feedback on earlier drafts of some of this work. To all of the administrators, teachers and students that I’ve had the privilege of learning with over the years, this book was made possible because you shared your passionate insights about leadership and education with me. Candy Skyhar, you are the queen of just-in-time conversations and an incredible teaching partner. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Leadership and Educational Administration at Brandon University. You help me make some sense of the academy. My deepest gratitude to all of the other feminist scholars in the field who give me the courage to transgress disciplinary boundaries so that I may carve out this route with others. Sometimes we need poems to say what matters most. Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects pushed my thinking about leaky feelings in organizations. I am particularly grateful for the relational psychoanalytic work of Sándor Ferenczi, Jessica Benjamin and Daniel Stern. They opened my eyes so that I may see new angles in what leading does to leaders. My sincere appreciation to the Routledge team for working with me. Thank you to Mandy Farrell, Jennifer Farrell and Allan Farrell. My ghosts love your ghosts. To Andrea Sloane, Aleda Sloane, Bruce Sloane and Liberal Vieira, thank you for sharing the view at the lake and the red wine. Thanks to Maiv and Ollie for your furry companionship. Most importantly, thank you Trent, Vanya and Kirill. We have moved in and out of this work with bursts of laughter, tears, eyebrow raises, whispers, first date conversations and late night cups of coffee. The muse visits more often when you are close by. Thank you for it all.

Introduction

How does one write a research monograph that emanates from flushed cheeks, gritted teeth and racing hearts? I cannot, by way of my commitments to affect, write about leadership without attempting to communicate through the senses. To start in the midst of a socio-affective inquiry that is already on the move, I frame this work as a ficto-research artsbased project, one that attempts to slip away from inherited ideological and discursive commitments to create an interplay between knowledge, unconscious forces, language and meaning. My central aim in this book is to develop an intersubjective approach to the study of educational leadership, one that challenges the conventional humanist subject who operates as a self-contained protagonist. Blending a scholarly-research-voice with fictional texts is my attempt to make some room to think about leadership not as a stable body of knowledge but as something that is always in the making and doing with others. To that end, my task is to demonstrate that leadership, at its essence, is relations, and to take a small modest step towards accounting for what leading in education means as we lurch towards the edge of the Anthropocene. The arts-based pieces in the text are meant to pull attention to the intensities and the surfaces of emergence when bodies (human and nonhuman) affect bodies within and beyond educational organizations. To think about how bodies produce different kinds of bodies in the field, I hope that you, dear reader, build relationships with the queries and concepts through a sensuous encounter with the characters, feelings, moods and textures that move through the episodes, poems, photos and scripts. You are encouraged to take a nonlinear approach to reading the text. For instance, you might scan the episode titles and jump to a page because the title beckoned you there. If you are a take-charge-kind-of-person, you might begin with the poem My Take Charge Moment to sense the secrets buried unknowingly inside of you by others, the ones that wreak havoc with your sense of yourself as a rational actor. I privilege ambiguity in arts-based work to explore the affective elements of relational leadership because the fusion of fiction and reality opens up imaginative spaces to trouble some of the normative assumptions that construct communication between subjects. Through the arts-based

2

Introduction

pieces, I gesture towards the intersections between our inner psychic lives and the field of past and present-day influences. I invite the reader to question what it means to define oneself as a “good leader” amidst wider social forces. In this way, the reader’s curatorial imagination is essential because the study of educational leadership, like all other fields of study, is implicated by a hauntology (Derrida, 1994) in that the meanings of the words, signs, symbols and artefacts that construct leadership and administrative discourses are haunted by the ghosts of other meanings. Arts-based work anticipates shared conceptual development because it requires you to bring your life experiences to a shared waking dream. My epistemological assumptions rely heavily on the premise that the reader will interact with the poems, scripts and episodes and infuse new layers of meaning. As a result, the exegesis that wraps around some of the arts-based work may temper some of its interpretive potential. In this vein, I encourage readers to use the open space around the pages in this book to begin their own ficto-research projects. Taubman (2012) reminds us that the “aim of psychoanalysis is not the pursuit of truth but speaking truthfully” (p. 24). Using the alchemical properties of fictoresearch texts, I draw attention to the ordinary (Stewart, 2005) and peculiar affective dimensions that infuse educational leadership praxis. The intent is to blur fiction with reality to escape the seduction of linearity and causality in the study of leadership and to open the possibility for a set of relations and new inquires to appear that we have yet to imagine. In this way, I am applying an intersubjective approach inside the text to amplify the affective intensities that move through leadership encounters. I aim to animate what Massumi calls thinking-feeling (2015) in the study of educational leadership. I pull towards the intersections between our inner psychic lives and the wider socio-affective influences in the field to consider the inheritance of psychic distortions that live in the dreams, memories and the childhood dramas that are sometimes uncritically rehearsed in leadership spaces. In other words, the text is an invitation to the reader to question the myths one has inherited about what it means to define oneself as an autonomous rational actor. The work is personal and the personal is theoretical (Ahmed, 2010, 2017), and it raises difficult questions about the inheritance of psychological legacies that are buried, excommunicated, fading or invisible (Spooner, 2010). With that in mind, I invite the reader to encounter her/his/their/our/my figurative ghosts for a while, to allow the spectralized ethos of the everyday (del Pilar Blanco & Peeren, 2010) to increase the distance between the repetitive thoughts that limit what one is permitted to think and do in the field. I consider the ways in which one’s formative relations bequeath psychological inheritances that can wreak havoc with one’s capacity to recognize the subjectivity of others in administrative spaces. Some of my questions that haunt are:

Introduction • • •

•

3

Why is educational leadership, and education more broadly, so caught up in optimism and happy affects? What happens to us (humans and non-humans) when we suppress everyday cruelties, the kinds that reappear as phantoms? If we were given the chance to understand how the secrets of others do their work on us, would it be possible to earn a small reprieve from inherited aural phantoms? What are the consequences for school leaders, and those with whom they work, if the intimate dead make their demands known in the light of day?

According to Bertolt Brecht, the great playwright, director and poet, art is not a mirror held up to our reality but a hammer with which to shape it. But what if the very idea of a shared reality is being relegated to the margins of social thought (Bauman & Leoncini, 2017)? This book is set in a time when authoritarian leadership discourses are being amplified within the ubiquity of a politically territorial social media habitus. Questions of how to communicate more democratically within and beyond educational contexts have become increasingly urgent. Recently, in Canada, there has been a surge in public displays of racism, misogyny and hate speech in virtual and face-to-face encounters. There are at least 130 active far-right extremist groups across the country now, a 30 per cent increase from 2015 (Habib, 2019). These groups coalesce around ideologies that promote hate against minoritized groups. Since 2015, white supremacist rallies are occurring more frequently, evidence that these groups and their leaders are becoming more emboldened and impactful. Affects are uniquely registered in educational organizations, and publicly registered affects in educative encounters leave traces that determine who is allowed to speak and under what conditions later in life. A relational turn to affect may place scholars in the field of educational leadership in a position to advocate for a study of emotions, self-awareness and thinking-feeling the thought of humans as a geological force as important aims of education. Educational leadership as a field of study should be more concerned with channelling affectivity and collective attunement (Massumi, 2015) so we can make sense of a world that is increasingly fragmented with our students and colleagues. Thus an essential question for leaders is, how can you remain curious for long enough about another’s mind while you lead, make a decision or write a policy without being wholly determined by the other? Part One, “Affect as a Shadow in the Field of Leadership,” of the text begins to take up this question with an exploration of some of the fantasies of objectivity in educational leadership. Paying particular attention to the work of Thomas B. Greenfield, I discuss the seductive qualities of objectivism in the study of organizations and highlight Greenfield’s contention that organizations are expressions of will and intention (1980). I explore some

4

Introduction

of the field forces that have syphoned away the idiosyncrasies of alienation, mutuality and parallel vulnerability. To live our emotional interiority out loud turns attempts to orchestrate the activities of others into the continuous navigation of a matrix of affective relations. Currents of submission and the imposition of one’s will move through all leadership encounters, and these types of encounters are worthy nodes of inquiry. Bodies affect bodies in leadership, but because theory in the study of leadership has traditionally been wielded to disavow messy feelings, the study of affect remains a shadow in the field. More to the point, affect studies in educational leadership make limited appearances in the literature because tensions exerted between bodies are more acutely felt by those who typically concern themselves with rules, rationality and control. As much as one would like to be able to isolate the behaviours and choices of leaders, encounters are never our own because language and gestures are always affectively in play. Consequently, to feel our way around affect and leadership requires the language and doings of psychoanalytic theory to more deeply understand encounters with others. Psychoanalytic inquiries into educational leadership hold a great deal of potential to alter counter-productive relations between people. Yet psychoanalytic theory has been used sparingly in leadership research despite its interpretive power to deal with the ends, values and emotionally complex aspects of human relations. In Part One, I interrogate the shadow of psychoanalysis in a field that is dominated by the study of making change and trace the emergence of relational psychoanalytic theory with an emphasis of the groundbreaking work of Sándor Ferenczi. Ferenczi was one of the first psychoanalytic theorists to take mutuality in emotional entanglements seriously. The seeds he planted ground contemporary relational frameworks that are instructive when thinking about what leading does to leaders. This section concludes with a lament of beauty’s shadow within a field that sought scientific legitimization for such a long time. I surface a few scattered aesthetic imprints from the humanities that are evident in the field’s early history to trace some of beauty’s roots in the field. To see something or someone anew requires arts-based approaches to interrogate the illusions that have insulated us for many years. In this section, I write not as the school master making each theoretical link explicit but as an explorer who is looking for glimmers of emergence, curiosity and wonder. The shifting assemblage of feelings that may be elicited by different forms of arts-based work can make room for an unbidden sensuous encounter with some of the peculiarities of leadership. Part Two, “Dancing With the Unconscious—Relational Affective Forces,” emerges from the shadows to dance with the unconscious. Taking leadership to a socio-ontological position, the pieces in this section shift attention to the relational affective forces that bubble and roil between bodies. “You Bring Something Out in Me” considers what parts of a person come forth when they are with particular people in their organizations. The episodes in this section encourage critical reflection on

Introduction

5

what relational qualities are valued in others and a questioning of how one responds when one’s expertise or authority is challenged. “This Feels Familiar” is a collection of queries about the influences of early formative relations on present-day relationships and the inheritance of verbal tics that inhibit one’s ability to recognize the subjectivity of the other. “Memoirists” takes memories as poignant points of departure that orient us to particular people and topics in educational leadership. In “Memoirists,” the episodes appear on the slippery terrain of remembering others in the process of reimagining ourselves. “Ghosts” investigates how we behave in ways that are connected to the inheritance of someone else’s experiences with trauma or everyday cruelties. It creates an encounter with buried secrets to draw attention to what remains unsettled from the past. Finally, “In Your Dreams” asks the reader to reflect on the people, events, images, sounds or symbols that appear and reappear in their dreams to shed light on collective un/conscious worries about the future Part Three, “Communicative Bodies in Sensuous Encounters,” is an exploration of communicative acts in sensuous encounters between bodies in educational leadership. “Word Play” delves into the interactions that turn on a word. Some of the episodes traverse how leadership identities shift in the face of pronouncements made by others. “Narcissistic Signalling” invites contemplation about moments when one individual in a significant dyad expects the other person to shift while claiming a position of exemption for themselves when feelings of moral superiority, defensiveness, shame and envy arise. “Denial of Loss” provokes attention to what people have to psychologically give up, concede or accept if they adopt a new idea, process or approach. This part of the book deals the most directly with the emotional side effects of change, while “Confession” focuses on how demands to know operate on bodies in educational leadership spaces. Spinning around on what confessions do to bodies in encounters, it presents some of the relational costs of admission. “Living With the Paradox” addresses the affective charge of collegial relations when contradictory sets of truths are proffered by individuals who are convinced the other people involved in the same event are dead wrong. The last two sections in Part Three are more agentic in that they focus more on what can be done to make our lives with other educators workings of art. Moments of uncertainty are filled with latent potential for recognition. Often sourced in the mystery of the aporetic body, confusion and emotional disjuncture, “The Unbidden” provokes an instantaneous attunement to the intensities that move through and between bodies. To welcome the unknown, one must actively participate in the other’s world through one’s senses. “Recognition” centres on approaching a state of awareness in which people reflect one another’s knowing mind. Always on the edge of disappearing, the state of recognition involves bearing witness and feeling the struggles of another person and a willingness to co-construct a shared perception of reality. Part Four, “Relational Leadership as Socio-aesthetic Inquiry,” invites the shadows in educational leadership to play. In “Images of Practice,” I

6

Introduction

discuss several socio-aesthetic methods that hold some promise to generate a state of play in educative spaces. “Arts-based Research” (ABR) is an introduction to some of the tenets and key figures of ABR in educational research to ground socio-aesthetic inquiries in the field. “The Field of Educational Leadership” defines the field as the sum total of all of the mutual influences of material and psychic realities as they expand and contract between a multiplicity of inner and outer worlds. I situate the field as a site of socio-aesthetic analysis to dissolve the mind–body duality of leaders and to treat leadership as a set of unfolding affective relations that emerge organically in the interactions between people as they pursue intersecting and competing interests. I offer some middle-waymethods to study communicative processes to make relational depth a defining quality of life affirming leadership encounters. Most of the episodes, scripts and poems are fictional accounts that have been inspired by my work as a researcher and a faculty member who works with current or aspiring educational leaders. The exceptions are Social Dis/Location, Blue Haired Consultant, The Moth Women, Battling the Cops in My Head, Catholic Girl and To Know We Make Room for the Unknown. These pieces are influenced by the field, but they are sourced from experiences in my own life. To engage in this work without sharing something personal of myself would be a betrayal of the relational psychoanalytic aims of this project. In addition, the inclusion of some of my own stories is reflective of the continuous movement of influences that traverse one’s inner and outer worlds. Creating a conversation between the cooler tones of academic parlance and fictional work is my attempt to imbue the topics with an aesthetic ambiguity to live out an intersubjective matrix with the reader. I began this process by scouring the hundreds of pages of journals I kept over the last ten years to excavate emotional motifs and affectively charged incidents in my memories of being a teacher, program director, school improvement consultant and now an instructor and researcher in the academy. Over the last three years, I braided these feeling motifs with an intensive engagement with the literature in relational psychoanalytic theory, affect studies and educational leadership. Feeling motifs, experiential story fragments and nodes in the literature produced surfaces of emergence for the episodes, poems, photos and scripts. By way of encounter in this textual memory theatre, I ask the reader to become a theorizing accomplice as we immerse ourselves in the particularity of some of the poignant moments of leadership. This is the means for us to co-illustrate the vivacity of the wide-ranging topics addressed in the text. To affect and be affected, we must read, work and play in the messy middle. To that end, this work does not offer smooth transitions, and it cannot lay bare objects of study across a static plane of analysis. Instead, my intention is to draw the reader close to some of the disjointed singularities that fascinate, upend and exert a sizzling pull. I hope a node of inquiry opens to you as you encounter characters who are already in the thick of it.

Part 1

Affect as a Shadow in the Field of Leadership Fantasies of Objectivity Elwood Cubberly and George Strayer were appointed as professors in educational administration in 1905 (Popper, 1987). Their appointments are purported to have launched educational administration preparation programs in the United States (Willower & Forsyth, 1999). Cubberly’s textbook Public School Administration went unchallenged for decades and was emblematic of the field’s allegiance to scientific management (Popper, 1987). In 1947, a significant shift of priorities occurred in the field when the National Conference of Professors of Educational Administration was formed to improve the training of administrators (Halpin, 1970). Prior to 1947, the bulk of professors in the field of educational administration were former school and school system administrators. This shift in priorities led to a chorus of prominent scholars in the United States in the early 1950s to vociferously critique leadership training programs that were composed of the war stories inherited from seasoned practitioners (Griffiths, 1964). As an illustration, in 1956, the University Council for Educational Administration was created as one of the means to infuse theory into what was considered a practitioneroriented discipline (Oplatka, 2012). During what is now referred to as the theory movement in educational administration, scholars and leading practitioners began to look for intellectual enrichment from the behavioural and social sciences (Popper, 1987). Attempts were made to make the study of educational administration a subset of the pursuit of an all-encompassing theory of human behaviour. The positivistic turn created an opening for the management science introduced by Simon (1957) to be taken up by social scientists such as Halpin and Griffiths. They promised control-oriented science would improve the decision-making skills of administrators, accurately describe the inner workings of organizations and separate the ends of education from the theories that should inform the actions of educational leaders. Using broad strokes, the goals of the theory movement were to separate values from facts, incorporate research methodologies from the natural

8 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership sciences (Griffiths, 1957) and apply universal laws of human behaviour to conduct inside of organizations. The eventual entrenchment of these assumptions provides an important bit of context to understand the impact of what happened in 1974. In 1974, a significant rupture occurred during the International Intervisitation Programme (IIP) in Bristol that would alter the field of educational administration. At the conference, Thomas B. Greenfield presented a paper that disrupted the orderliness of the systems perspective and brought the discussion of social reality as a human invention to bear in the study of organizations. The controversy that erupted subsequent to the conference remains one of the most provocative disruptions in the field to date. I remember being introduced to Greenfield’s work early in my PhD program by professors who described in elaborate detail the drama that resulted from Greenfield’s epistemological challenges at the IIP. I found the descriptions of the conference debates very compelling, but it was his poetic writing, which Harris (1996) so aptly describes as, “an aesthetic shock that propels the reader to cast aside everyday assumptions in order to see things anew” (p. 490), that struck me the most. The way he described organizations as manifestations of the mind left an indelible impact. Greenfield (1991), influenced by the work of Max Weber, wrote about the seductive qualities of objectivism in the study of organizations. He wrote about organizations as expressions of will, intention and value (1980). More significantly, he criticized the fetishizing of objectivity (Murphy, 2005) because it was, in many ways, a strategic evasion of the “defeats of life” (1991, p. 215) that disorient heroic fantasies of the autonomous and rational leader. His arguments were framed in a physical reality that existed within a subjective reality (Greenfield, 1973), and he constructed organizations as compositions of the power plays exerted by those in the organization. When Greenfield was pushed to account for the lack of applicability of his work to the training of leaders, he boldly claimed that his “solution to the problem of training administrators [was] to recognize that administrative training is training for life and that only those who have some insight into life, its ironies, joys and tragedies—are fit to be administrators” (1993b, p. 112). As someone who has received criticism about the lack of prescriptive solutions to administrative problems in her work, I see Greenfield as a kindred sprit in this regard. His work provides a foothold for me when I make the case to graduate students that it is worth our time in our Introduction to Educational Administration class to read Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener to think together about what leading does to leaders, or that we might become more attuned to loss in the face of systems if we watched the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership

9

I believe we have not given Greenfield his proper due. Using Hans Loewald’s psychoanalytic parlance, we might say that Greenfield remains a ghost, and it would serve us well to lay him to rest as our ancestor. If we are willing to look back, his work continues to challenge us to look for escape routes beyond the dominant managerial language (Hodgkinson, 1978a, 1978b) in educational administration, a language that continues to dominate many parts of the field today. In this text, I take up Greenfield’s challenge, but I locate the centre of my inquiry inside the affective currents and the psychic inheritances that obstruct one’s escape routes. More concretely, I am trying to develop a relational psychoanalytic approach in the context of leadership studies to draw attention to how others co-construct an educational leader’s sense of their identity and the messy feelings that infuse all aspects leadership encounters. I am writing this book at a time when the talking points of authoritarian leaders, and those with authoritarian tendencies, have coarsened the public discourse and contributed to an upsurge in public acts of racism, misogyny and intolerance of the other. With the amplification of authoritarian leadership talk across a politically territorial social media habitus, the question of how to recognize the other within and beyond educational contexts has become increasingly urgent. Alternative assemblages of subjectivity (Hardt & Negri, 2017) are needed to develop artful leadership inquiries that intervene in group dynamics that entrench asymmetries of power between people, which make Greenfield’s discussions about the ways in which people dominate or are dominated by others in organizations especially relevant. More personally, some of the impetus to think about educational leadership in relational and affective terms comes from my eight years of experience as a school improvement consultant. Throughout those years, I often took notice of the disavowed autobiographies that leaked from the bottom drawers of principals’ desks that created havoc with claims of rationality. Remarks from colleagues that I recorded in old journals such as, “My father would have slapped me silly if I ever wore baggy jeans like that” or utterances such as, “Sometimes I wonder if there is something happening to me because this stuff (referring to a violent episode in the school). It just doesn’t seem to shake me anymore.” It is these types of what first appeared to be throw away comments that have exerted a strong influence on my work. To interrogate the types of utterances reclaimed from hundreds of my journal pages and my experiences as a researcher and an instructor in educational administration, and to immerse us in the middle of an intersubjective analysis of Greenfield’s assertion that organizations are reflections of an inner order, I take up the relational psychoanalytic concept of complementarity in many of the narrative pieces that come later in the book. Complementarity is a term used by relational psychoanalytic theorists

10 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership to describe moments in significant dyads when a person feels done to and not like a subject who is able to shape a co-created reality with the other person (Benjamin, 2018). This type of interrogation feels especially urgent in today’s social climate. Shortly before Greenfield died, he wrote at length about the state of research in educational administration in Canada and the United States. He observed, The academic study of educational administration goes on in Sylvia Plath’s plangent term, like life from under a bell jar. It is sealed from the larger world but the barrier is noticed by virtually no one in the oppressive, airless environment. (Greenfield, 1993a, p. 44) Inquiries into the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions of research in educational administration are often marginalized in leadership discourses (Eacott & Evers, 2015). Although I am not convinced that we have escaped the bell jar, I do believe there are more scholars in educational administration who are engaged in studies that are more attentive to the particular and open to the world. Let us continue to question the assumptions we hold close that keep us from feeling and living differently. As a way to begin, let us entertain some of the shadows in the field.

Affect Shadows Skin is faster than the word. Brian Massumi

Affects are sensations, intensities and traces that circulate whenever bodies meet. They seep through and leap between subjectivities. They are the unconscious forces beyond emotion that compel bodies to move and wonder (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). In encounters between bodies, bodies are changed, and in turn, bodies reshape encounters which make affects social, contextual and irreducible to individual subjects. Affects stand apart from the intentions of the actors because they perpetually leak beyond the professed intent of the bodies in question and leave infinite traces in the future remains of encounters yet to come. What is often referred to as the affective-turn has influenced work in cultural studies, the humanities and social sciences and increasingly education (Massumi, 2015; Niccolini, Dernikos, Lesko, & McCall, 2019; Probyn, 2004). Yet the affective turn has had a limited impact in the study of educational leadership (James, Crawford, & Oplatka, 2018).

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There have been some recent studies conducted that examine the suppression of emotions (Crawford, 2007; Oplatka, 2017) and critical feminist work that interrogates emotional labour (Blackmore, 2013), but because theory has traditionally been wielded in the field of educational leadership to disavow the potential of affect, it remains underexplored terrain. More to the point, affect studies in educational leadership are an anathema because tensions between intricate bodies are more acutely felt by those who typically concern themselves with rules, rationality and control. The Researcher Who Wants to Know About Your Feelings The researcher measured each dilated pupil to assess the relationship between feeling words and the students’ entrepreneurial joie de vivre Confused by the relative results textbook profiteers in paisley launched head first into the stained glass window A smiley face psychologist was called in to clean up tail feathers and match blood splatter patterns with appropriate sets of emojis That’s the type of commitment you need to win-place-or-show in the new edu-anthropo-scene In many structural-functional iterations of educational leadership theory, nasty feelings are syphoned away and sheathed in cocoons to leave situations and people undisturbed and emotionally intact. Cocoons can take the form of rigid methods, well-worn methodologies and research questions that strip emotion from the ends of education. An affective attunement to the study of relational leadership prompts a deconstruction of the compulsion to cocoon and plunges the body head first into the messiness of organizational life framed against the mysteries of living. In this way, a pedagogy of leadership is never fixed but a becoming poetics of rupture that opens up a space to reinterpret the swarms of feelings (Hickey-Moody, 2011) that overtake us in our work with significant others. Those who study and practice leadership often speak of theories, programs, decisions and processes as if they can be separated from their

12 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership affective intensities and connections. Leading, learning and teaching are saturated with emotionally charged events. These events are disorienting at times because they disturb fantasies of self-sovereignty (Niccolini, 2016) and rational deliberations within educational encounters. An affective pedagogy of leadership is sensual, filled with fleshy gestures and words that are saturated with past encounters. Take the vice-principal who recently appeared in my office with a crumpled assignment to challenge a grade. He asked me to show him “exactly where he failed himself in the assignment” and to “account for bias in my assessment practices.” As much as we try to dislocate ourselves through rubrics, checklists and strategic plans, we cannot separate an educational event from our viscid preoccupations with worthiness, approval and recognition. Messy feelings abound. Attempts to orchestrate the activities of others exists within a matrix of affective relations. Living our emotional interiority out loud makes leadership a potent mixture of heartbeats and howls in the collective psychical alchemy of organizations. Currents of submission, resistance and the desire to impose one’s will move through all leadership contexts. These currents necessitate that people in organizations understand that affects elicited by decisions, renewal efforts or disciplinary procedures exist within a web of transfigurations of emotional bonds and breakages. More specifically, leadership is filled with conflictual rhetorical networks laden with ideas that people already hold within the organization. In part, because we are beholden to ideas we do not know we have, affects get amplified as one resists coming to know a new person, project or idea. Blue Light Filter In dark rooms we sat with multiple devices crying over anonymous messages keystroke accelerations across borders and moon phases Most tweets live but a minute but sarcasm is a contagion and spoken injuries accumulate quick in well executed shame campaigns We really did admire your tenacity in a constant state of breaking news you found new ways to cut to the bone Time lost with your rescue retriever Dozens of unbaked cakes In the end it was a lot of effort to tell us we disgust you

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If we take the idea of emotional contagion and place it in the school, teachers and administrators are often directed to leave the psychic wounds of children and youths to counsellors, social workers and psychologists. As of late, it feels more and more untenable to ignore the intensification of affect within a social context of inflamed rhetorical passions. Amidst the public deterritorializing of online and face-to-face outrage, it is becoming increasingly important to focus attention on how thinking-feeling (Massumi, 2015) comes into being within the pedagogical scene. In the epilogue of educative encounters, accumulations of affect are instructive to those who seek to develop artful peacebuilding communication practices. To affect and to be affected (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2007) situates pedagogy in a series of doings rather than a fixed linear body of knowledge (Miller, 2014; Pinar & Grumet, 1976; Pinar, 2004). A pedagogy of affective and affecting leadership requires organic, permeable and flexible epistemologies that help people in organizations to better understand why a particular moment stirs up so much intensity. Encounters are never our own because language and gestures are always dancing with the unconscious. Consequently, to feel our way around leadership requires the language and doings of psychoanalytic theory to more deeply understand our encounters with the other.

Psychoanalytic Shadows There has been very little engagement with psychoanalytic theory in the study of educational leadership. One of the reasons for the estrangement may be due to the way many psychoanalysts employ case-based, interpretive approaches to the generation of new knowledge. Historically, research in educational administration has focused on sociological phenomena to make claims of truth, while psychoanalytic theory has traditionally developed methodologies that construct knowledge by sewing the common elements of individual cases together. It appears as if research as discourse developed in both fields in such a way that it became impossible to understand the potential contributions psychoanalysis could make to the study of education. Educational leadership and psychoanalysis appear as though they do not speak the same language/s. In the1960s, there was an incredible backlash towards psychoanalysis in North America just as the theory movement began to generate focus and support in educational administration. Positivistic approaches to the study of the social sciences took centre stage. In a research context that overvalued objectivity, the prioritization of emotions and the interiority of individuals appeared wholly inadequate and of little use in the study of educational administration, school improvement and leadership development. Furthermore, the foci in psychoanalytic explorations have been historically associated with the feminine (Chancer, 2013) or

14 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership with epistemologies that privilege the knowledge of the research participant’s lived experiences, which may be another significant factor in the historical marginalization of psychoanalytic ideas in educational administration. Love, joy, hate, melancholia, anger and jealousy are elements of the human condition that cannot avoid ambiguity. They are also examples of phenomena that are considered irrational and resistant to measurement. In the current North American context, measurement and standardization underpin much of the educational leadership discourses. Effectiveness of leadership continues to be measured in relation to a leader’s capacity to indirectly improve student learning outcomes and it is often assessed against one’s ability or inability to build a school culture that fosters a relentless commitment to school improvement amongst teachers (Niesche, 2018). Obviously, the academic success of young people is important and a positive school culture is desirable, but what is often missing in the myopic drive to improve outcomes are questions about ends and values. In 2012, the journal Organization Studies produced a special issue on the contributions of psychoanalytic theory to the study of contemporary organizations. Fotaki, Long, and Schwartz (2012, pp. 1108–1109) identified five interconnected trends in this area of research and scholarship: • • • • •

Linking psychoanalysis to discourses of power and social issues, Developing new processes in social research in what is called ‘systems psychoanalysis,’ The integration of core psychoanalytic concepts to join central debates in the field of management and organizations, Expanding psychosocial inquiry to the study of affect and emotions, and Creating fusions between psychoanalysis, feminism and critical social theory.

In concert with Fotaki et al. (2012), I suggest that linking psychoanalysis to social issues in the study of organizations is prudent. The rich interpretive power of psychoanalytic theory can draw attention to school improvement foci that are tangential at best and at worst dislocated from the greatest concerns and passions of humanity. If education ought to be concerned with peace, love and justice, psychoanalytic concepts such as disavowal, repression and projection are instructive in examining the relationships between miseducation and the turbulent intersections between late stage capitalism, environmental degradation, hate speech and public acts of racism. Psychoanalytic inquiries into educational leadership can inform one’s attempts to alter counterproductive relations between people. Unfortunately,

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psychoanalytic theory has been used sparingly in educational leadership research, even though it holds a great deal of interpretive power to deal with ends, values and the emotionally complex aspects of leadership and human relations. In many ways, it is difficult to understand the disinterest in psychoanalysis in a field that is dominated by the study of the effectiveness of change processes. Change typically involves the disruption of long-held assumptions and the push to relinquish ideas that one once held to be selfevident. When educational leaders, teachers, faculty or students are invited or forced to adopt new practices or policies, the resistance can be formidable. Even if one thinks about change in instrumental terms, leaders would benefit from psychoanalyzing resistance. In spite of Freud’s long shadow (Roth, 2016), there is certainly no “monolith of agreement” (Jagodzinski, 2010, p. 18) as to what psychoanalysis currently is, and there have been many significant revolutions in psychoanalytic theory (feminist, object relations, intersubjective, Lacanian, relational . . .) post Freud. Amidst the bricolage of theoretical approaches, I purport that relational psychoanalytic theory has the most to offer educational theorists and practitioners. Its focus on the psychic life of social subjects, reciprocal responsiveness, relational systems and the influence of one’s formative relationships in present-day circumstances is well suited to assist scholars and practitioners to think through the complexity of the affective networks that exist within and beyond schools. Relational Psychoanalytic Theory: Recognizing the Enfant Terrible When psychoanalysis was first emerging as a discipline, Freud and his disciples spoke little of what analyzing does to the analyst. Similarly, in the early days of educational administration as field of study, the leader imago, or the idealized mental image of the decider-in-chief, that was operationalized in many research and training programs said little about the emotional impacts of leading. Classically trained psychoanalysts were strongly dissuaded from writing about countertransference (Berzoff & Kita, 2010), which was defined as the elicitation of the unconscious desires, fears and hatreds of the analyst through her engagement with the patient. As is well documented, Freud had a habit of casting aside even his most loyal protégés when they disagreed with him publicly about concepts like countertransference. One of his castaways, Sándor Ferenczi, is an early ancestor of relational psychoanalysis. His work is essential to this project because he was one of the first psychoanalytic theorists to take mutuality in emotional entanglements seriously. The seeds he planted ground contemporary relational frameworks that are instructive when thinking about what leading does to leaders.

16 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership Ferenczi (1873–1933) was one of Freud’s most talented and controversial students. Unlike Freud, he sought to surround himself with cultural innovators in psychology, anthropology and sociology (Haynal & Haynal, 2015). His ability to develop relationships with other cultural critics, coupled with his interdisciplinary interests, helped open psychoanalysis to other fields of study. Although Ferenczi thrived within an interdisciplinary social milieu, he did a tremendous amount of work to build and support organizations and networks that focused on the dissemination of theoretical and therapeutic innovations in his own field. For example, he proposed the creation of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), and he was instrumental in the development of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society (Mészáros, 2015). Ferenczi was a complicated man. Even though he was a staunch supporter and contributor to organizations like the IPA, he remained suspicious of members of organizations who were in love with their own expert authority (Ferenczi & Frank, 1925/2012; Mészáros, 2015). Those who were closest to him said that what excited him the most was working with and learning from those patients who were the most marginalized in society. In fact, he is frequently referred to in the literature as the “analyst of last resort.” Not surprisingly, the sessions with one of his most troubled patients, Elizabeth Severn, led to some of the most radical innovations in his practice and to several important theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 3). Ferenczi prized authenticity in the analytic space, and he insisted that analysts should be courageous enough to admit their mistakes to their patients. He saw the analyst’s admission of inadequacy as an instrumental part of the healing process because the demeanour of the detached expert can re-traumatize the wounded child inside the adult patient. To reach his most vulnerable patients, Ferenczi maintained a healthy suspicion towards dogmatic theory. In fact, he believed that many of his “technical difficulties arose [also] from the analyst having too much knowledge” (Ferenczi & Frank, 1925/2012, p. 34). His public critique of the pride of place that theory occupied, his child analysis in the analysis of adults as well as his experiments in mutual analysis damaged his relationship with Freud (Ferenczi, 1995), and subsequently erased him from the collective consciousness of psychoanalysis for many years. We know he was painfully aware of his looming erasure because at a meeting in Vienna to celebrate Freud’s 75th birthday, he lamented that he had been painted as the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis (Haynal & Haynal, 2015). Countertransference Freud mentioned countertransference sparingly, even though he saw it as a significant barrier to the psychoanalytic process (Gabbard, 2001). The

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concept was first discussed as the evocation of the unconscious desires, fears and hatreds of the analyst through his or her engagement with the analysand (Berzoff & Kita, 2010). Holmes (2014) studied the historical legacy of countertransference and characterized the treatment of the concept in three different ways: interfering, useful and intersubjective. Freud conceived of countertransference as interfering, while Ferenczi understood it as an instructive and intersubjective process. He observed and noted the many ways that interactions between patients and their analysts had a significant impact on both parties in the analytical space. Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary (1995) paints a portrait of a brilliant experimental analyst who feared the personal and professional consequences of leaving the safety of Freud’s inner circle. Risking Freud’s disapproval, he chose to tell the truth about what it felt like to sit and listen to his patients day after day. As an illustration, on January 7, 1932, as he reflected on one of his ‘active methods,’ he wrote, The patients begin to abuse my patience, they permit themselves more and more, create very embarrassing situations for us, and cause us not insignificant trouble. Only when we recognize this trend and openly admit it to the patient does this artificial obstacle, which is of our own creation disappear. (p. 2) In the same diary entry, he refers to a female patient who insists that patients ought to have the right to analyze their analysts. During some of his early experiments with mutual analysis, particularly with his patient called Elizabeth Servern, he was quite frank when he found it difficult to actively listen to patients when negative feelings in his own mind competed for his attention. Closer to his death, Ferenczi distanced himself from his more radical experiments with mutual analysis. He cited problems with feeling out of control in sessions, and he referenced the significant emotional cost of being totally vulnerable in the presence of one’s patients. Unaware, in many cases, that an intellectual debt was owed to Ferenczi, in the late twentieth century, a new cohort of analysts began to discuss countertransference in increasingly relational terms. They began to challenge the disavowal of countertransference in classical psychoanalysis and to write about a third space of learning, one that is mutually created between the analyst and the patient. These new intersubjective theorists and practitioners encouraged their fellow analysts to deconstruct their own wishes, fears and desires that arose in the analytical scene. In summary, the evolution of relational countertransference excavates some of the early deliberations about the ways in which the interior worlds of different individuals intersect. In tracings of Ferenczi’s writing, I find new ways to explore the concept of mutual influence in the study and practice of educational leadership.

18 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership Clever Babies Ferenczi released a brief communication in 1923 titled The Dream of the Clever Baby. In the short piece, he refers to a dream of a wise infant or small child who treats the dreamer with “deep sayings.” Ferenczi suggests these types of dreams can represent the repression of a child’s traumatic experience with an adult. An adult’s unpredictable or aggressive behaviour can force a child to become a little psychiatrist in order to navigate the confusion caused by the adult’s denial and dismissal of the child’s pain. When a child’s pain is left unacknowledged by the adult (You know that’s not what I meant! I don’t remember it that way. If you would just pick up after yourself, I wouldn’t have to get so angry with you!), the child has no choice but to blame herself for her own situation and prospects. For Ferenczi, the “silence, lies and hypocrisies of the caregivers were the most traumatic aspects” (Blum, 2004; Hoffer, 2003) of these types of events, and if they remained repressed, the silences and hypocrisies would be lived out in future personal and professional relationships. His work on the Clever Baby is an invitation to reshape the skills and attitudes one develops in order to survive major and minor emotional injuries and to deal with the psychological inheritances one receives as a child. For instance, in response to a traumatic event, the Clever Baby may need to overdevelop her capacity to be hyper vigilant, intuitive, observant, protective, creative, empathetic or driven. Extremes in these areas may cause serious difficulties in childhood and adulthood. However, if these strategies are deconstructed, reshaped and refocused in ways that are healthier, these capacities can be a source of resilience. In other words, old survival skills may assist those who experience or relive negative emotional experiences to deploy these same skills in more life affirming ways. As a cultural critic and an explorer, Ferenczi sought ideas from other disciplines to enrich his research and teaching. To refine his clinical practice, he took advice from colleagues in the field he admired while remaining suspicious of those who would choose to wield their expert status against those they purported to support. For many years, Ferenczi has been a ghost in the historical record of psychoanalysis, but the reengagement with his work is a necessary retrieval to view leadership through a relational psychoanalytic lens.

Leadership as Relations Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new field of study. Its emergence is marked by the publication of Greenberg and Mitchell’s book, Object Relations in Psychoanalysis, in 1983. Grounded in research on infant attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973; Stern, 1985), the interpersonal psychology of Sullivan (1940, 1953, 1956) and the rediscovery of Ferenczi’s key theoretical concepts (Aron & Harris, 1993; Frankel,

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1998, 2002), a collective of theorists who were innovators in intersubjective approaches were drawn together under the umbrella of relational psychoanalysis. In very broad strokes, this group of theorists and clinicians critiqued the early Freudian conceptualization of drives as the primary motivators and decentred contemporary Neo-Freudian approaches that relied heavily on sex and self-preservation as the primary motivators of human behaviour. Common tenets of relational psychoanalysis posit that human beings are born to connect with one another and that social experiences are the primary motivators of psychic life. Mitchell (1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1997, 2000), whose work was central in the emergence of the field (Ringstrom, 2010), conceptualized the mind as a set of relational configurations (1988). He made the case that relational configurations influence one’s predictions about the behaviour of others, they impact how one interprets other people’s behaviour and they shape how one behaves in the presence of other people. These networks of relations shape our personalities and influence who we are and who we can become in the face of others. Past relationships are ever present. It is why, in times of great emotional stress, educational leaders may unconsciously retreat to familiar relational configurations. This relational regression makes one’s ability to recognize the subjectivity of the other challenging but an essential element of leadership praxis because it determines what can be made possible between bodies in a given encounter. The heart of the matter is that the maintenance of social bonds in organizations requires a continuous mitigation of the affectively charged tensions that erupt when people act out in ways that contravene inherited relational configurations. Take Charge Moment My father is disappointed I don’t want to be a (c)onservative anymore When we spar we trade in cheap orthographic projections always engineering future plans for forgiveness Seconds from disappearing I’m forced to remind you Under his spell we taste of a sour alchemy If you plant a flag on a pile of decomposing outrage it’s not victory

20 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership So intrusive in your views people thought you should know When mutuality within an encounter cannot be actualized, the other is reduced to an object of fantasy to be manipulated. What gets in the way of recognition is what Benjamin (2018) calls the complementary structure. In a complementary structure, dependency on the other is coercive. It is the feeling you get when the person sitting across from you expects recognition but thinks you can do without. It creates a cycle of sour affective currents that become amplified with each emotional slight. In this zone, people are operating in two different realities, unable to understand the conflict with any nuance and unwilling to approach it with generosity. It is a scenario that skips like the needle bobbing inside the scratch in a record. What Is Called for Now If you loved me— If you loved me You would . . . Bring my coffee black Save me a seat Let me finish a sentence Stop saying I sound like your mother Do your part If you respected me— If you respected me You would . . . . . . . Read your emails Stick to the agenda Invite me to the meeting before the meeting Speak in less subtext Make eye contact If you hated me— If you hated me You would . . . . . . . . . Talk me out of something I love Annihilate my central argument Make me a punchline Confirm I’m an imposter Write me out of the third act

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If we could go back— If we could go back We would . . . . . . . . . . . . Locate a grain of goodness Measure the potency of words in fractions Respond in reciprocity Stay open to the not yet known A capacity to stay open to the not yet known is a gesture towards mutual recognition. In moments of recognition, conversations evolve in response to each person’s contributions, and mutual corrections are frequently made to address little misunderstandings and the off-the-cuff dismissals of feelings. In this way, mutual relatedness is always in flux because it requires a persistent attunement to shifting states between feeling seen or unseen, heard or unheard. Striving for mutual recognition requires an appetite for risk and steady faith in another’s good intentions to actualize the potential for recognition (Grumet, 1988). Further, it demands a certain kind of humility to surrender to the other person’s point of view and to repress a desire to control a conversation, especially when one feels like one is losing ground. And because one can never separate what someone knows from the knowing person, each interaction is both emotionally cumulative and laden with potential for change. An intersubjective approach to the study and practice of educational leadership rejects the idea that humans are isolated individuals and, instead, assumes that emotions and thoughts are not our own in educative spaces. In this vein, encounters become integral sites of inquiry in which researchers account for the complex subjectivity that exists within each person and for the shifts between multiple subjectivities within and between encounters. Within this relational ontological positioning, I define leadership as a set of unfolding affective relations in the field that emerge organically in the interactions between people as they pursue intersecting and competing interests. To study leadership as an affectively charged set of moving relations is to question how social relations are produced, reproduced and constituted in organizations and communities in ways that enhance or diminish inclusivity and respect for diversity. It is a commitment to identify new ways to think about how affected and affecting minds destabilize social bonds. Further, it is a call to study artful communication practices that disrupt entrenched asymmetries of power between people. In the previous two sections, I described what the study affect and relational psychoanalytic theory might have to offer educational leadership praxis. In the next section, I address a third shadow in the field and use it to move towards the arts-based pieces in the text that may help readers feel their way towards a socio-aesthetic approach to relational leadership praxis.

22 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership

Beauty Shadows In a field that sought scientific legitimization, very few wrote about the art of school administration. However, a few scattered imprints from the humanities are evident in the field’s early history. In 1963, the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) struck a task force to explore the potential roles for the humanities in preparation programs (Farquhar, 1968; Popper, 1987). The Humanities Task Force organized a meeting in 1965 at the University of Virginia. At the meeting, participants were presented with papers intended to provoke debate and discussion regarding the inclusion of the humanities in preparation programs for administrators (Popper, 1987). Even prior to the UCEA sponsored meeting in 1965, there is evidence of the ephemeral appearance of the arts in the field. Max Weber’s writing in 1922 on charisma (Bates, 2006) and Barnard’s 1938 edict on moral creativeness as a foundational skill for the functional executive (Popper, 1987) are acknowledgements that “selected content from the humanities may contribute substantially to the improved preparation of personnel, who, through educational leadership, will play a significant role in determining the future of modern society” (Farquhar, 1968, p. 99). As an illustration, Barnard suggested that administrators ought to develop the capacity to define the organization’s purpose and inspire allegiance to the mission of the organization. This particular skill set separated mere managers from institutional leaders. He insisted that “moral creativeness” should precede technical proficiency (Popper, 1987) but that creativity was fundamentally dependent on an administrator’s technical abilities. In this way, the formal leader’s task was to code switch in order to translate bureaucratic rules and policies into more socially humane words. After World War II, a burgeoning sociological wave, coupled with the theory movement, was viewed as an opportunity for administrators to be able to move beyond the “beans-budgets-bricks” model of training (Popper, 1987, p. 72). In 1968, Farquhar articulated three possible foci for the humanities in educational administration preparation programs: (1) A focus on the general liberalization of the administrator; (2) A focus on the values and purpose defining skills of the administrator; and (3) A focus on the creative and analytical skills of the administrator. The three foci were not intended to privilege the aesthetic over positivistic research but to make the case that administrators would be more successful if they could effectively communicate organizational values in relation to ideographic concerns and ethical imperatives. Just as the artist is able to navigate and utilize the beauty and pain evoked by harmonious and discordant observations, the competent administrator needs to demonstrate these artistic skills. Farquhar claimed the aims of the organization would be better served if formal leaders intermittently adopted the persona of an

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artist to more efficiently and humanely achieve both the technocratic and social aims of the organization. Farquhar (1968) references the injection of the liberal arts in many business administration courses in the 1950s to build his case. These injections were designed to “breed statesmen” who would feel great responsibility for the communities in which they made their profits. In turn, Farquhar offers some possibilities for the inclusion of the humanities in preparation courses to firmly link the work of the school leader to social responsibility. The study of the classic structure of drama, with special attention paid to decision making and critical incidents, as well as the inclusion of humanities scholars in educational administration instructional teams, are two of the major entry points he proposed to make space for the humanities in preparation programs. He noted past attempts to include the humanities in the field had limited success and attributed the limitations to the field’s scientific preoccupations and the risks associated with evaluating the impact of humanities courses on the practical work of school administrators. Almost 20 years later, UCEA published a book that echoed Farquhar’s challenge. The former Executive Director of UCEA, Patrick Forsyth, uttered another call to use the humanities in the publisher’s note he drafted for Samuel Popper’s Pathways to the Humanities in Educational Administration (1987). Forsyth noted, Educational administrators have tended to see their mission, bringing up children, as a sacred one. The mechanical and sociological models used to explain and understand life in school organizations were never perceived as wholly adequate. It is at this juncture that Professor Popper’s efforts are vital. (Popper, 1987, p. iv) Popper’s explication of the role art plays in capturing the spirit of a period (zeitgeist) and his treatment of “imaginative beholding” to inoculate against the fetishizing of functionalism are notable aesthetic roots in the field of educational leadership. An artist is well suited to identify or capture a changing ethos through his “imagistic creations of meaning” (Popper, 1987, p. 58). An artist uses her third eye to make an observation about the human condition so that she can bring the observation to life inside of a play, sculpture, painting, novel, poem or song. The artist creates an image and in the making of the image, she identifies social pathologies and renews the social field. In more practical terms, viewing the image protects the administrator from: (1) entrapment in the egocentric predicament; an inability to see the world except through one’s eyes; (2) the acquisition of a trained

24 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership incapacity for empathy; a skill which enables one to comprehend what others feel under stress and (3) the all too familiar spiritual ‘burn out’ in the administrative role. (Popper, 1987, p. 65) Prior to the 1970s, aesthetic analysis generated a modicum of interest in educational leadership, and in the 1970s and the 1980s, it served the functional and rational goals of educational administrative theorists and practitioners (Samier, Bates, & Stanley, 2006). Exceptional contributions made by scholars like Farquhar (1968) and Popper (1987) and the earlier work of the UCEA Humanities Task Force (Popper, 1987) yielded a limited acceptance of a socio-aesthetic ontology or arts-based methodologies in the field of educational leadership. Worries about im/practical applications, under developed aesthetic theory and the challenges the arts pose to the dominant technical rationality in the field were, and continue to be, significant barriers to the widespread theoretical and practical applications of arts-based approaches to leadership praxis. Epistemologies that savour imagination, sensory perception and ambiguity are sparse in traditional educational leadership studies (Bates, 2006, 2012; Bersani, 2006; English, 2008; English, Papa, Mullen, & Creighton, 2012; Oplatka, 2012; Sloane, 2013). Since epiphanies inspired by dramatic scripts, poetry or beautiful music cannot be measured or predicted, they are often dismissed as dispensable luxuries that interfere with more traditional academic approaches. I include several arts-based pieces in the monograph not only to address this particular shadow in the field but to employ methods that can provoke the reader to examine how they have come to know what they know about leadership (Irwin & Springgay, 2010). By making the familiar strange, the arts can exert an uncanny effect (Freud, 1919). Although there have been some significant arts-based contributions to the theory and practice of educational administration (Bates, 2006; Cranston & Kusanovich, 2012; Greenfield, 1980; Popper, 1987; Samier, 2011; Samier et al., 2006; Snowber, 2006), there is a paucity of interdisciplinary research that combines educational administration, psychoanalysis and arts-based research. In this case, writing this monograph created a placein-text that allowed for affectively charged psychoanalytic questions in the context of educational leadership to emerge. To see something or someone anew often requires the courage to interrogate the illusions that have insulated us for many years. Creative texts can help us deal with our cravings to be certain because there is a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities embedded in an evocative script (Saldaña, 2010, 2011), poem or dance. Furthermore, over time, one accumulates assumptions that desensitize or even deaden one’s ability to perceive the uncanny. Arts-based research is an antidote for desensitization because it evocatively represents and distils the experiences and feelings

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of others (Cranston & Kusanovich, 2012). Many people have encountered a performance or a piece of dramatic text that elicited a strong emotional reaction in their bodies. These visceral responses can build reflective surfaces that provide researchers/readers with new ways of seeing themselves in relation to others and their work. When encountering an artistic text, readers/researchers may uncover peculiar relationships between what initially appeared to be disparate phenomena. New parings elicit fresh questions (Eisner, 2010), and disrupt mental habits (Bharucha, 2011; Eisner, 2008), which may cause researchers/readers to question powerful binary relationships (King, 2008) in the study and practice of leadership. For instance, the potential in a dramatic script to point to new intersections between previously unrelated concepts and fields of study (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Eisner, 2008, 2010; Leavy, 2009; McNiff, 2011) and a dramatic form’s capacity to make absurdities tolerable make meta-narratives more suspect (Barone, 2010; Finley, 2011). In a field that is at times constrained by a cult of presentism and control mechanisms (Greenfield, 1986), arts-based work may dislodge unquestioned assumptions about leadership. The creative texts throughout the monograph may illustrate some of the constraints and paradoxes of leadership, but most importantly, they are an attempt to make the world come alive in a circuit of singularities. Glimmers of images, poeticized dialogue and storytelling are a way to move around, through and beyond the tones and resonances of academic prose. To bring affect and relational psychanalytic theory to the study of educational leadership, one needs to call upon different emotional registers. Cigar Puffery Never confuse acquiescence with admiration for your efforts With defenses depleted all that was left to do was to fall back on your mercy Come now, obedient headmaster it’s time to treat the other Mothers and Fathers with deep sayings Enter the memory theatre Wounded or hostile to etch your initials against the wood grain of the lectern If you take up arms clever babies will feed off the

26 Affect as a Shadow in Field of Leadership autobiographical cuttings on the consulting room floor To strike a new chord rewind and take a new route home We’re not afraid to improvise here

Part 2

Dancing With the Unconscious—Relational Affective Forces You Bring Something Out in Me What parts of me come forth when I am with particular people in my organization? How do I respond when my expertise or authority is challenged? What relational qualities do I value in others? Is empathy more important than reliability? Do I prize trustworthiness over patience? How do I feel and respond when others behave in an unbecoming manner within a professional or personal context? Administrators are conditioned through professional training, the enculturation practices of school systems and by inherited stories of leadership to project confidence in the face of uncertainty. As a result, they become quite practiced in the art of telling students, teachers and parents what they need. This can be concerning because repressive exertions of power often begin with the imagined perfect understanding of someone else’s needs. In the section “You Bring Something Out in Me,” I explore the parts of us that come forth with another person when we think we are giving them what they need. In classical psychoanalysis, countertransference is the name given to the moments when the analyst is triggered by the patient. Ferenczi (1995), an important ancestor of the relational approach to psychoanalysis, wrote about countertransference in positive terms. It was, for him, a beneficial alarm for the analyst, a warning system that the analyst was becoming emotionally entangled with a patient in unhelpful ways. Notably countertransference is a contested concept within the various iterations of intersubjective approaches to psychoanalysis because it does not account for an unconscious that is relational and a human ontological positioning that is inherently social. In relational psychoanalytic terms, one speaks of enactments to think about the parts of us that come forth amidst emotional entanglements with others. The explanatory power of enactments is a useful concept that can remind those who work in organizations that we, too, can become

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emotionally entangled with others in ways that produce maladaptive responses to reduce anxiety. Emotional entanglements can look like a vice-principal’s overidentification with a teacher. It can transpire in the moments when a teacher tries to care for a student at the expense of the student’s well-being. It is not difficult to imagine that enactments surface during leadership performances. At times, the offices of educational leaders morph into interrogation rooms, confessional booths, archives, classrooms and emergency waiting rooms. The work is difficult and disorienting at times. All the while, leaders are significantly impacted by the conceptual tapestry woven in the dynamic exchange of words between themselves and those they are entrusted to lead. If leaders were to become more sensitized to the enactments in their interactions, they might be more capable of tending to their own and the emotional wounds of others. Enactments are characterized by reductive interpretations and a collapse in ambiguity. Things mean what I think they mean and nothing more. It is a withdrawal into self-protection and the maintenance of an allegiance to taken-for-granted assumptions about people, events and ideas. Within significant dyads, it is a collapse of twoness, or what Benjamin (1998, 2018) describes as a doer and done to encounter. The collapse results in perpetual reversals in the divisions between subject/object, leader/follower, researcher/researched and observer/actor. Enactments also diminish an appreciation for the unbidden and limit the risks and benefits associated with being affected when one attempts to affect something or someone else. The episodes in this section are a reminder that we must return to the negative moments, to deconstruct our enactments to work towards a more nuanced approach of recognizing and honouring the subjectivity of the other. Clean Up The year-end family barbecue was coming to an end. Just a few parents were left milling about in the courtyard. Mr. Deng picks up a garbage bag and begins to collect some of the paper plates and napkins that didn’t quite make it into the garbage can. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Brittany Morgan, the president of parent council making her approach. “Mr. Deng, do you have a minute?” Wrestling a wince into submission, he puts down the garbage bag and smiles. “Yes, Mrs. Morgan, how can I help you?” “The djembe drumming group.” “Yes, wasn’t that an extraordinary performance? Those young men and women have worked so hard this year. In fact, they are performing at the Canada Day Celebrations in front of the legislative buildings in just a few weeks. I hope that you and some of the other members of our parent council will be able to celebrate with them.”

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“The investment of time and resources you’ve put into the drummers is certainly producing results. They have quite a little following on Instagram according to Chole and her friends. And better yet, they are in the music room rehearsing rather than running the streets.” Mr. Deng pours some leftover juice onto the ground, picks up the garbage bag to throw out the empty cup. Some of the purple liquid splatters close to Mrs. Morgan’s tennis shoes. “What was it that the boy said before he began drumming?” “He offered a prayer and talked about the djembe drum as symbol for gathering in community.” “It’s probably a very good thing that you encourage them to speak in their first language.” “Actually, English is his first language, the official language of South Sudan, introduced during the colonial era. He chose to offer the blessing in Mangayat to honor his great grandparents. He tells me there are fewer than 1000 people left in the world who know the language.” “We can certainly appreciate your commitment to your community.” “The school community is my community, Mrs. Morgan.” “Yes, of course. But I wonder if you’ve thought much about how the other students perceive the constant championing of the drumming group? The money for the drums, the drumming teacher, all of the excused absences as they are out performing at local events . . .” “What exactly is your concern, Mrs. Morgan?” “Our concern—” “When you say ‘our,’ you mean?” “Parent council, of course. It was discussed at the last meeting.” “And who raised the concern?” “Oh, there were at least three other parents who wanted to talk about the drumming group and how much it receives compared to other clubs and programs in the school. There may not be an issue, technically, but the perception is out there that the drumming group benefits more than most of the other clubs and teams. It’s really about equity.” “I thought we decided at the beginning of the year that the funds raised by the parent council would be allocated by a committee of teachers in the school, teachers who would ensure that the funds would go towards the provision of more equitable extra-curricular opportunities for all the young people in the school. For instance, when you allowed your daughter Chloe to go on the Europe trip with the French class, you laughed in my office. You said, ‘I’d rather write a fat cheque than be selling chocolate almonds over the Christmas holidays.’ Some of the young people in the school don’t have parents who can write cheques like that.” “I think what you said there, is key. ‘Equitable opportunities for all the kids in the school.’ All students should benefit from the fundraising efforts of parent council. I know you’re not suggesting that all the parents who spend hours and hours running the pizza lunches or bringing in

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goodies for the bake sales are rich? We make plenty of room for parents to volunteer their time, and to be blunt, I haven’t seen any of the drummers’ parents helping out at our events this year.” “You raise, let me say, some provocative arguments. Maybe this is something we take up after the election of the parent council president in the fall. I’m sure we’re all ready to go home after such a busy evening, such as this one was.” “That makes sense, I suppose. I do wish you a restful summer, Mr. Deng.” “You as well, Mrs. Morgan.” “I look forward to seeing the pictures of the drumming group’s Canada Day performance on Facebook.” “I’m sure you do.” Blue Haired Consultant When I was 26 years old, I was hired as a school improvement consultant in the school division where I spent three of the first four years of my teaching career. The superintendent who hired me was a thoughtful and experienced leader who hoped I might have something to contribute to the newly articulated school renewal efforts. My job was to work with him, the high school administrators and the teacher leadership teams to devise and implement school improvement plans that were connected to the division’s priority areas. Just prior to the first divisional high school improvement team meeting, I engaged in an annual ritual. Each spring, from the time I was about 16 years of age, I dyed my hair a vibrant colour, and that year I picked blue. When I arrived at the ‘meeting before the first meeting,’ the superintendent took one look at my hair and said, “I’m not sure that’s going to do you any favours today.” He must have thought I had more than enough to overcome (youth, an underdeveloped filter and an initial resistance to small ‘p’ subtext . . .). Indeed, all of the administrators for whom I was working were men who were in their late 50s or early 60s who had accrued decades of experience in the school division. When I think about the myriad mistakes I made in my first year in that position, my cheeks flush. I continue to wonder if my unbridled enthusiasm for helping them made them justifiably wary. During the first three monthly school improvement team meetings, one of the senior administrators would refer to me as “the young lady.” He would make a point and then turn to me and ask, “What does the young lady have to say about this?” I felt as if both of us were perpetually ‘positioned.’ As I replay the meetings in my mind, we were fish trapped by the netting of our respective positionalities. A close colleague of mine, a new vice-principal in the district, assured me that the issue was not age. She explained, “It’s not because you’re young, it’s because he doesn’t think you’ll be around long enough to learn your name.” Four months into

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the job I was still “the young lady” and the principals defined my role in terms of organizing professional development events for teachers. Halfway into our fifth divisional team meeting, I was frustrated by his reference to me as “the young lady,” and I believe I capitalized on that frustration to overcome the fear that prevented me in earlier meetings from disrupting the routine. Subsequent to an animated verbal exchange, we held one another’s gaze for a few seconds longer than the other attendees may have preferred. As a consequence of the encounter, during the break he poured me a coffee and said, “It’s about time kid.” I experienced his affirmation as being constructed as a child but then a poiesis of the relations of alterity that changed how I saw myself in the space. What I remember as part of the self-analysis of my work as a school improvement consultant are the ways that I managed to “be around long enough.” Over the years, I have developed techniques that help me to deal with some of the internal voices that goad me into behaving too well when I am afraid. A number of these strategies were conceived of in the intersections between enflamed passions, self-analysis, creative writing and study. Several of the pieces in this book represent an evolution of this process in that they try to creatively spectralize some of the categories and significations that inform the stories that others, and society more broadly, write into us. The discomfort in these social situations was generative in that it provoked me to make sense of relational asymmetry in professional situations, and it fostered my attunement to differences in the exertion of gender power. In addition, the school improvement team meetings gave me many opportunities to practice inhabiting different affective registers simultaneously. This is by no means to be read as an apology for sexism or a sadistic demand that others look for the good in their experiences within oppressive encounters. For me, it was a consciousness-raising form of education that challenged the valourization of the autonomous, masculine leadership narratives that I had inherited. It would be tempting to try and identify with more certainty the definitive source material for the repetitions that move through the episodes, scripts and poems in the book. However, the entire thrust of this project is to loosen the certainty that pours into empty signifiers. This is why I call forth the specter. My overall intention in this work is to haunt the signs and symbols that reinforce the rational discourses that frame much of the field of educational leadership. To be sure, the reader will notice at times that I sound too sure, or fix an interpretation for too long. Nevertheless, this is partly reflective of the trappings of language. One must insert oneself in a conversation knowing that she will eventually be too hypocritical, too uninformed or too certain in her claims. These particular places in-text can signify errors or misunderstandings, but they can also signal that one is in the presence of something that has been exiled or turned invisible.

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Over the course of my time as an educational consultant, the administrators with whom I worked shared myriad professional and personal experiences. When I look back at the journals I kept during that time, a number of provocative themes emerge. Sacrifice, power and control were significant verbal motifs in their stories about colleagues, particularly in the memories unearthed from the conversations we had about their school renewal efforts. Further, the stories told by the administrators directed my attention to the interpersonal and environmental factors (living in a perpetual state of urgency, dealing with the impact of repeatedly responding to the most emotionally taxing events in the school . . .) that cause enactments to present themselves in the principal’s office. These memories and stories continue to be an invaluable well of inspiration, and I am grateful for all that I learned during that time in my career. Secret Thoughts CHARACTERS Department Head (DH) Dr. Kolisnyk Dr. Li Dr. Garcia Dr. Butters AT RISE (The Department Head and three members of the department sit around a rectangular table. One member of the department, DR. KOLISNYK, joins the meeting via video conference. The people and the table are almost completely buried in Excel spreadsheets.) DR. KOLISNYK

(She has yet to turn on her mic. She mouths—) Can you hear me? DR. LI

We can’t hear you. DR. KOLISNYK

(She still hasn’t turned on her mic. She mouths—) Is my microphone on? I can hear you. DEPARTMENT HEAD (DH)

Alright, you’ve given me your wish lists. I think— DR. GARCIA

(Directed to the DH) We still can’t hear her.

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DH

For goodness sakes. Will someone text KOLISNYK and tell her to click the little microphone button at the bottom of her screen. DR. BUTTERS

(Pulls out his cell phone.) Done. DH

We’re getting closer to— DR. KOLISNYK

Here we go. Can you hear me? Hello, everyone! DH

Seriously, if you want to video conference your way through every department meeting, you better learn how to damn well use a computer. As I was saying, we’re close to submitting our department’s workload proposal to the Dean. DR. BUTTERS

If administration coerces me into teaching one more goddamn group of undergrads next year, I will lose my mind. Undergrads are best left to those who want to regale them with war stories from the past. DH

We have a few more conflicts to work out, which I’m sure we can do before DR. BUTTERS launches into yet another speech about the audacity and entitlement of undergrads. DR. BUTTERS

Charming as ever. DR. GARCIA

BUTTERS never seems to mind taking the lovely young ladies out for coffee to help them revise their Intro to Ed Philosophy papers. The less aesthetically appealing undergrads remain unable to revise his perceptions of them. DH

At our last department meeting, we articulated some criteria that would help us address these workload issues. We talked about rotating the compulsory grad courses so everyone gets a chance to teach grad courses, especially those who are supervising PhD and M Ed students. DR. KOLISNYK

(She mutes her mic and turns off her video. Her voice is heard in an amplified computerized tone such as Siri or Alexa.) BUTTERS teaches every course as an intro to Foucault. Classroom Management, get inside the Panopticon, kids. Inclusive Teaching Practices, those are birthed in The Clinic. Want to get your kicks? Read The History of Sexuality and replace the words sex and sexuality with education. You’re so meta, BUTTERS. DH

And ensuring that we—

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DR. GARCIA

Ensuring that we give all of the online grad courses to the ‘suitcase professors’ so they may avoid living in a city that has only one good restaurant. Did KOLISNYK mute her mic and stop her video again? She’s probably gone for sushi. God, I could really go for a California roll right now. DH

As much as possible, we would allocate courses in a way that respects the research and personal circumstances that take people away from campus. DR. LI

What about the students? DR. BUTTERS

(Rolls his eyes and piles some more papers on the table in front of him.) DR. LI

Are the thesis students we supervise part of our workload? DH

You can’t be on a three credit hour research release and get compensated for being a thesis supervisor. DR. KOLISNYK

(Turns on her video and sound again. Her voice demonstrates high interest.) Can we do something about that? It’s only fair. DR. GARCIA

It would help if we more equitably shared the burden of working with thesis students who are on campus. DR. KOLISNYK

It would help if GARCIA struck a better balance between talking about working with students and actually advising students. DR. GARCIA

I don’t understand how we can live with our international students leaving their countries, their families, their entire lives, to come here and take a program full of online courses and to meet with professors via video conference? It’s nonsensical. DR. KOLISNYK

(Turns off her video but forgets to mute her sound. In a mocking tone—) It’s nonsensical. DH

Mute it, KOLISNYK. DR. LI

The grad students are not a burden to me. We write together. They make me a stronger researcher and teacher. I just was wonder— DR. BUTTERS

Oh, to be that energized and enamoured with the work. It’s refreshing. If there is anything I can do to help you balance the competing demands foisted upon new scholars, don’t hesitate to ask.

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DR. GARCIA

LI is going to get invited out for coffee. DH

Can we get back to workload, please? ALL

(Everyone mutters yes.) DH

Right, then. All the workload puzzle pieces fit as long as— DR. BUTTERS

Here it comes. DH

DR. KOLISNYK picks up an online section of the Intro to Research in Ed Admin in the winter term and BUTTERS or GARCIA picks up one— DR. BUTTERS

I knew it. DH

Just one, undergrad section of Classroom Management. DR. GARCIA

Enjoy your stay in the panopticon, kids. DR. KOLISNYK

I think that’s fair. DR. LI

(Directed to DR. BUTTERS) You refer a lot to Foucault in your work, don’t you? I think it would be fascinating to trouble the students’ perceptions of power and classroom management in the context of Foucault’s work. DR. GARCIA

Good God. DR. BUTTERS

Maybe we could talk about that over— DH

At the next department meeting. Think it over you two and then we’ll firm things up. DH

Let’s get to the rest of the items here. (As the list is read, more and more paper falls from above landing on the table. Each person echoes the words using various tones and at different volumes.) DH (+ALL)

Review of the senate’s new academic integrity policy Calendar changes Grad student applications New course approvals DR. LI

(Halfway through the reading of the list DR. LI, gets up and dances her way off stage. At first her movements are slow and contrived, and then they become loose and more creative.)

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Dancing With the Unconscious (DR. GARCIA gets up and exchanges gestures with DR. LI. She exits the stage. DR. LI responds thoughtfully and intuitively. DR. BUTTERS looks as if he wants to join in, but he elects not to.) Changes to the calendar Diversity Committee report Publish and Perish—the latest forensic audit Petty grievances Reignite turf war with the Curriculum Department . . . (SCENE) (BLACKOUT)

This Feels Familiar What types of people reappear in my life? What are some of my verbal tics that surface when I am in the midst of a conflict with another person? What are the repetitions in my organization that signal that a particular relation or sets of relations are in need of re-symbolization? This Feels Familiar takes up repetition as a concept in two different ways. One, I invite the reader to think about the words or phrases that consistently reappear as verbal tics, or the inner language that gets repeated with different people in different contexts when the same old feelings arise. Secondly, I explore the revelatory possibilities of repetition in the same way that actors mine their scripts to create new emotional valances on stage and to playfully violate an audiences’ expectations. Outside of the theatre and inside organizations, aural and gestural repetitions can be mined for surprise and wonder. In relational psychoanalytic terms, rehearsals as repetition refers to the production of a psychic backdrop where formative relationships are acted out with others in present-day circumstances. In this sense, repetitions are acritical and a ritualized forgetting that reproduces old ways of being with others. To put it differently, these types of rehearsals repeatedly cast actors in the present in roles that were scripted in the past. These are the times when one plays the parts one was given as a child and behaves in ways that demand others play the roles one unconsciously assigns them. These types of rehearsals can and do play out in educational leadership contexts. Recognized problematic repetitions in a professional context signal that it is time to inquire into the history of the repetition and the characteristics of its present-day incitements. There is a more freeing possibility if one takes the relational psychoanalytic idea of repetition and places it in a theatre. The play is written, and it is the expectation of the directors and the audience that the actors will bring the characters and the playwright’s lines to life on stage. To deliver

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a compelling performance, however, the actors must continuously interpret the initial offering from the playwright, and these interpretations must make sense within the world that is co-created with the director and later the audience. The best rehearsals in the theatre are collaborative, generative and creative. The collective work of the playwright, actors, director and audience comingle to significantly revise the meanings of events and people that may at first present as familiar. As illustration, take the simple phrase I got a lot out of that meeting. Say it out loud in the company of others with sincerity, with animus, sarcastically or as if you are in love, and the entire scene changes in dramatic ways. Warm Mittens Dee Dee comes in on Saturdays to put the finishing touches on her lessons. She sits on three committees to monitor the progress made towards achieving the most important goals in the school improvement plan. She contributes baking for the parent council bake sales. Her raspberry chocolate chip muffins have attained legendary status in the community. She takes children to the big box store to buy Winnipeg winter proof mittens even though it puts significant pressure on her household budget. She mentors new teachers, and she agrees to host a teacher candidate each year. The university supervisors race to get their student teachers placed in her classroom. The teacher candidates tell their professors they love her because she listens with such an open heart to all of their worries and wishes. Parents love Dee Dee, and whenever they see her in the grocery store, they make a point of telling her she was their child’s favourite teacher. In January, Dee Dee is diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. As she takes an inventory of her life, she seeks comfort in the memories of all of the children she has loved and taught throughout her long and distinguished career. At first, several colleagues and some of the parents visit her at home on a regular basis. After six months, Dee Dee spends most of her lucid time with the palliative care nurses, one of them a former student. She dies on a hot July afternoon. The charge nurse informs the five people on Dee Dee’s list about her passing. Dee Dee made all the funeral arrangements before she died. There wasn’t a lot of family to turn to in the end, and she didn’t want to impose. After the service, the school principal laments the number of people not in attendance. Arriving just before the service began, he was sure it would be standing room only. One of the teachers around the refreshment table pops the rest of her finger sandwich in her mouth and interjects to remind the group that it’s really hard for people to fit everything in on Saturdays. Aural Phantoms Ahunna is quiet during most large group discussions. There is something about the way people introduced themselves in the first class that leaked

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into the next class and the next one making her feel self-conscious. Feeling nervous about sharing her thoughts in an academic learning environment is depressingly unfamiliar. Ahunna’s written assignments continue to convey an avid interest in the course topics and a critical approach to the study of educational administration. And it is her theorizing that perpetually draws the over attentiveness of the course instructor. The instructor’s attempts to open a space so Ahunna will speak more during class discussions are presented as pedagogical gifts, but she is becoming weary of the aural tic that prompts Ahunna to speak about every lecture, reading or video with a decolonizing lens. Afraid of her own shadow’s white fragility, the good professor takes her refusal to speak for others to a place that abdicates her responsibility for the class. To further complicate the relational terrain in the room, Ahunna’s fellow students mobilize like thirsty multiculturalism vampires to suck each comparison that emerges when they share stories from their formal leadership experiences. Whether the lecture focuses on leadership for inclusion or educational finance, the other students in class appear delighted when Ahunna’s stories highlight the stark differences between the Nigerian and the Canadian educational contexts. There is an excess of pleasure in the repeated attempts to compare and contrast their lived experiences. Ahunna is increasingly unsettled by remaining in a class where she has become the object of inquiry. Three Ways CHARACTERS Woman The Watcher (TW) Voice Girl Scene: One Way SETTING There is a large screen suspended above the stage. Most of the time, the screen is filled with the upper body of TW. A metronome ticks at different speeds intermittently throughout the scene. AT RISE GIRL sits perfectly still at a small wooden desk downstage right. Papers are scattered around the desk. WOMAN lights a sparkler and paces anxiously around the stage drawing lines in the air with the sparkler. (Lights up to half.) WOMAN stops and faces TW.

Dancing With the Unconscious VOICE WOMAN TW GIRL TW WOMAN GIRL WOMAN GIRL TW WOMAN GIRL WOMAN

TW GIRL WOMAN GIRL WOMAN GIRL

WOMAN VOICE

39

Lights up please. Each theory comes with its own set of risks. (Loudly coughs up some phlegm.) (Covers her ears.) (Drags wooden chair closer and appears larger on screen.) (Moves to GIRL.) Let’s draw a squiggle to remember the things we’ve forgotten. What? (Pulls GIRL’s hands away from her ears.) I lost my pencil. (Writes notes.) (Reaches into desk and pulls out a pencil.) Is that so? (Slides under the desk.) (Reaches under the desk. Grabs GIRL underneath her arms and pulls GIRL towards the chair. GIRL almost gets loose and giggles. WOMAN is able to get GIRL seated. WOMAN puts pencil and a piece of paper on the desk and stands over GIRL with arms folded across chest.) Well? (Puts pen down. Starts stopwatch.) (Stares at the blank paper for three minutes. After 3 minutes, GIRL picks up the pencil.) (Crouches down beside the GIRL. Smiles tenderly.) (Turns to WOMAN and mimics a smile as she puts the pencil down.) (In a huff, stands up and looks at TW.) (Notices the burnt sparkler and places it carefully in the WOMAN’s hair. Returns to the desk.) I remember now. (Picks up pencil and draws a series of disjointed lines. A closeup of the GIRL’s drawing appears on TW’s screen.) That’s not a goddamn squiggle. We have evidence the GIRL produced several adequate squiggles for last year’s teacher. This is a play about a girl who will not abide. It is not a play about a GIRL who is incapable of drawing a squiggle. (BLACKOUT) (SCENE)

Scene 2: One More Time Please SETTING There is a large screen suspended above the stage. Most of the time, the screen is filled with the eyes of TW. Sounds of the wind blowing at various speeds occurs consistently throughout the scene. WOMAN lights a sparkler and moves effervescently

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Dancing With the Unconscious around the stage drawing squiggles in the air with the sparkler. A gust of wind blows out the sparkler. (Blackout.) WOMAN stops and faces the audience. AT RISE GIRL sits whistling at a small wooden desk downstage right. Papers are stacked neatly on the desk.

WOMAN VOICE TW GIRL WOMAN GIRL WOMAN GIRL TW WOMAN GIRL WOMAN TW GIRL WOMAN GIRL WOMAN TW

WOMAN TW GIRL WOMAN TW WOMAN

Lights up please. (Lights up.) Each day comes with its own set of risks. (Sings, You are my world, my shining light.) (Stands up and stretches.) (Moves to GIRL. Sings softly, My love for you is infinite) Let’s draw a squiggle to remember the things we’ve forgotten. What? (Twirls GIRL. GIRL giggles and then GIRL sits down in her chair.) I lost my balance. (Sings, “You make me extraordinary in fields of grey.) How do you recover? Under my own steam, Miss. When will you start? (Screen starts to flicker and then goes blank and dark.) (Closes her eyes and makes a squiggle.) (Crouches down beside the GIRL. Smiles tenderly.) (Turns to WOMAN and asks her to finish the squiggle picture.) You’re turn, Miss. Use my squiggle to make your own picture. (Picks up the pen.) (Screen flicks back on. TW puts on his glasses and swallows a couple of pills with a bottle of water. The gulping sound of the water is amplified across the theatre. It begins to sound as if the theatre is filling up with water. A picture of the squiggle is shared on screen.) (Turning towards the screen.) You’ve really got something there. (The water sounds stop.) I’ve taken this as far as you can go. I suppose that’s true. (The squiggle on paper is folded and refolded until it disappears.) This is a play about my little darling. Protected from life’s unforbidden pleasures. She’ll go out and make us proud, without getting too pushy about it. (BLACKOUT) (SCENE)

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Scene 3: If We Must SETTING Lights up to half. There is a large screen suspended above the stage. Most of the time, the screen is filled with scrolling Tweets that contain mash-ups of well-known leadership quotes that are paired with soundless videos showing random people falling. These are videos of minor accidents that marry laughter with pain. Computer notification sounds interrupt intermittently throughout the scene. AT RISE WOMAN turns her large purse upside down. She shakes out the contents onto the floor. She picks her phone up. She changes from looking happy to furious as she moves around the stage reading things on her phone. She walks quickly with no particular direction in mind. WOMAN stops when she bumps into GIRL’s desk located downstage centre. The legs of the wooden desk make a loud scraping sound as they move across the floor. GIRL TW

GIRL TW

GIRL WOMAN GIRL WOMAN GIRL

WOMAN TW

(GIRL leaves her seat to pick up the paper that’s been knocked off the desk.) (In a voice similar to Alexa’s) Lights up please. (Lights up, even the house is brightly lit.) (Looking up at WOMAN.) Each life comes with its own set of risks. (Video of someone tripping plays and the sounds of recorded laughter erupt in different parts of the theatre.) (To the audience.) What is so funny? Let’s draw a squiggle to help them remember what they’ve forgotten. What? Take out your markers. There are no markers in this place. (Runs over to search for and collect a pen from the items on the floor that were in her purse.) Sometimes you have to improvise. (Holds the pen up proudly to WOMAN.) Do you plan your squiggles with an end in mind? (Screen starts to flicker and then shows a video of man dressed in a paint splattered painter’s suit as he sweeps hundreds of markers off the edge of the screen. The

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WOMAN

GIRL WOMAN

GIRL WOMAN GIRL WOMAN & GIRL

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VOICE

sweeping sound is audible. Many markers fall down onto the stage from above the set.) (Crouches down beside the GIRL. Smiles tenderly as she puts a hard hat on the GIRL to protect her from the falling markers.) The squiggles have all fallen into line. (Picks up the pen. She draws several squiggles that are projected on screen that all straighten out. The more squiggles she draws, the quicker they straighten out. She gets increasingly frustrated.) I told you a thousand times. (Laughs louder in response to each straightened squiggle.) What if you helped? I keep it locked away. (GIRL hits her chest with a closed fist, twice.) (WOMAN and GIRL cautiously move towards each other. They take turns making interesting shapes with their bodies. At first they are tentative. After a while they respond more intensely to each other’s movements, inventing new and beautiful pictures on every part of the stage.) (Intense rhythmic music plays and WOMAN and GIRL are not only responding to each other, but to the musicality in their bones.) This is the mystery. (BLACKOUT) (SCENE)

Memoirists What are some of my earliest memories of significant caregivers exerting their authority over me and over others? How would each of these significant individuals have approached the last difficult encounter I had with a colleague or student? Each visit to where we have been is never the same. Attempts to individually modulate the affective charge or to influence the unfolding of events in the memory traces of our lives is impossible. The philosopher Simon Critchley (2014), in his fictional text Memory Theatre, explores the relationship between knowledge and memory. His character of the same name, Critchley, attempts to build a structure that will hold his collective memories in order to document his entire life. What Critchley confronts towards the end of his project is that the collective can never be limited or representative of the totality of his own life as a separate subject:

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Memory theater cannot be reduced to my memory, but has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past. The dead who still fill the air with their cries. The memory theater would have to immerse itself in the monumentally forgotten. Like a dredging machine descending down through the lethic waters of the contemporary world into the sand, silt and sludge of the sedimented past. (p. 83) One’s collective memory reaches back through history, embodies the current social context and exists within a web of other peoples’ memories. Memories can be poignant points of departure that orient us to particular people and topics. In Memoirists, the episodes appear on the slippery terrain of remembering others in the process of reimagining ourselves. Because one’s sense of self is derived amidst a field of social relations, our minds are partly colonized to some degree by our early caregivers (Abraham, 1968, 1975; Abraham & Torok, 1971, 1972; Ferenczi, 1995; Ferenczi & Frank, 2012; Torok, 1968). The colonization proceeds in part through the unconscious transmission of pain, shame, anxiety or guilt, and it manifests in the moments when a child becomes the depersonalized object of a significant adult’s judgements and demands (Shaw, 2014). Driven by the need to escape these unsettling emotional encounters, a child becomes the repository for the adult’s bad feelings. In other words, the adult must remain good for the child to psychically survive. Memories build palatable and coherent narratives of significant people and events. Amidst the edits and oversimplifications, memories cement aspects of one’s identity and encourage leaders to play roles they were given as children, roles that are difficult to revise as adults. Students in my Introduction to Educational Administration graduate seminars are often initially wary when I invite them to reflect on significant educational experiences with authority figures during their childhoods. Term after term, I feel compelled to say, All administrators were once children who worried about a loss of love and pleasing the adults in their lives. Not in spite of, but because life is composed of the disorderly matrices of meanings we give to significant people and events, in order to examine our internalized assumptions about leadership, we need fresh interpretations of our memories to critique and devise new metaphors for what we think we know about the exertion of authority in the context of education. For example, it might be worthwhile to think with others about how and why particular events are memorialized in institutions. School leaders are frequently called to act in response to affectively laden events, and the telling and retelling of these stories often valourizes images of stoicism, calmness, discretion and measured language in the face of emotional wildness. Students often speak of rationality, focus, quietness and control as the anchors of administrative work. However, it is

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important to think about the personal cost as one perpetually strives for the maintenance of control and stoicism in the face of unwieldly emotions. No unravelling of a myth can happen without a counter-myth (Ruti, 2006, 2018), therefore opening up our memory theatre archives to the thoughts and musings of others is worthy work. Continuous and collaborative acts of remembering allow us to recast ourselves and others in the face of new learning and to suffer less in the present. To that end, a significant aspect of one’s leadership identity ought to be that of memoirist. Administrators consciously and unconsciously contribute to the writing of their identity within the organization, but at times, they are unable to relinquish the pen. The role of the memoirist is critical, because there is a unique collection of memories archived from childhood that exert a force that makes other people in the organization too familiar. People may become too familiar because memories haunt. Setting the table for a holiday dinner, noticing the flash of a familiar grin, the smell of an old nemesis’s aftershave on a colleague, curls of cigarette smoke that waft through an open car window at a red light, these types of moments can dislocate us from time, throwing us into the past. Haunt shares an etymological closeness with the German word unheimlich, and in the multiplicity of its significations, haunt gestures towards an eerie dwelling place where unhomely domestic scenes of the past invade and disturb, as Freud (1919) discusses in his well known text The Uncanny. We build imposing monuments to our relations in our memories (I was a precocious child. My father did what he had to do to put food on the table. Birthdays weren’t a big deal in our house. In high school I was a real screw up) because the meanings of the words, signs and symbols that construct memories contain a multiplicity of interpretations. In this way, memory work raises questions about the inheritance of psychological legacies that are buried, excommunicated, fading or invisible and how these questions present themselves in present-day circumstances. The Moth Women From the time I was a small child, I recall being compelled to listen to a frightful story about a little girl and a moth. It was used year after year to justify, teach and to warn. The smell of clover, the dusking sky, a flicker of the outside lights and abrupt departures would often signal the telling of this story. In some ways, I resent its trappings each time I listen to or retell it, partly because I feel guilty about my complicity in relaying a narrative that raised the hair on the back of the necks of three generations of women in my family. One evening, when my Nana was a very young child, she lay alone in her bed unable to sleep. Nana would often begin the story by describing what it felt like on her fingers to drag her little hand across the seams of the white netting that surrounded her bed. In response to hearing a creak

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of a floor board, she took notice of a looming figure in the doorway. She began to call out to her mother in response to its slow approach. The candlelight, which was supposed to clear the shadows from the gaze of a worried child, revealed the toothy smirk of her uncle. She remembers the smell of whiskey emanating from his breath as he lifted the net to release a large, hairy, black moth. As he slithered back into the darkness of the room, the moth tried relentlessly to reach the candlelight. She remembers shrieking in response to each flutter of its wings while her uncle laughed in the umbra. As a result of this traumatic childhood experience, my Nana suffered terribly from mottephobia. In the summer it affected her ability to go outside and her relationships with darkness and light. As an example, in her late fifties, she was asked to attend a celebration to receive an award from her beloved art club. She really wanted to attend the celebration, so she steeled herself against all the voices in her mind that were trying to convince her to stay home. From the time she was a little girl, dusk signalled potential danger. After much deliberation, she got in the car with my grandfather and felt proud that she made it to the event. However, while sitting in the second row of chairs, a feather from another art club member’s fascinator fell in her lap. In a hyper state of vigilance, she mistook the feather for a moth. She leapt off her chair, screamed and knocked over chairs as she tried desperately to reach the safety of the building. I remember the instructions my Nana and my mother repeatedly gave me so that I may properly respond to an encounter with a moth when Nana visited in the summer. No windows with torn screens were to be opened under any circumstances. No dillydallying in the doorway. Get in quickly and close the door all the way. Limit how many times one has to be outside after dark. Shut the lights off that are close to the doorways to keep the moths away from the entrances to the house. If you see a moth, you must catch it immediately. A moth is dead only when it is flushed down the toilet. Nana must be able to hear the flush, and you must be able to report to her that you saw the moth disappear down the toilet. I was well trained to monitor and manage the anxiety levels of some of the adults in my life. As a child, I climbed on chairs that were piled up on tables to trap moths in paper towels. These experiences, according to my mother, were formative in what she describes as “the joy I found in being a people pleaser.” After a particularly daring moth h(a)unting mission left me with a split lip and a bump on the head, we both learned something significant about the responsibility one inherits in the telling and retelling of painful family stories. But as many complex family stories go, this one became saturated and leaked into personal narratives in ways that moved beyond the various tellers’ professed intent. Moths belong to the order of Lepidoptera. With over 100,000 species of moths in the world, many have yet to be classified. I, too, have

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been unable to conceive of and classify all of my life experiences that are directly and indirectly connected to this text. First, my unconscious makes me an unreliable witness to my own life. Alternatively, I must consciously put limitations around what I can and should share in the public domain. In my mind, sharing this memory cannot and should not be therapy, although it has been therapeutic in some ways. Additionally, not all stories are appropriate to tell at all times, and sharing too much can endanger us (Senehi et al., 2009). I will say that in my late teens and in my early twenties, I experienced two traumatic events that left me frightened and mentally stuck. As a result, once in a while there are phantoms that haunt my doorways at night. And because of these difficult experiences, I would describe myself as a person, like my Nana, who remains focused on tracing the seams of places, people and discourses to identify potential escape routes. In similar fashion to the character Carly in the play Last Call for Sincere Liars, in the next section, I cultivate a spectral heart and mind (del Pilar Blanco & Peeren, 2013). Writing creatively as part of this book project presented escape routes and openings that led to alternative interpretations of the affective dimensions of leadership. It is not because research is inherently capable of making this happen but because some of my understandings about the world were troubled. Acting creatively, combined with the art of study, forces me to confront the dissensus I experience (Durkheim, 1897/2006) as I try to be more alive in my work. Moths evolved long before butterflies, but they do not enjoy the symbolic pride of place that butterflies occupy in life’s saccharine stories that deal with transformation, change and hope. Moths, too, make miraculous cocoons, but unlike butterflies, they are known as unattractive nuisances who engage in life at night. However, moths can figuratively make room for metamorphosis that is more closely connected to the dissolution of certainty. Butterflies, in my eyes, are helpful to symbolically orient oneself to a visible future or to significations that resonate with well circulated discourses. They make their lives during the day. Conversely, moths, in their syncopated flight towards the light, create dark shadows when they mistake unnatural light for lunar lighting cues. The oddly shaped shadows cast by the moth’s wings blur the boundaries between opposites such as light/dark and natural/unnatural. It may sound peculiar to the reader that the moth in this context is coloured more positively than the butterfly in light of the memory I shared about my Nana. While in fact it may be peculiar, it is in many ways an acknowledgement of the potential healing power in revising memories with an audience that is present or even imagined. In this way, the moth’s meaning is too abundant to live inside just one story. Eventually, through a multiplicity of retellings, one can capitalize on the saturation of significations and memorialize them differently. I do this to better understand

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how the moth story shapes me, and I use it as an opportunity to reshape the signification of the moth women in the future. Anti-Social-Mediations He wakes up every morning thankful he went to high school before the advent of social media. It’s of no consolation to the sobbing girl in his office that there was a time when young people could outlive many of their youthful indiscretions. His mind wanders back to the time when a friend pulled down his pants while he urinated off the school roof and the time he threw up all over the backseat of his best friend’s car. His face flushes. There is freedom in not having the embarrassing or frightful moments in your life archived in the public domain. As the image of her naked body courses through the school’s digital circulation system, they feel another sharp reduction in the student body’s capacity for sympathy. He wonders about the cumulative human cost when you don’t have to look another person in the eyes to feel the impact of your cruelty. Maybe in time, she can forget. The Reunion The gym motif is royal blue and silver. Balloons, streamers and plastic tablecloths from the big box store reanimate the old wooden rectangular tables around the dancefloor. The DJ plays confusing mashups of one hit wonders. Twinkling lights hang from fake trees that shade cotton snow piles. People mill about doing a lot of winking and saying things like, You haven’t changed a bit and Can you believe what so and so is up to now? All of the old teachers look a little like swollen raisins when you get close. For the most part, nervous laughter overwhelms the wafts of competitiveness that move through the room. Donnie spots Vice-principal Connelly at the bar. He watches Connelly’s body jiggle as he exchanges several high-fives and fist bumps with the former Captain of the varsity basketball team. Connelly spent thousands of hours over the course of his career coaching basketball, and several of his student athletes, like the Captain, went on to play college ball. When the Captain’s wife crashes the scene to pull her guy onto the dance floor, Donnie notices Connelly’s hands refuse an invitation to join the Captain and his wife that was never extended. Donnie seizes upon the moment and nervously approaches Connelly who takes some time to study Donnie’s face. For a few seconds, Donnie is terrified that Connelly doesn’t recognize him. Thankfully, his old coach grabs his hand, shakes it and pulls him in close. Connelly barks, “How the hell are you, kid?” and Donnie offers to buy him a drink. Throughout the conversation, they lift each refilled glass towards the banners that hang along the back wall of the gym.

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After more than a few awkward pauses in the conversation, Donnie blurts out, “I never did it again, Coach.” “What’s that, son?” “I said, I never did it again.” “You never did what?” “Before the big game with Oak Park High. You were busy getting the lineup finished, and I was freaking out because I left my jersey at home. There was no way my old man was going to be in any shape to bring it to me, so I panicked. I kept trying to get your attention to see if maybe you had an extra one. I guess you had enough of me nipping at your heels, so you really ripped a strip off me. I remember you just kept yelling, “Don’t interrupt me again!” Over and over again. “Don’t interrupt me!” It got so quiet in the gym. When I saw you tonight, I thought I should tell you that I was sorry about all that. And I don’t go around interrupting people anymore.” Blood Pressure Just outside the gymnasium, she finds the young man sitting on the floor with a bloodied nose and mouth. The other boy he was fighting with left the scene minutes ago. She examines his face, helps him up and then asks one of the students who watched the fight to get some ice from the cafeteria. She tells both students the ice will help reduce the swelling. Once she’s back in the office, she takes copious notes as the boy tells her his side of the story. She interviews three witnesses, watches the video footage from the east wing and then calls the boy’s parents to inform them about their son’s two day in-school suspension. Tomorrow, she’ll need to focus on tracking down the other boy involved in the fight. She packs up her laptop and heads for the car at 7:08 pm. She’s pleased that she’ll be home before 9:00 pm tonight. She arrives home, lets the dog out and then recounts the events of the day to her partner. As her partner listens to her description of the aftermath of the fight, she watches her partner’s brow furrow. They begin to discuss the absence of frustration or sadness in her voice and the banality of the words used to tell the story. A violent incident in the school used to bring tears, a desire to return to teaching or a third glass of merlot. Tonight, there was none of that. They wondered about being grateful for the absence, that maybe pleasure should be taken in knowing that these types of incidents, which were surely to happen again, did not cause the same kind of emotional upheaval that they once did. Lying in bed now, her partner fast asleep, she forces herself to remember all of the young men and women whose bruises and broken hearts she has tended to during her tenure as principal of the school. She pictures the faces of as many of them as she can recover from memory and places them in the east wing hallway of the school. As if preparing to watch a video, she pushes the imaginary play button and invites them to deal with

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their own misery, thinking the brutality of the images manufactured will make her cry. Eventually, she opens her eyes, sits up and touches her face. Nothing. Awakened by the movement in bed, her partner wants to know if she is okay.

Ghosts What secrets are buried in me? What phantoms make their presence known to me in the light of day? What are the phantoms that haunt education on the precipice of the end of the Anthropocene? One can behave in the present in ways that are connected to the inheritance of someone else’s experiences with trauma or everyday cruelty. What “haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (Abraham, 1975, p. 173). To unearth the secrets requires a reanimation of formative relationships to discover the psychic terrain that has been unconsciously colonized by one’s ancestors. What might be called for in order to do this difficult work is a place in the dark where people can focus their thoughts on the same words and sounds for a while. The play Last Call for Sincere Liars may open such a space to think about what we repeat and what gets repeated in our relations with others. Just as the actors speak the lines written by someone else, we too, can act and speak in ways that emanate from the ancestral playwrights that have written into significant scenes in our lives. One’s dreams, memories and the childhood dramas rehearsed in adulthood are the sincerest of lies. The sincerity with which they are told and protected is connected to a need to manage the demands placed on the ego by the protean demands of social environments. The play Last Call for Sincere Liars speaks to the strong influence the unconscious wields in one’s life. If one agrees that our houses are haunted by the past and that these hauntings can limit what we can perceive (Rose, 2007) and do in the world, the significant relationships one develops with others can help us to catch our breath when we become emotionally unmoored. Our ghosts can help us to more thoughtfully trouble what we want to be true about the world as we experience and manage complex and emotionally charged incidents (Ferguson, 2016). The play is a reminder to all of us who work in education that we frequently ignore our own “psychic investments and autobiographically overdetermined involvement in [our] work, but as psychoanalysis insists, those investments, one’s family and the intimate dead, however irrelevant they may seem to one’s scholarship are always pressing close” (Taubman, 2012, p. 3). The Grey in the play intersects mutated human relations with the nonhuman, making the environment a looming monstrosity and

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a specter of influence. My decision to have Karen walk out the door at the end of the third act is partly rooted in my deep concerns about the disavowal of ends of education in the face of a world without people. The absence of language is itself a ghost. In the first act, Martin tells Karen that one of his students was assaulted in the bathroom. He reports that when he arrived at the scene he found two seniors with “a junior pinned to the floor so their buddy can urinate all over him.” Much later in the play, the audience learns that Martin shoved one of the students who had Marcus pinned to the floor. When Martin crosses the line in the bathroom, it represents the moments in a person’s life when repressed trauma from the past is destructive in the present. Further, the incident points to the intergenerational transmission of aggressive impulses. The stakes become higher when Marcus, the victim of the assault, reveals that he managed to record Martin shoving the other student. In response to Marcus’s threat to release the recording, Martin’s aggression intensifies. He repulses Karen when he tells her that he deals with the threat by informing Marcus that “by the time he got back to home room, the video of those boys pissing all over him could be sent to the entire school with just one click.” Here, Martin shows us how the negation of our past diminishes one’s capacity to muster a healthy amount of emotional suppression. Karen’s facial expressions of disgust and the absence of her narration open a space for the unmetabolized traumas (Harris, Kalb, & Klebanoff, 2016) to manifest as the ghostly with encounters between Dylan, Connie and Carly. Psychoanalysis has been historically concerned with the ways in which ghosts can be laid to rest as ancestors (Harris et al., 2016). Ghosts are different than ancestors, for unlike ancestors, they are “sensed as lingering absences” (Mac Varish & Leavit, 2016, p. 156). Ghosts haunt the living, and in response, the living operationalizes defensive structures to keep relations intact. When leaders interact with others in their schools, students, teachers, parents and community members bring their own ghosts to the playground. Karen and Martin’s encounters make visible the idea that specific relationships determine which ghosts make an appearance in particular social circumstances (Hollan, 2014). Martin hears the ghosts as carnival barkers, but he does not have the language to treat their looming arrival in psychoanalytic terms. One of the ways that Martin copes with the sound of the carnival barker he references in act one is to look at his students through the eyes of the mistreated child inside of himself (Miller, 1983). He constructs some of his students as monsters and as the flesh and blood warnings of social decay. Martin’s expressions of contempt are projections of the parts of himself he hates. To survive the self-loathing, he must choose between his allegiances to the narratives he inherited as a child and a severance of the emotional ties to his students and colleagues. He is caught in phantom spirals of self-hatred and grandiose claims.

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Last Call for Sincere Liars confronts the pain that is caused when phantoms disrupt a leader’s life. These phantoms exert deadening effects that cause the assimilation of helplessness and a paralyzing fear of the unnamed absence. Carly’s death is a phantom in Martin’s life. His memories of Carly and many other elements in the play are infused with melancholia and loss. These images of sorrow brought to my conscious attention the lack of unhappy affects (Ahmed, 2015; Berlant, 2011, Phillips, 2012, 2015) in the writings about the aims of education and leadership. Last Call for Sincere Liars A Play in Three Acts CHARACTERS Martin Man in his mid-50s; High school principal Karen Woman in her early 40s; Bartender Carly 16-year-old girl; Martin’s dead sister Dylan Man in his late 50s; Police officer; Karen’s dead father Connie Woman in her late 30s; Martin’s dead mother The Grey The Phantoms Between shadow and light Scene: All three acts are set in an old style pub. Karen is the bartender and the owner of the pub. The pub is located in a trendy neighbourhood just on the outskirts of downtown anywhere. There are three characters in the play who are dead: Carly, Dylan and Connie; and there are two non-human elements: The Grey and The Phantoms. Time: The edge of the Anthropocene Stage Direction Acronyms Upstage Right = UR Upstage Centre = UC Upstage Left = UL Right Centre = RC Centre = C Left Centre = LC Downstage Right = DR Downstage Centre = DC Downstage Left = DL Off Stage = OS ACT 1 Scene 1 SETTING: The play is set in KAREN’s pub. For the most part, the pub is immaculate except for one corner. The pub is filled with old wood, and the bar rails are furnished with a few polished brass trimmings. The bar itself is the most exquisite piece in the place. Ornate curls of

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MARTIN

(MARTIN jumps up and tries to wipe the beer off of his pants with some napkins.) Jesus Christ, I made a mess. (KAREN gets an old cloth from behind the bar. She mops up most of the spilled beer. MARTIN takes the cloth from her and continues to try and clean off his pants. KAREN grabs another cloth to continue to soak up the beer.) KAREN

It’s fine Martin, really. MARTIN

(MARTIN stands up staring at the bar and notices that one of the old books is wet. He wipes the beer off the cover of the book and then blots some of the damaged pages.) We need to keep them separate so the dry pages won’t get wet. (MARTIN gestures to a bottle of whiskey.) MARTIN

What about that one? (KAREN picks up the bottle, gives it to MARTIN. He lays it across the open book to keep it open.) KAREN

Thank you. I’m sure— MARTIN

The pages are going to wrinkle. I’ll just replace the book. Seriously, I’m quite happy to buy you a new one. (MARTIN picks up the book and turns it over in his hands.)

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How much did you pay for this? KAREN

50. MARTIN

50 bucks, for a book that sits on the bar. (MARTIN takes a 50 dollar bill from his wallet, smiles and puts it in the tip glass.) I wouldn’t leave that lying around. KAREN

How was your week? MARTIN

(MARTIN gestures to the 50 dollar bill.) KAREN

(KAREN takes the bill and puts it in the cash register.) MARTIN

The carnival is on the move. KAREN

The carnival? MARTIN

Nicer than saying shit show don’t you think? It’s a running joke at our admin team meetings. Every big school in the district gets to be the bearded lady on the front page every few years. KAREN

So something major happened this week that could bring the carnival to your school? MARTIN

Well, let’s just say I can hear the barker and he’s getting louder by the minute. KAREN

(She picks up some glasses to dry them and puts them on the shelves.) MARTIN

(MARTIN unbuttons one of his sleeves and rolls it up.) There’s a new English teacher at my school. Eats lunch in his classroom everyday so the oddball kids have a place to be. Our newest Saint of Lost Causes. One of the kids in his third period class tells my vice-principal that Mr. Jeffries— KAREN

The new English teacher? MARTIN

Yes. The kid tells my VP Allan that Mr. Jeffries is intentionally failing him because of his gender expression. (Air quotes gender expression.) KAREN

Is he?

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MARTIN

Is he what? KAREN

Is he failing the kid because he’s some kind of conservative nutter? MARTIN

According to Allan, the kid says Jeffries gives him weird looks in class and that he is marked harder than the rest of the students. KAREN

(KAREN pours MARTIN a fresh pint.) Do you think there’s something to it? MARTIN

This kid, Marcus, they had to deliver his file to the school in a box. The social worker, school shrink, Child and Family Services, they’re all involved. I’d be surprised if he lasts the term. KAREN

And what does the box tell you about Marcus? MARTIN

Less than the body glitter and heels . . . You probably think I’m an asshole. KAREN

I don’t think you’re an asshole. Maybe a little repressed? MARTIN

Now we’re going to in-services on gender fluidity. We’re cisgender did you know that? But what does he think is going to happen when he shows up in sequins? KAREN

Does that— MARTIN

Tell me you’ve never looked at one of the head cases at the end of this bar and thought to yourself, this guy’s doing it to himself. (MARTIN looks down at his shoes.) KAREN

I make my living from people trying to put some distance between them and their ghosts. Maybe the most generous thing we can do for others is to inspect the house once in a while. (KAREN taps her head when she says cracks in the foundation.) But yes, I look down the bar and worry about the cracks in the foundation. MARTIN

(MARTIN takes a huge sip of his beer.) KAREN

How does the size of Marcus’ file or what he wears change his report to the vice-prin— MARTIN

(MARTIN looks up quickly.) Because this isn’t the first time the kid has accused a teacher of something.

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KAREN

Too great a sacrifice for a lost cause? The kid probably does face a ton of BS from teachers and other students, you know. MARTIN

I’m going to end up wearing the BS no matter what. When I walk through those doors, the decisions I make affect people. KAREN

A job that can only be tolerated by the saints among us? (CARLY enters the pub from the audience DR. She crawls on stage and sits behind MARTIN’s bar stool.) MARTIN

I didn’t say tolerated. You did. KAREN

But you got all fired up about saints and lost causes when you were going on about Carly last week. CARLY

(She slithers up to MARTIN’s ear.) I hope you didn’t call me a lost cause little brother. MARTIN

(Looking at KAREN) I never said that Carly was a lost cause. She had one very regrettable— MARTIN CARLY

(Slumping to the floor) Virginia Woolf episode. Virginia Woolf episode. MARTIN

(MARTIN stares into space.) KAREN

Where did you go Martin? MARTIN

Every Saturday Carly’d drag me to this moldy bookstore in the exchange district. She’d run her fingers along every book spine in the place with this dreamy look on her face. She told the owner one time . . . she told him— CARLY

I think I like people better in text. MARTIN

The way her face looked when she said it . . . KAREN

What do you think she meant by it, that people were better in text? MARTIN

I wish . . . KAREN

What? MARTIN

Carly would go through these intense phases. Like when she was 12, she latched on to this poem, “A Better Resurrection.” Plath I think.

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CARLY

(CARLY walks DC.) “My heart within me like a stone Is numbed too much for hopes or fears; Look right, look left, I dwell alone;” MARTIN

What 12-year-old kid is obsessed with Sylvia Plath? KAREN

Maybe a sensitive girl who found some solace in the words of poets. (KAREN leaves the back of the bar. She takes a book from down off a shelf, blows the dust off the top and places it against MARTIN’s chest.) CARLY

“I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief No everlasting hills I see . . .” MARTIN

For months she’d fixate on some depressive and lose herself in the pages. KAREN

What do you mean she’d lose herself? MARTIN

(MARTIN sighs heavily and stands up. He walks DC and stands behind CARLY—just off to her right.) CARLY

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” MARTIN

It made my mother crazy. Almost every morning she’d ask— (CARLY is frustrated at MARTIN for bringing it up, and so she moves RC behind KAREN.) CARLY

Carly, honey, must you always dress as if you are in mourning? (Embarrassed, directed to KAREN) I spent four years getting dressed for my own funeral. KAREN

Did you dream about her again this week? MARTIN

What do you expect to find in my dreams? KAREN

Did you? MARTIN

Once— CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) You are so annoying right now. KAREN

(Directed to MARTIN) Are you gonna tell me about it?

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57

CARLY

(Covers her ears) MARTIN

(Half-joking) I read a little Freud back in college. Are you surprised? KAREN

Are you trying to surprise me or impress me? (KAREN holds his gaze.) MARTIN

(MARTIN rolls up his other sleeve.) I think Freud will be all over this one. KAREN

I’m more interested in knowing what you make of it. MARTIN

(MARTIN shifts in barstool. From the back of the house, quiet whispers roll like waves towards the stage. They abruptly stop when MARTIN begins to speak.) I wake up with a start. I try to get out of bed but my legs and arms are so heavy—like my pyjamas are lined with birdshot or something. I finally make it to the bedroom door. It takes some doing but I bring myself to look around the corner, and I see this dim light at the top of a very long staircase. The closer I get to the top, the drier my mouth gets. I gag and then throw up . . . KAREN

Jesus. Do you get to the top of the stairs? MARTIN

(From above the audience there are intermittent sounds of snapping branches and a few PHANTOMS move around the dark corners of the bar.) Yes, and there’s this huge wooden door. My hand starts to shake as I turn the knob. After a few seconds, I can’t help myself so I look in the room— KAREN

Go on. CARLY

(CARLY reluctantly climbs on top of the bar.) MARTIN

(Looking at KAREN) She’s looking at me with this awful grin on her face. She asks me to— CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) Come closer. MARTIN

But I don’t want to. KAREN

What happens next?

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Dancing With the Unconscious

CARLY

(She begins to unzip her hoodie as MARTIN describes the dream to the sounds of an opening soft drink can. The sounds of bubbles come from LC of the house.) MARTIN

(Looking at KAREN) She raises her hand to the top of her forehead and starts to unzip her skin. Methodically, she climbs out of herself. Where her eyes used to be, there’s empty sockets so I force myself to watch her lungs as they swell up and down. Then she turns, moves towards the closet and takes out a different suit of skin. As she struggles to put it on I realize it won’t fit. (CARLY’s hoodie slides down her body.) Sagging, deformed, the ass hangs down to her ankles. (CARLY slithers down the bar to sit next to MARTIN at the bar.) She stumbles towards me, I realize she’s wearing my face, and then I wake up. KAREN

What you think all of that means? MARTIN

About me? CARLY

(CARLY gets up and begins to move around the pub, testing her ability to move. The longer she moves, the freer her movements appear to be.) KAREN

Earlier you mentioned that when you walk through the doors of the school, you wear it all. MARTIN

What about it? KAREN

(Grabs the knot of MARTIN’s tie and then pulls the tie through her fingers.) Do you see any connection between the image of crawling inside the skin of someone else in the dream and the suit you wear every day? MARTIN

You’re suggesting I’m someone else when I’m at school? You sound like my ex-wife. KAREN

How does she describe it? MARTIN

She says I’m a politician. KAREN

What kind of politician? MARTIN

When she’s feeling generous, someone who works hard to keep people happy.

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59

KAREN

And when she’s not? CARLY

(CARLY rushes to RC to say it close to MARTIN’s face.) I know the answer to this one. (CARLY rushes to KAREN.) You let me play this part. KAREN

(Directed to MARTIN) Go on. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) He’s a— MARTIN

Coward. CARLY

(Directed to KAREN) His wife’s words are like blackfly bites on the beach. The minor discomforts one has to put up with for such a pretty view. KAREN

Why would you say that? MARTIN

I don’t, she does. Jesus Karen. KAREN

Okay. Why does she say it? MARTIN

(MARTIN stands up and walks by CARLY.) I’m not a mind reader but maybe it’s because she can be a real bitch. KAREN

(She winces and gets busy tidying the bar.) MARTIN

(He smiles and then falls serious again. He tries to catch KAREN’s attention.) Maybe she’s right. I can’t remember the last time I stuck my neck out when it really counted. KAREN

(Reluctantly reengages) At home or at school? MARTIN

Both. When I started out as a teacher I wanted to change things in the community . . . And I thought it was actually our job to show kids how they were being constructed in the world. KAREN

Raising consciousness. MARTIN

(MARTIN laughs.)

60

Dancing With the Unconscious Any chance there’s a Bob Dylan song playing in your head right now?

KAREN

“Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse . . .” MARTIN

Impressive. KAREN

Thank you. CARLY

(Directed to KAREN. She mouths the words. The lines are delivered via recording OS. The sound of the voice is like Siri from the iPhone.) He’s what Daddy affectionately referred to as a champagne socialist. DYLAN

(DYLAN enters from the first row of the audience. He stumbles a little bit when he walks on stage. On his way he grabs CARLY and her hoodie. He sits at the bar and puts his feet up on top of another stool.) MARTIN

And now, schools are incubation chambers. A place to kill six hours while your device charges. KAREN

How do students connect now? MARTIN

(Does an awkward impression of a Zombie.) Cyber space zombies chasing likes. KAREN

What does that mean? MARTIN

(Lights go black. A spotlight [as square as possible] shines on an audience member DC in the house. Clicking sounds from a key board play on the left side of the house.) A kid sits alone and watches a Snapchat video. It triggers an emotional flare. In a heightened state of arousal she posts a reply and then waits. The anticipation of the response is what’s so seductive. Any reply— (MARTIN directs his comment to the audience member who is lit up.) Would you please! (Back to talking with KAREN. The keyboard clicking stops and the lights go back up.) Any reply to her post is received as an affirmation or as proof that the idiot on the other end of the keyboard must have misunderstood. Or worse, she thinks she knows something new about the content of the video. CARLY

(Directed to DYLAN)

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I don’t think he’d want you to investigate his search histories too closely. KAREN

That’s a pretty bleak assessment of your students’ perception of school and their agency in the world. MARTIN

It’s true of something. There’s something going on. KAREN

What about the parents? Do they care about what happens in schools? MARTIN

Oh they care, about their own kid’s math marks. DYLAN

(DYLAN stands knocking a few items off the bar and shouts.) Christ! Kids have to know their numbers don’t they? I can’t tell you how many times some kid at a convenience store gave me the wrong change because he couldn’t put 2 and 2 together. (DYLAN pours himself a large shot of Jameson’s and slams it down. He pours another shot.) (He repeats the line three times. The line is a recording OS, and it sounds as if it is emanating from a police radio.) Sunshine, I don’t know how you stand listening to these whiners all night long. KAREN

(KAREN clenches and unclenches a fist in rhythm with the police radio stutters.) MARTIN

And I’m supposed to feel shame because I’m not in their classrooms all the time to supervise them into being better math teachers. I’m told by the district, to be good, I should be an instructional leader. Hard to do when I spend most of my day soothing bruised egos and trying to keep the peace. And that’s just the staff. KAREN

(She refills MARTIN’s glass.) It must be worrisome to have all of that on your shoulders all the time. MARTIN

The scary part? We’re not really talking about how or why we’re losing so many kids. KAREN

My father was a cop and he dealt with a lot of troubled kids after they were pushed out of school. The connections you make with your students, keeping them off the street, is so important. DYLAN

(Putting a tip in the tip glass)

62

Dancing With the Unconscious Pay me now or pay me later. (Sounds of wood snapping emanate from across the theatre.)

MARTIN

You used the word pushed. Who is it, exactly, that pushes them out? I’m not sure you heard what I said. The bodies are in the desks. They’re just not there . . . KAREN

I hear you. MARTIN

So your dad was a cop? That explains a few things. KAREN

What exactly do you think the fact that my father was a police officer explains? MARTIN

If that’s not a breeding ground for wannabe bartender-shrinks, I don’t know what is! CARLY

A Clever Baby. DYLAN

(DYLAN slides next to KAREN. He kisses her on the cheek as the wood cracking sounds fade away.) KAREN

(KAREN adjusts her apron.) MARTIN

You’ve never shared something personal before. We’ve spent hours and hours in here together, and I don’t really know a thing about you. Don’t you find that odd? (DYLAN tries to get CARLY to put on her hoodie.) (MARTIN smirks.) But now I know when you get pissed off, you put a little shine on the words you use. Dad becomes father. Cop becomes police officer. Is that to create distance or to demonstrate how clever you are? I think I like playing the analyst. KAREN

(KAREN mumbles something quietly under her breath.) MARTIN

Pardon? KAREN

(Offers MARTIN a dirty bar cloth) I said, maybe you’d feel more comfortable back here? DYLAN

(Ties CARLY’s hoodie tightly around her head) CARLY

(CARLY rips the hoodie off her head.) Jerk.

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DYLAN

(Directed to CARLY) Careful princess mopey. MARTIN

My apologies if I crossed a line. KAREN

The carnival at school is stressing you out, that’s all. MARTIN

Nobody enjoys looking at the bearded lady. KAREN

Like Marcus? MARTIN

I wouldn’t have pegged you for someone who was so judgemental. KAREN

Earlier you asked me what Marcus should expect when he showed up at school in sequins. MARTIN

Christ. I know what you’re thinking. KAREN

Please tell me. You seem to have an advanced copy of my inner script. MARTIN

You think me not wanting Marcus to show up at school covered in glitter is evidence that I’m uncomfortable with the way he is . . . KAREN

Is it? MARTIN

My daughter tells me that on Facebook there are 58 gender options. Agender. Cis Male. Two-spirit. Bigender. Pangender. Gender queer. Trans Person— KAREN

(Visibly annoyed) Ya, you know a lot of the terms. CARLY

Dad slapped the hell out of Marty one day when he caught him in mom’s heels. He was seven years old. He wet himself on the new area rug, then Dad took off his belt. DYLAN

(Directed to CARLY) Do you know how many of those people I had to scrape off the street? Bloodied to a pulp. No father wants his daughter to experience that kind of— CARLY

Did you know that Karen— DYLAN

Finish that sentence and I’ll bury you, again.

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Dancing With the Unconscious

CARLY

Yes, it’s a complete mystery why Karen ended up here. (CARLY tries to grab OFFICER DYLAN. He gets away.) MARTIN

The point is, my daughter seems to think that her generation must spend all of its time and energy solving the great gender binary equation. KAREN

And you think they shouldn’t? (DYLAN and CARLY begin to move around and play cat and mouse. CARLY is the cat, and DYLAN is the mouse.) MARTIN

Just last week I had a parent storm into my office to tell me she wouldn’t stand for her son going to a school that tried to convert him with subliminal advertising. ROY G. BIV on the QSA poster. KAREN

Who’s ROY. G. BIV? MARTIN

The grade ten science teacher is the support teacher for the QSA, Queer Straight Alliance Group. Multi-coloured posters of inclusion. Red. Orange. Yellow. KAREN

Roy. MARTIN

You bet. The work of the Secret Rainbow Society. KAREN

But it was the parent, was it not, who made the ridiculous complaint? MARTIN

Yes, but there’s no way her kid joins the QSA or clicks the Facebook box that says gender fluid. KAREN

But you’re doing some work on gender issues. CARLY

(Jumps up and sits on the bar. Directed to MARTIN.) More like gender issues are doing their work on you. KAREN

Can you imagine this boy, this parent’s son, having a similar epiphany? (CARLY catches DYLAN DR and drags him DL.) MARTIN

Last Friday. 3:45. The witching hour in high schools. The secretary runs in shrieking that I’ve got to get up to the third floor bathrooms. And the way she’s looking at me . . . KAREN

Ya, you’ve got to run. (CARLY pushes DYLAN to the ground.) (Soft sounds of something moving above and below the surface of water are heard close to the feet of the audience.)

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MARTIN

I go ripping up to the third floor as fast as my legs will take me. KAREN

What do you see when you get there? MARTIN

(CARLY sits on DYLAN’s chest, facing him, and covers his mouth while he struggles.) Two seniors have a junior pinned to the floor so their buddy can urinate all over him. The kid who’s pinned, his pants are around his ankles. And one of the three apes who assaulted him wrote . . . Fag Queen on his right thigh in magic marker. KAREN

That must have been a very painful thing to see. MARTIN

It took everything in me not to beat the shit out of him. CARLY

(Imitating DYLAN) He just lied there, covered in piss, wasn’t fighting or anything? KAREN

Go on. (DYLAN stops struggling.) MARTIN

So yes, these woke hipster kids traffic in the words, but I’ve seen first-hand the way some of these well-dressed monsters react when confronted by an outlier. KAREN

Monsters? Apes? MARTIN

That’s what you take from the story I just told you? My words are too potent? KAREN

You make them inhuman. They’re just kids. (CARLY gets off DYLAN.) MARTIN

You think I’m losing— KAREN

What was so hard for you to control? DYLAN

(Looking at KAREN) She’s seduced by the edges of people. That’s why the misfits are so drawn to her. KAREN

It must have scared you that your anger— MARTIN

Want a body, download one. Due process dragging you down, don’t think, Tweet your vendettas—

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Dancing With the Unconscious

KAREN

Why was the incident in the bathroom shameful for you? MARTIN

For me? KAREN

Why are you so ashamed about what those boys did in the bathroom? MARTIN

(MARTIN puts his head down and leans on his hands.) He just lied there. There was no screaming or banging when I came up the stairs. He just lied there and let some kid piss all over him. And I thought, how exactly is he going to tell his father what happened? KAREN

Reminds you of something you had to tell yours? MARTIN

He saw. CARLY

(CARLY goes and sits on a barstool next to MARTIN.) KAREN

What did he see? MARTIN

(MARTIN gets up and moves DC. DYLAN follows him and mimics every move. It’s like a dance, not a mockery.) My mother, she loved to take pictures. There were pictures of Carly and I on every bloody wall of the house. I was so embarrassed when my buddies came over. KAREN

Because there were so many pictures of you? MARTIN

No, they were really terrible photos. We’re talking out of focus, the framing was usually way off, and I’d say over half of them featured one of my mother’s fingers. CARLY

(Joins MARTIN DC) I can’t remember her without her camera in her hand anymore. (Directed to MARTIN) Do you think she could see us differently through a lens? KAREN

She was no Ansel Adams. MARTIN

No definitely not. KAREN

Was your dad in many of the photos? MARTIN

The old man hated having his picture taken . . . he said my mother spent too much time curating memories instead of making them.

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KAREN

Not a fair assessment? (CARLY walks back towards the shadowy end of the pub.) MARTIN

If it wasn’t for my mother, it would have been as if Carly never existed. CARLY

Dad made sure I died over and over again in that house. KAREN

What’s the connection between your mother’s photos and what happened in the bathroom at school? MARTIN

Mom attended every hockey game I ever played. I’m sure she had a snapshot, albeit a blurry one, of every check, goal and penalty minute. One year, we actually made it to the city finals. KAREN

How old were you? MARTIN

(MARTIN heads back to the bar.) Playing bantam, so maybe 14. She was so excited. She made Dad stop at the drug store on the way to the rink to pick up a few extra rolls of film. (Sounds of skates scraping the ice come from the right side of the house and move like a wave to the left side of the house.) CARLY

She loved to watch Marty skate. She said he looked free when he was on the ice. MARTIN

(A video of a hockey game is layered all over the set. Three loud crashes of a body into the boards in a hockey game come from three different parts of the theatre.) It’s the third period, the game is tied with a few minutes left on the clock. By some miracle, I pick the puck out from a defenseman’s skate and head out on a breakaway. Out of nowhere, I’m hit, hard. I’m mean ass over teakettle and then land in a heap in the corner. My head is swimming, but I can hear the old man. “Jesus Christ, Marty! Keep your head up!” He doesn’t talk to me the whole ride home. Pulls into the driveway, puts it in park, turns to me and says, “A real fucking embarrassment. You don’t let anybody lay you out like that and get away with it . . .” And then, snap . . . KAREN

What made the sound Martin? CARLY

(CARLY touches the side of her face.) DYLAN

(Moves close to the bar. Directed to KAREN.) Honey, I guess I wasn’t so bad after all.

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Dancing With the Unconscious

KAREN

What happened next? CARLY

Mom’s sister took her to the hospital. MARTIN

I quit playing hockey. And no one ever spoke of it again. KAREN

I’m so sorry th— MARTIN

I wanted to hit him. KAREN

Your father? MARTIN

Marcus. KAREN

It was Marcus who was assaulted in the bathroom? MARTIN

Yes. No. I mean yes, it was Marcus who was in the bathroom. Maybe I’m like my old man. KAREN

But you made a different choice than your dad did. You didn’t pummel those boys even if they deserved it. (CARLY gestures that she’s going to grab DYLAN again, and he flinches.) MARTIN

The thing with Marcus in the bathroom—I’m leaking from the edges at school. DYLAN

A lot of responsibility darlin. A school’s an awfully large echo chamber for the boss’s neuroses. CARLY

(Directed to DYLAN) He won’t let himself get in trouble. He’ll do whatever it takes to avoid disappointing mom. DYLAN

(Directed to KAREN) Maybe, but she’s never been all that good at seeing around corners. MARTIN

Closing time? KAREN

(KAREN looks at the old clock behind the bar.) CARLY & DYLAN

(Shouting) You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here!

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KAREN

(Gets out from behind the bar and walks towards the door. She waits by the door expecting MARTIN to follow. KAREN opens the door.) MARTIN

(After 10 or 15 seconds MARTIN gets up, fishes for his keys in his pocket and moves to the door. They stand facing each other for what feels like a long time.) (DYLAN goes to sit at the bar, and CARLY moves behind the bar and pours herself a drink.) KAREN

(KAREN takes off her apron.) MARTIN

(MARTIN taps KAREN’s forehead with his finger.) All our houses are haunted right? DYLAN

(Stands up quick. He almost knocks the bar stool over. He is visibly distraught.) MARTIN

(Takes a deep breath of the cool night air and then leaves the pub singing an old song.) CARLY

(Directed toDYLAN) Did any of your buddies on the force know? KAREN

(KAREN grabs a broom. She hums the same tune as she sweeps the floor.) (BLACKOUT) (END OF SCENE) ACT 2 Scene 1 SETTING: The scene is set in a stripped down version of the same pub. All but two of the small tables and chairs are left. A third of the glasses remain, but they are a little dirty and spotty. Most of the Irish Whiskey bottles are gone. A few kitsch items like gaudy souvenirs take their place. Approximately a third of everything in the bar is in THE GREY. A sizable portion of the wood is rotten. The dart boards are busted on the floor and a glowing burning barrel is placed DC. The scene takes place two weeks from MARTIN and KAREN’s last encounter at the pub.

70

Dancing With the Unconscious AT RISE: The lights ebb from very low to black. The lighting pulses like deep sleep breathing. At first, we barely make out that KAREN is asleep in her coat on top of the bar. DYLAN sits on one end of the bar and watches her.

DYLAN

(DYLAN watches her for at least two minutes. Then he kisses her forehead and moves a part of the blanket that is covering KAREN’s legs. Lights go black. DYLAN exits the stage.) (There is a loud bang at the pub door.) KAREN

I can’t . . . (KAREN wakes up with a start.) (KAREN knocks over some stools as she gropes for the light switch. Lights up. KAREN unlocks and opens the door. Outside a fierce blizzard rages.) MARTIN

You are open aren’t you? I could use a glass of whiskey. It’s a nightmare out there. KAREN

(KAREN blows into her hands and then pulls her hair back in a ponytail.) Yes, yes, of course I am. I just didn’t expect anyone to show their face in this weather. MARTIN

(MARTIN scans the room and picks up the overturned bar stools.) KAREN

(KAREN wipes the end of the bar that is covered in ash and she pours herself and MARTIN a healthy shot of whiskey.) CONNIE

(The lights fade on stage, almost to black. Then the house lights flicker. CONNIE stands up from her seat in the audience, approximately middle row, middle seat. There’s a wide spotlight on her. CONNIE directs her comments and questions to a few of the audience members who sit near her.) Did he tell you to stay where you are? (CONNIE starts to move past the audience members in her row towards the aisle. CONNIE takes three or four pictures [with the flash on] of various audience members.) Was my Marty supposed to help her? Were you? (CONNIE walks slowly backwards towards the stage and snaps a few pictures of a few more audience members. The lights flicker and light up the bar.) KAREN

(KAREN and MARTIN clink glasses.) Cheers, Martin.

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71

CONNIE

(CONNIE sits down somewhere in the aisle.) MARTIN

(MARTIN zips up his jacket again and takes a sip of whiskey.) A fellow workaholic. Although I can’t say that I’ve ever slept in my office. KAREN

I’m sorry I kept you waiting at the door in this God awful weather. MARTIN

(MARTIN continues to straighten items around the pub as he tells the story.) There’s a design student in Toronto, Raharjo I think, who just invented a hammock you can clamp under your desk. Their motto is “A nap in a snap.” Get yourself one of those mini fridges, and you never have to leave the office. (A constellation of snapping wood sounds erupt across the theatre. Wisps of fog begin to emanate from five different locations in the house.) Voluntary confinement. I would find it tough to work at home. I mean, hard to free yourself from what happens in here when you’re just 10 feet away from where you microwave your tv dinner. KAREN

That’s a very specific image. MARTIN

You do eat and sleep back there, don’t you? KAREN

What makes you say that? MARTIN

No, you don’t ever leave this place. PHANTOMS

(Move in the corners of the pub) MARTIN

You get busy with other customers, and it gives me time to poke around a little. You can learn a lot about a person from the stuff they collect and the things they think they can do without. KAREN

Unhomely reminders. Something you know something about. MARTIN

For starters, that cot is an insomniac’s wet dream. KAREN

Stay out of the back room from now on. CONNIE

(Directed to KAREN) He often goes where he’s not supposed to. MARTIN

Fine with me. There’s nothing for me there anyway. I’ve been hinting for a year now.

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Dancing With the Unconscious

KAREN

It makes me uncomfortable— MARTIN

Don’t flatter yourself. I asked. You declined. That’s all. Now pour me another whiskey so we can be friends again. KAREN

I can do that. MARTIN

But you know, it’s hard to control myself in the face of such a lovely mystery. You make me want to look for clues. KAREN

(Emphatically) I’m sure you can figure out how to control your wandering legs. Go back there again and I’ll break one. MARTIN

(MARTIN pours himself a glass of whiskey.) Would you like me to pour you a glass? From the looks of things, you need another. KAREN

(KAREN shakes her head no, but MARTIN pours her one anyway.) You’re working very hard to get a rise out of me, why? MARTIN

What’s left to do? KAREN

Behave yourself. MARTIN

I just poured you a shot to be polite. KAREN

(KAREN grabs the bottle from MARTIN and puts it behind the bar.) My place. MARTIN

(Raises his glass to KAREN) Your place, darling. KAREN

Tell me about your week. MARTIN

I don’t like it when you avoid talking about yourself. KAREN

You told me that one of the reasons you come in here was because you didn’t have anyone to talk to that you could trust. I don’t entertain many personal questions with the customer. The booze muddies the waters, but more importantly— MARTIN

The thing with Marcus is heating up. KAREN

The red zone?

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MARTIN

The kid— KAREN

Marcus? MARTIN

He told his pain in the ass social worker that he has proof that Jeffries is treating him differently. Something about a recorded conversation and a picture of an assignment in the recycling bin. KAREN

I thought you said it was in the kid’s head? MARTIN

I told you this kid has mental health issues. It was. Most of it is. KAREN

How do you know? MARTIN

Well, for one thing, Marcus is way off with timelines and due dates. KAREN

The same kid who was assaulted? You don’t think it’s possible to get some dates mixed up with all the things he’s got going on in his life? MARTIN

His story is full of holes. KAREN

In loco parentis. MARTIN

This young teacher, he gives all sorts of time to the school. I don’t want to lose him. KAREN

And if he is being cruel to Marcus? MARTIN

What? It makes me what? KAREN

You tell me. MARTIN

Rational, reasonable and unflinching in the face of out of control identity politicking. CONNIE

(CONNIE gets up and moves towards the stage. She is now about four rows back.) KAREN

Meet with the teacher again and tell him your concerns, what your VP told you, what Marcus told you. MARTIN

(Solutes KAREN) Yes, ma’am. KAREN

You know I’m right.

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Dancing With the Unconscious

MARTIN

You’re upset about the fact that I have doubts about Marcus’ story. Well, snowflake. You’re making this an unsafe space to talk about my feelings. This must be some sort of barkeeping sin. (Laughing and pointing up to the roof) Get me a number to report you. I’m going to get you dis-barred. KAREN

You can’t see how damaging this could be for a kid like Marcus? PHANTOMS

(Shadows move across the stage and across the audience.) MARTIN

Oh, I can hear the carnival barker. KAREN

Since you were last here, I’ve been thinking— MARTIN

I like hearing that you think about me when I’m away. CONNIE

(Directed to an audience member who sits near to where she stands) He’s honest with her in a way he never is with me. A real connection. KAREN

Tell me. MARTIN

I’m not sure I should say . . . Most nights I have trouble falling asleep. I’ve fooled around with Ambian, enjoyed a few cocktails before bed, (Drinks what’s left of his whiskey and shakes his empty glass) enjoyed a few cocktails with Ambian. But the one thing that seems to do the trick . . . KAREN

Is what? (The soft sounds of pages turning come from above the audiences head.) (Long pause) MARTIN

A waking dream. You’re there and you seem to have some control over the play button. KAREN

What’s the mise en scène, player? MARTIN

(MARTIN fidgets for a minute.) We’re out together. It’s warm outside, we’re by the water. There’s a moment where you lean in to my shoulder. You smile at me, and then I feel you take my hand. KAREN

Where?

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MARTIN

Where do I think of you? Everywhere. At my desk, as I pour my first cup of coffee in the morning . . . KAREN

Where are we when I lean on your shoulder? The park, at a restaurant? MARTIN

I’m not sure. I think . . . KAREN

What happens just before we touch? You said I control the play button . . . CONNIE

(CONNIE begins to pace up and down the aisle.) (The sounds of the turning pages stop.) MARTIN

I, I . . . pull a book off the shelf. You tell me you spent years looking for this particular edition. You’re so pleased I found it for you that you take my hand. This is more than a little embarrassing. KAREN

(Shivers. Puts on a winter toque.) In our dreams we long for lost objects. MARTIN

You think I lost something, and you have it? KAREN

A couple of weeks back, you talked about that messed up conversation with your dad after the hockey game after you described what happened to Marcus in the bathroom. MARTIN

My dad wasn’t a perfect guy, but the house functioned after Carly. I know you think my parents fucked up my life . . . But it was a blessing he wouldn’t let mom lie in bed and rot. CONNIE

(From approximately row 2 in the aisle facing the audience) I couldn’t hear her poems outside of my room. You understand, don’t you? KAREN

You said you felt anger when you saw Marcus lying on the bathroom floor. CONNIE

(Touching an audience member’s face) You always had trouble with forgiveness. MARTIN

That’s rich. No, my anger comes from the fact that three of my students assaulted another student, so am I missing something here? KAREN

What do you think Marcus needed the most after the assault?

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MARTIN

Justice. KAREN

After you described what happened, you wondered how Marcus was going to bring himself to tell his father. I think dreaming of you and I in the bookstore reveals something to you about what he needed. MARTIN

In my dream I feel aroused. There are things I’d like to do with you, to you . . . KAREN

(Comes around from the back of the bar. Gestures towards the floor. In the spot she points to, there are busted floor boards.) Both of you, lying in heaps. Marcus on the bathroom floor, you on the ice. MARTIN

There is nothing arousing about blood and piss mingling on the bathroom floor. CONNIE

Watch your tone Martin. I didn’t raise you— MARTIN

(MARTIN looks towards CONNIE, gets up and walks DR to the edge of the stage.) But you didn’t raise—You’re upset that I raised this issue, my feelings for you. KAREN

I’m not upset with you. When you described the boys who assaulted Marcus in the bathroom you used the word monster. Do you know what the origin of the word monster is? (She goes and gets a massive dictionary and slams it on the bar. She looks up the definition.) MARTIN

I can’t say that I do. But please, let’s have a grammar lesson. Why shouldn’t we talk about how I just told you I want you? KAREN

(KAREN clears her throat.) Monere. It’s Latin. It means to warn. MARTIN

Is this your weird way of telling me my dream makes you uncomfortable? (MARTIN goes to the back of the bar. He climbs to the top shelf and grabs a very old and expensive bottle. He makes a show of opening the bottle and pours himself a shot. MARTIN walks it over to KAREN and holds it out to her. KAREN doesn’t take the glass. MARTIN places the glass on top of the dictionary.) CARLY

(CARLY stands up approximately ten rows back in the audience.)

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If you’re not truthful this time Marty, mom will be very upset with you. MARTIN

(MARTIN goes and sits at the bar.) KAREN

I wonder if your reaction to Marcus’ assault is connected to the memories you have of the aftermath of the hockey game? CONNIE

I don’t feel well today. (Directed to an audience member) Would you help me find my place? CARLY

(CARLY yells at the audience member who is with CONNIE. CARLY yells from the aisle, halfway to the stage.) Leave her be! (CARLY takes CONNIE’s arm and leads her towards the stage.) CONNIE

(Directed to CARLY, and points at MARTIN) He won’t stop this business with your father. CARLY

(Directed to an audience member in the fourth row, with a raised voice) You can’t let her wander off. (Directed at CONNIE) Dad can take care of himself. CONNIE

I miss you baby. CARLY

I’m sorry Mom. (CARLY leads her RC to the stage and helps CONNIE sit at the small table. She waves at MARTIN.) KAREN

Your dream doesn’t make me uncomfortable, stupid. They’re just wishes for what we needed and didn’t get as kids. MARTIN

I got what I needed. My parents put a roof over my head, food on the table, helped with university. And they did all of that even after they lost my sister. KAREN

After the hockey game, did you get what you needed? MARTIN

That’s unfair. KAREN

After the game, did you get what you wanted? MARTIN & CARLY

No.

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KAREN

What did you want? MARTIN

I don’t even know why I come here. You and your watered down whiskey make me feel like shit! All these questions. Do you even care that what we say in here takes on another life after I leave? CARLY

(Throws some of the books that have fallen off the shelf into the burning barrel) KAREN

(Recording from OS. KAREN mouths the words on stage. The recording sounds as if it’s coming from a colour commentator at a hockey game.) I care very much. Your dreams, fantasies, can help us figure out what lies behind some of your misplaced expressions of contempt and adoration in relation to your parents. MARTIN

I wanted . . . CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) He couldn’t give you what he didn’t have honey. And to keep demanding something of someone when they don’t have it to give is just mean spirited. MARTIN

Maybe he could have been less of an asshole at my games. He shouted his criticism of the play across the rink in front of the other players and parents. I know to keep my head up. KAREN

The thing you wanted most was for your father to refrain from yelling at you to keep your head up during a game? MARTIN

That would have been a marvelous start. KAREN

Sure, your parents were able to keep food in the fridge after Carly died, but what about— MARTIN

Honestly. Not everyone needs to hold hands at dinner in order to function properly as an adult. KAREN

What did happen around your table? MARTIN

(Softening) After Carly died, we swallowed a lot of takeout in between awkward silences.

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KAREN

You were just 12 years old. The experience of losing your sister impacted you in ways you don’t even understand. MARTIN

That I won’t . . . CONNIE

(Directed to CARLY) (CARLY pulls her sleeves down as far as they will go.) When you were a little girl at school, oh. You exposed your wounds so publicly. (Sounds of various thicknesses of ice cracking and breaking crisscross the theatre.) Other children seemed to be alright after they cried, but you baby, every one, everything left a scar. And at 13, you started to do their work for them. CARLY

That’s why daddy hated the cutting so much. Because I controlled how much I bled. MARTIN

The night after Carly’s funeral, Dad tore around the house and ripped every photograph of Carly off the wall. Broken glass and busted frames everywhere. KAREN

That must have been hellish to watch. MARTIN

What was worse was watching mom trail after him. CONNIE

(CONNIE takes out a folded photograph and shows CARLY.) You remember this one, honey? Look how lovely you were in Nana’s fascinators. You said the feathers and lace reminded you of the beautiful images in your poems. CARLY

Look at me, Mom. (CONNIE lifts up the camera to take a picture of CARLY.) CARLY

(Directed at CONNIE) (CARLY pushes the camera away from her face. The cracks diminish and fade away.) CONNIE

From the time you were born, I was terrified you were going to disappear. For hours each night, (CARLY is upset and begins to move towards UC. CONNIE follows.) I’d watch you in your crib to make sure you were breathing. What did I miss baby?

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Dancing With the Unconscious (CONNIE grabs CARLY’s hand.)

CARLY

It’s not your fault. MARTIN

I watched her follow him and gather what was left of us . . . I’ve never told anyone this, but for a long time, I hated Carly. KAREN

For leaving you? MARTIN

For leaving me to spend the rest of their lives in mourning. CARLY

(CARLY rips her hand away from CONNIE forcefully. Directed to MARTIN.) Tell them I changed my mind! CONNIE

What? CARLY

(Directed at MARTIN) Tell mom right now that I tried to stop. CONNIE

What does that mean? What is she talking about Marty? KAREN

(Directed to Martin. She drinks some of the whiskey from the glass sitting on the dictionary.) You know, you never told me how she died. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) Stop lying little brother. MARTIN

Don’t be ridiculous. CONNIE

Look at me son. What does she mean, she changed her mind? MARTIN

I’m not— KAREN

You don’t have to. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) If you don’t tell them . . . Please . . . Marty! I don’t want to play my part anymore. KAREN

She was 16, right? MARTIN

And my parents were out of town.

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KAREN

Where were they? MARTIN

Visiting my dad’s sister at the cottage. He told me they wanted a weekend away for their anniversary, and that my sister was quite capable of looking after me and the house while they were gone. CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) (CONNIE leaves CARLY and moves towards MARTIN. CARLY is anxious. She begins to repeat her last three gestures over and over again.) I told him you weren’t ready, that he should go, and I would stay. But he was so insistent. “Connie, if you want to be together for the next 15 years, you better make an effort.” MARTIN

I just, I felt it in by bones. I didn’t want mom to go. KAREN

But your mom and dad went away for the weekend anyway? MARTIN

The old man worked 60 hours a week. He deserved a break, and he loved going up to see his older sister. When he was around her, he really softened, and sometimes he brought some of that softness home. My grandmother died when dad was just nine, so my Auntie Patty played a pretty big role in raising him. He loved her for it. KAREN

What happened after they left? (CARLY begins to slow her body movements down.) MARTIN

Friday night was great. We watched movies, she made popcorn. But on Saturday, she slept the day away . . . A warning shot for one of Carly’s— CONNIE

Sad spells. (Carly freezes.) CARLY

(CARLY moves quickly to the very edge of UR. Directed to the audience.) You know the movie The Basketball Diaries? It’s about a kid named Jim who’s this really great basketball player. His life starts to tank because his best friend dies from leukemia and his coach is a pervy pedophile. Jim gets totally messed up by it all, so he becomes a drug addict. Throughout the movie he does all this awful stuff on the street to get high. Robbery, assault. He even prostitutes himself. I know, I know, you think the film sounds a bit cliché, but there’s this one scene towards the end of the movie I can’t get out of my head. The one where he shows up at his mom’s place, really desperate for money.

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Dancing With the Unconscious “Ma is that you? Ma, are you there?” You see her cry from the other side of the door . . . but she won’t let him in . . . (CARLY gestures to an audience member.) And the killer moment, right before the cops show up . . . “Ma, please let me in, I’ll be a good boy . . .” And you hold your breath because he almost charms her with his heroin soaked spell. (CONNIE rushes over to CARLY and drags CARLY to UR.) (CARLY forcefully yells.) Your kid begs you to let him in, screams he’s in terrible pain. Do you keep the door closed? Could you keep the chain on the door? (Despondent. Slumps to the floor facing the left wing.) My mom always opened the door. (CONNIE hurries to pick up CARLY and tries to move her closer to MARTIN. She picks CARLY up. CARLY hangs in her arms like a rag doll facing CONNIE.)

MARTIN

I called my Auntie Patty’s and asked to speak to mom. She passed the phone to dad, and he tore a strip off me. (Thumping techno music begins to play softly in the background from the jukebox.) Wanted me to know that mom was having the time of her life, the way she used to be. She was playing cards, people were hanging off her every word. “Don’t ruin this for her. If you tell her Carly’s in one of her moods, she’ll make me bring her home. Do you want that?” (MARTIN’s voice begins to quiver.) Maybe if I was more insistent . . . CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) I didn’t know you called . . . CARLY

(Directed to CONNIE) If Marty calls back, do you think I make it to prom or was I so messed up, I die no matter what? CONNIE

(Directed to CARLY. The music shifts and slows. A slow song begins to play. They begin to dance. CARLY is still like a rag doll in CONNIE’s arms.) Of course baby, you go to prom. MARTIN

I should have— CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) You, you could have called back. If I knew . . .

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MARTIN

If mom knew how bad she was, she would have rushed home . . . and— (CARLY’s body begins to stiffen and strengthen.) KAREN

She may have made the same choice down the line. MARTIN

No, no she wouldn’t have. KAREN

You can’t know that for sure— MARTIN

I do know, she changed her mind. (CARLY breaks away from CONNIE.) CARLY

Thank you, Marty. (The smell of peppermint begins to waft into the theatre.) KAREN

We can’t read people’s minds, or predict the future no matter how desperately we want to give the ones we love what they need. MARTIN

She said it. KAREN

That she— CARLY

I wanted to come back. KAREN

When did she say it? MARTIN

She got out of bed around supper time. I offered to make her some toast and a— CARLY

Cup of peppermint tea. MARTIN

She didn’t respond, so I asked if I should call mom . . . (CARLY climbs on top of the bar and then hangs her toes off of the edge of the bar. She wobbles and tries to keep her balance.) KAREN

You were worried about her. MARTIN

From the top of the stairs— CONNIE

(Connie rushes over to CARLY. CARLY leans over the edge of the bar and she looks excited and increasingly wobbly.) Will you please get down?

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CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) I yelled at you to mind your own business. God, you must have been relieved when the paramedics hauled me off to the morgue. CONNIE

Carly, how can you say such things? MARTIN

Nobody would dare say it out loud in front of my mother . . . but her spells turned our family into a crisis response team. And outsiders were never allowed to cover your shift. CONNIE

All the doctors wanted to do was pump her full of pills. (Directed to CARLY) Baby, you were so lethargic. You said the pills made it hard to hear your poems. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN. A metronome begins to tick very slowly at first. With each tick, sound comes from a different area of the theatre. The tempo increases and decreases.) In my waking dreams I’m one of a thousand dolls on display at the toy store. Children slink by to examine my frilly dress and accessories. They want to cut my synthetic hair while their mothers aren’t looking, but the plastic window that seals this cardboard crypt shatters their candied fingers. Behind it, the minutes wash in like days as all the other dolls get picked. But even if by some miracle I do make it out, it’s impossible to love a dead-eyed girl. MARTIN

I heard her put on a record. I remember feeling relieved, like it was a good sign that she was out of bed. MARTIN

(Directed to KAREN) But then I heard a loud crash in her room. I couldn’t remember how long she’d been up there . . . A few feet from the door I called out to her . . . I could feel beads of sweat roll down my back. I yelled again and banged on the door, “Carly you better say something or else I’m coming in!” (The lights begin to fade almost to black. Amidst myriad camera flashes, CARLY leaps off the bar into the arms of a stagehand who is wearing all black. CARLY is caught by the stagehand, and she is lit in such a way that she appears as if she is suspended in mid-air.) MARTIN

(Directed to KAREN) I placed my hand on the doorknob. “Carly?” CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) It’s taking too long.

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MARTIN

I turned the doorknob . . . KAREN

(Lights slowly come up. CARLY drops to the floor. KAREN begins to walk towards MARTIN.) You need to say it out loud. MARTIN

(MARTIN’s hands begin to shake. He stands up and crosses his arms and paces around the office.) Nobody can know. Nobody knows . . . CONNIE

Say what you did. MARTIN

(Feels around in his pockets for his keys.) KAREN

I can see it’s eating you alive. You’re so close. (KAREN places his keys on the bar.) CONNIE

Everyone felt sorry for you, finding her like that, but now, it’s plain as day, you knew what she was doing in there. She was in her room for over two hours. MARTIN

(MARTIN sits down on the floor. KAREN gets up and sits beside him. She reaches for MARTIN’s hand.) I opened the door, and I could hear her mumbling on her bed. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. CARLY

(Crying. As if she’s back in her bedroom at home on that day.) I need your help, Marty. MARTIN

An empty pill bottle in her hand. (Holding his head) CONNIE

(CONNIE runs over to MARTIN.) Call the ambulance, Marty! CARLY

To do this to him, even if I wanted another chance. I don’t deserve it. MARTIN

If I called the ambulance sooner, I would have saved her. CARLY

(Directed to CONNIE) I couldn’t see my reflection anymore. KAREN

(KAREN holds MARTIN as he sobs. The ticking of the metronome stops.) You were 12 years old, just a boy.

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Dancing With the Unconscious (KAREN strokes MARTIN’s hair.) No one was there to save you.

MARTIN

(MARTIN pulls back.) Do you think Carly had a choice in the end? CONNIE

(CONNIE and the stagehand carry CARLY to a long steel table that is DL. CONNIE strokes CARLY’s hair.) KAREN

When the abyss opens and the pain becomes intolerable, people can be unreachable, even to those who love them the most. CONNIE

We fled to the hospital after we got the call. And your father, God, he made such a ruckus in front of the nurses. They had to call security to get him to calm down. MARTIN

It was months before my mother could look at me. CONNIE

You have her eyes. MARTIN

And for the next 18 years of their marriage, my parents mined their regrets for new ways to hurt each other. KAREN

They weren’t able to function much after your sister passed? MARTIN

A funeral reception that never ended. A way to keep Carly close. KAREN

So the focus in the house before her death was on Carly, and even after she died, she still had all of their attention. MARTIN

She always needed them more than I did. KAREN

But there must have been moments where you wanted their time, their undivided attention? MARTIN

(A dial tone sound starts softly and then almost drowns MARTIN out at the end of this passage. MARTIN gets louder as the dial tone gets louder.) It took everything in them to get out of bed in the morning for the first two years after she died. And some days they couldn’t even manage to do that. So no, I didn’t spend a lot of time bitching and moaning that my mom and dad weren’t able to catch a hockey game. KAREN

Did you ever talk to your parents about what you saw or how you were dealing with Carly’s death?

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MARTIN

Once with the old man. If you can call it talking. We were raking leaves in the backyard. This is about five months after the funeral. Out of the blue, he turns to me and says, “If you ever tell your mother you called that afternoon, I’ll snap your neck. She’d never forgive herself.” Her-self. The bastard says nothing about the fact that when he picked up the phone that day, he told me not to bother her. (The dial tone stops. MARTIN yells.) Such a coward. KAREN

Did you ever tell your mom you called her that afternoon? MARTIN

(Looks down, shakes his head no.) CONNIE

I wish you had, son. KAREN

Have you told anyone about how it unfolded? MARTIN

No. KAREN

You’ve been holding on to this guilt all these years? MARTIN

My debt to Carly. KAREN

That’s a heavy burden to carry. You deserved to have an adult in your life who could help you process what happened to Carly and to you. CONNIE

Can you love your parents and still be angry with them for the way they mistreated you as children? KAREN

If a student in your school went through a similar experience— MARTIN

That’s diff— KAREN

It’s not. It’s not different. (The lights begin to flicker and there are intermittent sounds of bits of static—like the kind you used to hear when an old T.V. loses reception. There are three bursts of static.) (MARTIN gets up and paces.) MARTIN

The bell rings and in unison they forget what’s worth pursuing . . . The kids at my school are nothing like her. She— she read Emily Dickinson when she was just 11 years old. The truth of it? I knew and Carly knew that people in her life resented her. It sure wasn’t because they were ashamed to be happy in her presence, and it wasn’t because she was irritated by their idiotic

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Dancing With the Unconscious (CONNIE climbs onto the metal table with CARLY. They both sit up facing MARTIN swinging their legs under the table.) (CARLY and CONNIE begin to laugh. At first quietly and then their laughter gets progressively boisterous. It builds to wild and uncontrollable by the end of the scene.) suggestions on how to cultivate a stiff upper lip. No. The avoidance, their anxiety came from the realization that she was fucking right.

KAREN

Right about what? (Sounds of static end.) MARTIN

Most of us don’t have the courage to go out on our own terms like she did. We mire ourselves in petty politics as we pour ourselves another whiskey on the rocks to distract us from disappearing polar ice caps. What are schools even for as we stand on the edge of a world without us? Have you thought about that? (MARTIN puts both hands through his hair.) KAREN

All I know is that Carly didn’t want her younger brother to find her after she swallowed a bunch of pills. It’s dangerous to romanticize her decision or to ascribe meaning to her intent. She was a very sick girl. THE GREY

(Pieces fall from the ceiling, and a wood beam falls to the floor. This goes unnoticed.) MARTIN

I saved him from those boys in the bathroom . . . And he’s going to say that I pushed that other boy. That it’s all on his phone, and for what? (Directed to KAREN) For what? KAREN

(Almost to herself) You pushed— MARTIN

Lying there, covered in another kid’s piss, with enough strength to hit record on his phone. (A recording plays of MARTIN yelling, “Will you stop laughing! Will you stop!” Each word emanates from a different part of the theatre.) (Silence.) (BLACKOUT) (END OF SCENE) ACT 3 Scene 1 SETTING: The pub is mostly empty, and it is covered in THE GREY. Half the bar is missing. It looks ripped apart. There are no more

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bottles or glasses on the shelves. There is one lone roundtable with four wooden chairs in the middle of the stage. PHANTOMS intermittently move across the pub. They become increasingly active as the act progresses. What remains on the shelves behind the bar is a clear lockbox that contains one large book. CONNIE, CARLY and DYLAN are dressed in bright colours as if they are on a cruise. MARTIN has not been seen at the pub in almost five weeks. AT RISE: Sounds of waves wash in from the back to the front of the theatre. CARLY and DYLAN are in swimsuits or other summer clothes playing a game of Blackjack. There is one empty chair at the table. DYLAN

Where’s your boy? CARLY

Maybe he’s finally lost it. CONNIE

(CONNIE enters from SR carrying a tray of fancy umbrella drinks. She places them on the table. She takes one of the drinks off the tray and finishes the drink.) DYLAN

Respectable people are the most fun when pushed to the edge. (Directed at CONNIE. DYLAN touches her hair.) Right love? CONNIE

(CONNIE moves DYLAN’s hand away and goes down into the audience and invites one audience member [A/M] to join them on stage.) Surely you can help us figure this mess out for Marty. It’s been so difficult to speak to him at school. So many interruptions. DYLAN

(Directed to A/M) So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done behind closed doors, sailor? CARLY

(Directed to A/M) Ignore him, like his conscience does. Does a video of the principal shoving an asshole kid go viral? A/M

(Improvised response) DYLAN

(Improvised response to A/M) CONNIE

(Improvised response to A/M and/or DYLAN) CONNIE

Surely, no other school will want him. What will he do for money? (Directed to A/M) He doesn’t deserve this. He was trying to save that young man from those little monsters.

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A/M

(Improvised response) CARLY

(Improvised response) CONNIE

(Improvised response) DYLAN

(Directed to A/M) Dismissed, sailor. (DYLAN escorts A/M off the stage.) MARTIN

(Off stage, echo like) I have to get something off my chest. (DYLAN, CARLY and CONNIE do not hear MARTIN.) MARTIN

(Off stage) The truth is I really don’t need your advice. In fact, it’s making things worse. You show up when it’s inconvenient and I— CARLY

What if he could make that little tattletale change his mind? We could make him sick with guilt. Things only got heated because Marty was trying to help him. MARTIN

(Off stage) You want something, but I can’t give it to you. I think it’s for the best if you let me be. (MARTIN’s cell phone begins to ring.) CONNIE

(CONNIE stands up abruptly. She can hear the phone ringing.) MARTIN

(Off stage. Pleading.) Leave me to figure this out on my own. Mom? Mom? KAREN

(Off stage. KAREN leaves MARTIN a voicemail.) Hi Martin. It’s Karen. I haven’t seen you in a while, and I’m just wondering how you’re doing. If you could call me back or stop by the bar and let me know that you’re okay, I’d really appreciate it. (CARLY and DYLAN do not react to MARTIN’s plea, the sound of the phone ringing or the voicemail. However, CONNIE paces, biting her fingernails as she listens to the voicemail. CONNIE chooses to ignore MARTIN.) MARTIN

(Off stage. MARTIN is breathing heavily into the phone. Sounding distraught.) At school there are rules. Mom?

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CONNIE

He can’t see the field of possibilities. (The sound of a phone that’s off the hook beeps for 10–15 seconds.) DYLAN

(DYLAN walks up to CARLY and taps her on the forehead with his finger.) That kid, Marcus, is looking to crucify your precious MARTY. He uploads a video of the school principal shoving one of his students into the bathroom wall; he’ll have everybody in his life hanging off his every word. CARLY

Then people will stop talking about what happened to him in the bathroom. CONNIE

After what those boys did! DYLAN

And your son’s an idiot for putting his hands on a student. It’s not right, and Marty’s going to pay for it. CARLY

(Directed to DYLAN) That’s rich. DYLAN

You can be a real little bitch, did you know that? CONNIE

There’s no need—Why don’t I deal us another hand? CARLY

Don’t pacify this cretin. CONNIE

(Directed to DYLAN) Maybe your girl can help our Marty? Get him to calm down so he can think his way out of this mess. DYLAN

I hope she tosses him out on his ass. I knew he was going to give her trouble. The way he looks at her, like he could devour her. (He points to someone in the audience.) You, ya you. (DYLAN goes into the audience to recruit one more audience member [A/M2].) (Directed to A/M2) I need you to get up there and tell these women that Marty deserves whatever comes his way, and he better leave my daughter out of it. (DYLAN escorts A/M2 up to the stage.) CONNIE

(Directed to A/M2) He can’t help himself. It’s his work, he has to make so many decisions in a day you know.

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CARLY

(Directed to A/M2) What should I tell Marty? A/M2

(Improvised response) CARLY

(Directed to A/M2) (Improvised response) I’ll give him your message. (CARLY escorts A/M2 off the stage.) CONNIE

If he would just talk to me, I’m sure— DYLAN

(He looks at his cards, visibly displeased with his hand.) And if he crosses the line, the living won’t accept him as one of their own anymore. He’ll be excommunicated, sentenced to live the rest of his days with the other castoffs who populate psych wards. A tad sadistic, girls, don’t you think? CONNIE

You’re a vile man. (Directed to CARLY) There might be a way. CARLY

How? (DYLAN taps the table to indicate he wants another card.) CONNIE

(CONNIE deals DYLAN another card.) We estrange him whenever he feels compelled to confess. CARLY

(CARLY looks at her cards, pleased with what she sees. She motions she’ll stay with the cards she was dealt.) It means we get Marty to understand that life in that school, for him, is the erosion. (Shadows begin to slowly block out the light on stage.) DYLAN

(Gesturing to the PHANTOMS) What it means is that you’re prepared to let them roam the playground unsupervised. CONNIE

I won’t let that place bury him. DYLAN

Or, you’ll take him to the brink. And from then on, he’ll hear only the ghosts in his life, the naughty ones like you who escaped their coffins. CARLY

You couldn’t possibly understand. (CARLY shows her hand to DYLAN to show him she won the hand.)

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DYLAN

All I’m saying, little girl, is that it’s dangerous to let some people go out for recess unsupervised. (DYLAN grabs CARLY, throws her over his shoulder and starts to carry her off stage while CONNIE looks on frightened.) CARLY

(CARLY stretches her arm out towards CONNIE.) CONNIE

(CONNIE is upset. She looks away and cleans up the table.) (BLACKOUT) (END OF SCENE) Scene 2 SETTING: The scene is set in the pub. It takes place approximately five weeks after MARTIN was last seen in the pub. It has been completely taken over by THE GREY. What remains behind the bar is a clear lockbox that contains a large book. KAREN has been worried because MARTIN hasn’t called her back. MARTIN appears at the pub door. He’s dressed very casually, and he’s looking a little disheveled. He takes a small bottle from his pocket and takes a swig. KAREN

It’s good to see you again. How’ve you been? (MARTIN and KAREN stare at each other for a few minutes in silence.) MARTIN

I like what you’ve done with the place. KAREN

(KAREN stares at MARTIN intently for another three minutes waiting. She does not respond to his comment.) MARTIN

I tried something exciting a few weeks back. KAREN

What did you try? MARTIN

(MARTIN smirks.) Marcus, that little terrorist in training, threatened to upload a video of me giving the student who pissed on him a little shove. (MARTIN leans back on the barstool with his arms stretched out.) KAREN

What did you do? MARTIN

(While jamming his finger into the bar top.)

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Dancing With the Unconscious He thinks he can threaten me? I told him that by the time he got back to homeroom, another video of those boys pissing all over him could be sent to the entire student body with just one click. Then I made him sit there across from me for a while as I tapped the edge of my cell phone. Every minute or so I’d say, “Just one click.” . . . I let him go back to homeroom once his mascara started to run.

KAREN

(KAREN clears her throat. She is visibly shocked, but tries to hide it.) Why did you choose to handle it this way? MARTIN

We freed ourselves from old doctrines that constrain principal– student relations. KAREN

And you think he felt free in your office with you? MARTIN

Such judgement in your voice. KAREN

You showed Marcus that another adult in his life is willing to use their power to hurt him. MARTIN

(MARTIN stands up.) That’s an allegation. But good for you. You actually spoke the truth in here for once. KAREN

What happens next with Marcus? MARTIN

We reached an understanding. I’m done talking about this. KAREN

You’re being confrontational. MARTIN

(Shaking his whiskey bottle) Empowered. I will endeavour to take an active role in the therapeutic process today. DYLAN

(Enters from UL) KAREN

It’s important for you to control what comes next— MARTIN

Don’t mirror what I say, I can’t function in an echo chamber. Not here. Just turn on the music tootsie! DYLAN

(Directed to KAREN) Get this guy out of here.

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KAREN

Friends give friends advice when they see someone they care about unmooring from their emotional dock. MARTIN

No, no, no. You want us to speak politely because you’re terrified that if we don’t, our masks of civility will decay. (MARTIN goes over to KAREN and touches her face, to pretend to look under her mask.) KAREN

(Pushing MARTIN’s hand away.) And what, you leave your mask at home now? CONNIE

(Enters from UR) CARLY

(Enters from UL) (CONNIE and CARLY meet LC.) MARTIN

(MARTIN grins widely.) Something like that. KAREN

How’s that been working for you? (CONNIE and CARLY make three to five frozen images of what’s happening as MARTIN describes the meeting with the parent. Each time, either CARLY or CONNIE unfreezes first and makes a change or an adjustment to the other’s image.) MARTIN

Last Wednesday, I met with a parent who wanted to lodge a complaint because his daughter’s teacher gave her a B+. His princess has been an A student since the womb. So, obviously, the teacher wasn’t challenging her enough, and so on, and so on. This gentleman is on Parent Council, so in the past, I would’ve spent hours servicing him, placating him. Hell, if he called the board office, I might’ve made that teacher apologize for the unlikely possibility that his darling Angela mastered only 81% of the learning outcomes over the term. How were the assignments weighted? Did you differentiate your instruction? Were the students required to set goals? Can you describe your assessment practices in three sentences or less? Did you watch all 13 of dear Angie’s volleyball games to build a relationship with her? Good teachers build relationships you know. Fuck it. The fire alarm rings, and this father would steal the wheelchairs from the special ed classroom if it would get him and his daughter out of the building faster. KAREN

If you didn’t placate him, what did you do?

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DYLAN

Christ sakes, for once in your life, could you turn your back on these sideshow attractions? (DYLAN yells at MARTIN, CONNIE and CARLY.) Get out of here! (CARLY and CONNIE begin to march in unison around KAREN.) MARTIN

(A bit embarrassed to say it out loud at first, and then proud.) (A school bell rings and CARLY, CONNIE and DYLAN run to the back of the bar and sit, furiously write, pass a paper to the next person in line, to the rhythm and sound of a photocopier making copies. [Repeat in that order.]) I told him we’re not in the restaurant business. That studying and learning is hard work, and it’s not the teacher’s goddamn job to serve entitled tenth graders the English curriculum in tasty, bite-sized pieces. We’re not fine dining, we’re a public school. (MARTIN smiles.) It’s the shortest meeting I’ve had with him all year. Bloody liberating. KAREN

And your treatment of Marcus? Angela’s father? What do you call that? MARTIN

Honest. For the first time in 20 years I haven’t perseverated on what other people want to hear from me. You think you know something true about school because you spent so many hours as a little girl looking up at your teacher. My new approach seems strange only because your schoolgirl memories are staged in such an old scene. And what does it matter anyway? (The photocopier stops and then DYLAN stops, followed by CONNIE and then CARLY.) CONNIE

(Directed at DYLAN) Maybe we took him too far. DYLAN

What did I tell you? He won’t be able to notice the signs anymore. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN. She stands close to CONNIE.) You’ll be fine. Won’t you? MARTIN

(Directed to CARLY) Don’t worry about me. KAREN

Who are you talking to? MARTIN

(MARTIN is visibly anxious after being caught. MARTIN gets up to avoid her gaze. CONNIE and CARLY mirror MARTIN’s movements as he paces around the pub.)

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CONNIE

We whisper to him all the time. MARTIN

(MARTIN begins to mirror CONNIE and CARLY’s movements.) CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) Maybe we shouldn’t talk in front of Karen. KAREN

Do you hear them often? MARTIN

At first they were better behaved, but now, they appear when it suits them. At home it’s fine, but it causes confusion when they steal my time at school. KAREN

The stress— CARLY

(Directed to KAREN) Can he come back from this? THE GREY

(More things fall from the ceiling, and one wall of the set comes down.) KAREN

I see it now. MARTIN

Let’s stay focused on what’s important. KAREN

It’s a little late for that. CONNIE

No, you’re wrong. He’s a survivor. Imagine, such a young boy finding his sister half dead. And you more than insinuated I was a bad mother because all the focus was on Carly. No, my boy’s going to pull through. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) Blood in the water. MARTIN

(Annoyed. Directed at CONNIE and KAREN. MARTIN stops mirroring.) You know what’s best for me now? CONNIE

Let me take care of you, son. Find a way through this mess together. MARTIN

(Directed to CONNIE) Two weeks ago, I instituted an innovative disciplinary program for myself.

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CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) Wonderful, sweetheart. (Directed to KAREN) This is progress. He’s becoming bold, a real man of action. KAREN

Where did you go, Martin? MARTIN

(Apologetic. Directed to CONNIE and KAREN.) Let’s not get too excited. I still drink too much, watch too much porn and drive a car I can’t afford. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) Like every other mutant in this cabinet of curiosity. MARTIN

(Directed to CARLY. Annoyed.) Maybe it’s time you focus on yourself. Stitch up your own wounds. CARLY

You are totally beyond reason. MARTIN

(Directed to Carly) You don’t know what I’m capable of. CARLY

You’re fooling yourself little brother. And take it from me, I’ve seen the edge and we’re coming close. KAREN

(KAREN puts some loose bits of wood in the burning barrel.) CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN, looking at the lockbox behind the bar.) Baby, she keeps your answer in that book. MARTIN

(Directed to KAREN) What does it say about me in there? KAREN

I didn’t write that book. MARTIN

A list of my mistakes? KAREN

Just forget about your record, why don’t you? MARTIN

(Recording from OS. Sounds like a record stuck in a scratch.) Show me. Show. Me. Show me. Show. Me. Show me. Show. Me. CONNIE

If the work is about him, he has every right to see what’s in there. You see, she’s hiding something.

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DYLAN

(Directed to CONNIE) What are you up to? KAREN

(Gesturing to THE GREY around the bar.) I’m not comfortable giving you my book. It’s my job to keep it safe. MARTIN

I only want to look at my pages. You have my word. KAREN

No one gets to look inside that tomb but me. MARTIN

So suspicious. Growing up with a cop really did you in. Always coming home smelling like the worst human beings were capable of. DYLAN

(Directed to KAREN) He’s trying to get in your head. KAREN

(A bit harsh) That’s a sad attempt to make me capitulate to your big fat ego. MARTIN

Maybe I should . . . (MARTIN finishes the sentence using part of a fragment or a sentence that A/M2 delivered when asked, What would you tell Marty?) KAREN

(Directed to MARTIN) Let’s call you a cab. It’s closing time. CONNIE

(Directed to KAREN) I guess you want him to spend the rest of his life guessing what it says about us in that book! (A low droning sound is concentrated above different sections of the audience for a few seconds at a time.) CARLY

(Directed to THE GREY) Don’t do that. CONNIE

What, take care of him? KAREN

You can’t stop it now. CONNIE

Do you remember when he got drunk that Christmas Eve and swallowed the pills? He looked out the window all night calling for you. CARLY

(Directed to MARTIN) The inheritance is not worth keeping.

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CONNIE

(Directed to CARLY) Come now, love. It’s not like you were around to look out for your younger brother. CARLY

You’d sacrifice his chance to stay with the living for a few moments longer, and for what? CONNIE

Love. I love him. CARLY

Then why is it that your bruises took the longest to heal? MARTIN

(He raises his voice. Directed at CONNIE and CARLY.) Will you please— KAREN

(Visibly startled) How often do you speak to them? MARTIN

(Directed to KAREN.) It must be awful to be here, in this place, alone at night. DYLAN

(Directed to KAREN) Keep that on. KAREN

(KAREN nervously takes off her jacket and puts it in the burning barrel.) MARTIN

No! KAREN

No? MARTIN

You’ll freeze out there. KAREN

(KAREN walks to the door. She smiles uncertainly as she waits for MARTIN to move to the door.) MARTIN

(MARTIN takes another drink of whiskey from his little bottle.) CONNIE

It’s in the in-between where we lose our footing. MARTIN

Please, we need more time. KAREN

We’ve had all the time we’re ever going to have. MARTIN

(MARTIN stands up.) Remember when you let me sleep here until sunrise?

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KAREN

That was the night you told me how Carly died. (CONNIE begins to stroke MARTIN’s hair.) MARTIN

You held my hand and stroked my hair. KAREN

I sat close to you, snowflake. Our memories are our own. MARTIN

(MARTIN walks towards KAREN and points to the lockbox behind the bar.) KAREN

You don’t speak the same language. MARTIN

An archive of all your secret thoughts, the things you would never say out loud but really think. KAREN

(KAREN shifts uneasily by the door and then moves to the burning barrel. She proceeds to take off all of her clothes and put them in the barrel.) MARTIN

You like your other customers better than me. (MARTIN moves closer to the barrel.) KAREN

We don’t sell whiskey here anymore. MARTIN

(Gesturing towards the clear lock box that contains the books.) Maybe a better version of us could come from those pages? KAREN

I have nothing left to give you. CONNIE

Come now, darling, forget her. MARTIN

Please give me the book. KAREN

No. PHANTOMS

(From now until the scene ends, the phantoms begin to slowly eclipse more light on stage.) MARTIN

Can’t or won’t? DYLAN

(Directed to CARLY) Come on, kid, get him out of here. KAREN

(KAREN scrambles to the bar and stands on it to block the lockbox containing the book.)

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MARTIN

(MARTIN goes over to the bar. MARTIN wrestles her down, and she hits her head. He reaches for the lockbox, but THE GREY and the PHANTOMS move him back.) CARLY

(Startled by the phantoms and MARTIN’s outburst, she moves to the burn barrel.) KAREN

(Visibly shaken) MARTIN

(MARTIN looks at KAREN’s face. MARTIN takes a step towards KAREN.) KAREN

(KAREN takes a step back from MARTIN.) MARTIN

I never meant to— KAREN

(Rubs her head. She takes the little bottle out of MARTIN’s pocket and finishes the whiskey.) MARTIN

(Directed to DYLAN, CONNIE and CARLY) They forced us to keep their secrets. (MARTIN grabs KAREN’s arm—not harshly, more pleading.) (Directed to KAREN) How do we carve them out, get the last word? (MARTIN puts his hands on KAREN’s cheeks.) Tell me you understand what I mean. KAREN

I use— I used to know you. MARTIN

(He studies his surroundings.) Was it ignorance? A misunderstanding? Stupidity? KAREN

(KAREN looks away.) MARTIN

Did it ever have anything to do with me? DYLAN

(Directed to MARTIN) Keep your mouth shut. CARLY

Look at him, he’s hemorrhaging. CONNIE

(Directed to KAREN) You’ll feel better soon sweetheart.

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KAREN

(KAREN tries to pull away from MARTIN. MARTIN keeps hold of one of KAREN’s hands.) MARTIN

If we recognized it sooner, that we didn’t have to be the ones to satisfy their cravings— KAREN

(KAREN attempts to get up and get to the door.) MARTIN

Stay with me. (MARTIN moves even closer to her. He tries to lie in her lap.) For just a while longer. KAREN

(KAREN manages to squirm out of MARTIN’s grasp.) THE GREY

(Moves MARTIN and DYLAN to the lone standing vertical beam in what’s left of the pub.) KAREN

(She gets up, finds some wire on the floor and attaches MARTIN and DYLAN’s hands together.) DYLAN

(He looks afraid. Directed to KAREN.) Look at me. I put a roof over your head. Fed you, clothed you. Paid for college. Bought you everything you ever wanted. CONNIE

(Directed to DYLAN) All those years she hid under the covers and prayed her monster would have to work a double shift. CARLY

He was the warning. DYLAN

(Directed to CARLY) I loved her. CARLY

(Gesturing to the whole stage and beyond) You made this place a crime scene. THE GREY

(Takes down another wall of the set) DYLAN

(Directed to KAREN, sounds of a skipping record playing in rhythm to the lines) We’ll be alright. We’ll be alright. We’ll be alright. I’m alright. I’m alright. I’m alright. You, you, you— CARLY

(Directed to KAREN) Do you want to leave them both here?

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KAREN

(Gesturing to PHANTOMS) Let’s leave it for them to decide. THE PHANTOMS

(Move closer) CONNIE

(Directed to DYLAN) Pull yourself together. You’re embarrassing yourself. MARTIN

(Directed to KAREN. He tries to pull away from DYLAN.) Don’t leave me. KAREN

(KAREN kisses MARTIN on the forehead.) MARTIN

(Cries.) CONNIE

(Directed to MARTIN) It’s hard in the end times, sweetheart. (Directed to CARLY) This place never did you any good either. KAREN

(KAREN scrambles up what’s left of the bar and grabs the lockbox. Directed to MARTIN.) Each part of your face is locked in my memory theatre. MARTIN

When I’m with you, I’m not the worst echo of myself. That’s something, isn’t it? KAREN

(Gestures towards DYLAN) Will he suffer? THE GREY

(Knocks down a third set wall) MARTIN

(Mouths KAREN a kiss) KAREN

(The wind is raging outside. KAREN leaves and closes the door behind her. The door slams open and shut in the wind.) MARTIN & DYLAN

(They begin to kick at each other and scream ungodly sounds as the PHANTOMS eat up the rest of the light.) (BLACKOUT) (END OF SCENE)

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In Your Dreams What people, events, images, sounds or symbols appear and reappear in your dreams? I often ask family members, friends and people I work with what they dream about. The short italicized pieces in this segment are dream fragments shared with me by colleagues, fragments that have been sutured together from the accounts of multiple dreamers. Over the years, I have been gifted with many beautiful and haunting images that have shed light on individual and collective worries and desires. I often invite conversations about dreams because they are poems born in the unconscious. When these poetic fragments find their way to consciousness, they remind us that bedtime is liminal puissance. While breathing deep, the dreamer enters wild spaces that are symbolically rich and rootless in terms of time and relationship. The pilot announces we’re flying at 37,000 feet. I look around and see that I’m the only one sitting in the airplane. I push the button above my head to call the flight attendant. When she arrives, she brings me bourbon on the rocks and a manual covered in dust. She says, “Read up, bucko. It’s your turn to fly.” A wave of panic washes over me. I throw back the bourbon and then head for the emergency door. People fly, topple governments, talk to animals or listen to the dead while suspended in a free association fantasy world. Moreover, these vivid and metaphorically potent representations suture unlikely images together (Britzman, 2015). This can be disturbing and revealing because when we wake, we sometimes feel the urge to draw connections between what is happening in our lives and the latent symbolism in the dream. If dreams are shadow representations from the unconscious, then interpretations of dreams hold possibilities for deep reflection on past relationships as well as for uncovering imaginative possibilities for the future. A few nights before the start of every new school year, I have a dream of pulling people up the side of a large hill like a living chain of paper dolls. I feel the weight in my shoulders, and I often wake up from the dream with a sore shoulder and neck. As the chain starts to slip away, I scream, “Climb faster!” The child who hangs on to my hand says, “Don’t you yell at me, Miss.” Lying in bed, the sleeper can become more awake in the world. Enckell (2010) describes two approaches to the psychoanalytic treatment of dreams. The first is archaeological. In the classical approach, the symbols of the dream are to “help the patient look ‘back’ at reality reflecting itself in its derivative” (p. 1104). This is a closed representation system

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(p. 1104). It assumes the reflective process allows the patient to attune to the difficulties that he experiences when making self-observations. The hope is that a conscious awakening to these difficulties will help him move closer to uncovering the roots of the pain. I pull up to the front of the school and see a dog is guarding the front doors. It paces back and forth, frothing at the mouth. When I get closer, the dogs bares its teeth and growls. It’s the same bloody Rottweiler who bit me when I was seven years old. The second reflective approach to dream analysis is teleological. It is an open representational system that is based on the patient’s recognition that the analyst understands her in a way that is affirming and novel (p. 1105). This new relational web is not grounded in the past. It is an original entity, a third interpretive space that hovers somewhere between the analyst and the analysand. In this way, a person’s dreams become metaphors that are open to limitless interpretive possibilities in the future. We are sitting in the faculty lounge but everything is blue; blue chairs, blue table, blue coffee maker. Everything a shade of blue. You come in and pour yourself a cup of coffee and you say, “It tastes like blue.” I wonder what blue tastes like. As we dream, the events of our lives morph into abstract portraits that are dislocated from conscious attempts to represent our identities. I believe this is part of what Britzman (2009) gestures towards when she refers to the “second-chance self.” The surreal landscape of the dream is a realm in which entrenched identity constructions can be shed and experiments with new personas can be manifested. If we imagine the school as a theatre of dreams, education is an invitation extended to strangers to shape the emergence of a people and a place yet to come. These waking dreams are luscious terrain upon which to explore the background scenery of our collective aspirations for the future. In this vein, the time and energy leaders spend trying to monitor and control their own and other people’s emotional registers paints a dream for the future that lacks variations in tone, mood, texture and colour. I don’t dream. Well, at least I think I don’t dream anymore. Educational leaders assume a shared responsibility for the most complex and emotionally taxing behaviours and events in the organization. However, the emotional labour of relational leadership and the inherent psychic difficulty of the work remains an exquisite corpse (Torok, 1968), a looming specter repressed in the field, waiting for the language to express itself. The role of an educational leader, constructed partly by its

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codification and the system’s incapacity to stop the urgency signalled by the school bells, amplifies the types of behaviours that repeatedly draw the administrative gaze. The gaze can be elicited by the administrator herself, by people within in the organization, such as instructors, teachers or students, or by one’s intimate dead. I show up drenched in sweat with seconds to spare before my first class is supposed begin. I madly get my Power Point loaded onto the computer. I look up, only to find my mother sitting in the middle of the lecture hall in her nightgown. I ask, “Mom, what are you doing here?” She refuses to answer. She just shakes her head and walks out of the lecture hall. While it is true that all educators play a complicated hand in the mitigation of their desire to control undesirable behaviours as they profess a love for teaching other people’s children (Taubman, 2012), this tension is intensified in the administrator’s office. Leaders are called to mitigate the effects of behaviours while they are being witnessed by many other actors inside and outside the organization. Because many actors assume it is part of the work of the organization to maintain order and control, its formal leaders are frequently policed in terms of their capacity to achieve these ends. I have no mouth to explain why I burned all the textbooks in front of the school. Some watchers watch for a long time to ensure events are interpreted in ways that do not significantly challenge the ends of the organization. When the watchers exit the scene, what are left are the psychological remainders or the accumulations of one’s participation in outlier experiences and of being studied in times of great stress. These remainders become vanishing twins, lost souls whose mothers aren’t looking. These hauntings point to the absence of talk about the cumulative effects of administrative work on administrators. It is important to name this phenomenon because absences can be costly. Psychoanalysis teaches us that the vanished will have their day. To remember one’s lived experiences of leadership with others may open opportunities for the dreamer to query who he is and who he is becoming in the organization. I get out of my car and I’m mobbed by camera flashes. Each flash feels like an acupuncture needle. Each pin prick of light slows me down, more and more. I ask them to stop but they just keep mumbling something about my face under their breath. The light gets brighter and hotter until they slowly melt. Their bodies quickly spread across the pavement and then drip into a sewer drain.

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Educational organizations play a fundamental role in predetermining the behaviours that are put under the administrative gaze when young people are in and out of school. Serious offences such as vandalism, physical altercations, defiance, intoxication, theft and verbal abuse are examples of the elements that leaders chase to the fringes of the organization. I’m singing “All You Need is Love” in front of thousands of screaming fans. My father turns on the house lights in the concert hall. It goes incredibly silent. Just my voice, “Ba Ba—BaDaDa . . .” He says, “Really, that’s all we need?” But there are other less dramatic controls that are internalized by children, teachers and administrators. Sitting in chairs for designated amounts of time, directing bodies to move by the school bell or telling children to walk in single file down the hallway leave powerful imprints that determine how bodies affect bodies later in life. Like the body memories (Foucault, 1995) made from walking in single file, emotionally charged incidents in organizations are laden with psychic burdens, and those burdens do their work on leaders. Poetic fragments of dreams that surface from the unconscious are potent sensory signals for a dreamer to analyze what parts of her and her past relations come forth as she co-authors a school community’s dreams for the future. Sitting in the dark, terrified of being found. If I stay quiet, I’ll make it out of the room. From a dark corner, I hear someone laughing. It makes me squirm but I don’t give up the ghost.

Part 3

Communicative Bodies in Sensuous Encounters Word Play What can words do? Describe a time in your life when your identity shifted by pronouncement. Can you recall a meeting or an event that turned on a word? Language is precious and precarious. It is precarious because people often fill in the blanks for others in unflattering ways, or they turn ambiguity into assumptions that fit dutifully into inherited narratives. Language is precious because it is the dominant way that people make sense of themselves and their lives in relation to others in the world. In an emotionally affirming encounter, educational leaders can emerge as courageous and capable listeners who reframe negative phrases or words to uplift a teacher or a student. Through emotive and nurturing communicative events, life affirming language can enliven the one who discloses and the one who listens. Language is also performative. If I speak, I seek to describe my reality, but my speech also creates reality (Butler, 2006). Imagine that a school principal makes an explicit performative statement such as, “You are expelled.” After the utterance, a young person moves through a space that exists between student and non-student (Butler, 2015). The administrator’s words produce a new reality, one in which there are mobility demarcations, the rupture of a previous identity and the inscription of a new one. Parents, fellow students, administrators and teachers play a critical role in the adoption of this new reality. Acting as witnesses, they make the expulsion real and reify its power. Sedgwick (2003) coined the term periperformative to describe utterances that are “not themselves performatives, they are about performatives and, more properly, that they cluster around performatives” (p. 68). She conceptualizes this special category of utterances that move beside, around and up against the performative. Sedgwick builds her case for the generation of a new category through a critique of Austin’s (1975)

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attitudinal treatment of the “I dare you.” performative. She suggests Austin’s foundational work does not properly consider the scene in which the utterance has been made. If I dare you to do something, I must assume a real or an imagined audience for the spectacle I aim to unleash upon you. Responses, or non-responses for that matter, can alter the scene in dramatic ways. There are productive possibilities inside a situation when a person disinterpellates. Disinterpellation may open an exciting and liberating space to challenge unexamined assumptions. It is worth quoting her at length here. Sedgwick (2003) claims: The presumption is embodied in the lack of a formulaic negative response to being dared or to being interpellated as witness to a dare: to dare is an explicit performative; to not be dared, to undare oneself or another, is likelier to take the form of a periperformative: I won’t take you up on it. Who are you to dare me? Who cares what you dare me to do? The fascinating class of negative performatives— disavowal, demur, renunciation, depreciation, repudiation, “count me out,” giving the lie—is marked, in almost every instance, by the asymmetrical property of being much less prone to becoming conventional than the positive performatives. To disinterpellate from a performative scene will usually require, not another specific performative, nor simply the negative of one, but the nonce referential act of a periperformative. . . . It requires little presence of mind to find the comfortable formula “I dare you,” but a good deal more for the dragooned witness to disinterpellate with “Don’t do it on my account” (p. 70). Let’s visualize the meeting in which a high school principal tells a student that he is expelled with his mother present in the meeting. After the principal provides a detailed rationale for the expulsion, the student responds, “No, thank you,” while his mother nods in affirmation. Where are we now? The young man’s “No, thank you” acts as the disinterpellation. I am not expelled. I am still a student in my own eyes and in my mother’s eyes. Don’t do it on my account. Keep your punitive medicine for yourself. It is a subversion of power that generates radical potential. The radicalness swims in between your first inclinations after the periperformative utterance. Does your instinct prompt you to raise your voice, walk the student out the front door of the school, phone the superintendent or call the police to escort the young man out? Each choice alters the event in significant ways, but more importantly, these sensuous inclinations reveal a great deal about you. It is difficult to compose oneself when someone disinterpellates. In these moments, something echoes from a deep dark place within us to maintain allegiance to our best laid plans for the event. To experience someone opting out is disorienting because it alters individual and collective relations, while a new interpretation of the person, system, plan or policy emerges. To tolerate the ambiguity is quite difficult because it makes people vulnerable and it enlivens counter-narratives. Periperformative acts can

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figuratively and literally unmake categories and make it more difficult to sustain entrenched representations of the other. Those enmeshed in educational leadership spectacles can be effectively undone when the limits of their power in educational organizations are disavowed or exposed. Turn on a Word The vice-principal brings poster paper, masking tape and markers to the parent meeting to chart a running record of the conversation. During the event, parents are given a rationale for amalgamating the gifted and talented classes with the classes in the regular program. Budget cuts, reductions in enrolment and a revitalized school mission that focuses on educational equity are given as context and support for the administrators’ decision. Invitations are extended to meeting participants to voice concerns and to ask questions. Three parents who have children in the gifted math class express doubts that teachers will continue to help their children excel in math if they have to choose between assisting struggling students and providing challenging learning activities for children who are already exceeding grade level learning outcomes. Comments erupt fast and furiously until an outspoken member of parent council, who is also a parent of a daughter with a cognitive disability, inserts herself in the dialogue. “If you ask me to choose between inclusive classes and segregated classes, the answer is easy isn’t it? If we want our children to grow up to be compassionate and accepting neighbours in this community, they have to learn to live and work together in their classrooms.” From that point on, the dialogue is reframed. You are arguing on the side of inclusion or for classrooms segregated by academic ability. Parents of the children in the gifted program look increasingly wary voicing their thoughts. Eventually, they turn their silence into incredulous text messages to vent frustration in ways that are less harmful to relationships that had previously traversed school programs and labels. At first, the vice-principal is uncomfortable with the turn in language, but eventually she operationalizes the word segregated. With the decision to amalgamate the programs already made, all that is left to do is to outlive a few more awkward silences and to draw the meeting to a close. The Substitute Ruby press on nails trail across the board in cursive no glue, no mess, easy on, easy off little time to linger in their musings Each day an encounter with strangers meeting minor characters in subplots

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of an unhomely register In dreams of her own classroom she knows them well enough to be one of the good gadflies in the untold revision of their stories Acting as the referee and the peacekeeping purveyor of other people’s lessons She longs for a school to call home Solo Martini Seconds after learning she had become a new vice-principal, the superintendent squeezed her shoulder and said, “Don’t expect to be invited out for afterschool drinks on Fridays anymore.” People Think Drew Ruins Every Meeting Recently, the Equity Committee became a standing committee at the university. The word equity was chosen for the committee’s name because justice, feminist, queer and gender were words that were perceived as too exclusive or too loaded. When you change the name, activists are thrust back into perpetual aims talk, always on the way to making substantive change but never arriving in time to make trouble for the institution. To change the name, you get to build a different legacy, one that is perceived as less confrontational or less radical, but it extracts you from the lifeblood of social movements. When you change the name, you create distance from shameful events of the past, but it can allow senior administrators to slip away from zones of relational accountability. Drew is the chair of the Equity Committee. Some bodies are given more comfort than others in institutional settings, which means some bodies have to care more about how they appear to others. As a gay person of colour, Drew often experiences micro-aggressions when they call out heteronormative or gender binary thinking in meetings, structures, institutional processes or events. But to keep building allies, even when their heart is sick, Drew smiles all day long. These facial contortions are small appeasements for those who view them as a problem waiting for a chance to appear. If you smile, it’s much harder to make you into a villain or a ghost, but you’ve got to smile big.

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Last year, Drew pulled a group of faculty and students together to organize a storytelling event that would happen just before the Pride Parade. They envisioned people coming together in a community hall to share stories of resilience in activism. Drew felt this type of public demonstration of solidarity was especially important because posters laden with homophobic and white supremacy language were appearing more frequently around campus. As a consequence, faculty, students and members of the wider community were becoming numb in the face of public acts of racism, homophobia, misogyny and hate speech. To quell worries about offending the public and to disrupt perseverations on how the event would impact the reputation of the institution, the planning meetings devolved into exhausting impression management exercises. When you are always in question, you do not want to be seen as an obstacle in the conversation. You become proficient at compromising. When Drew stopped pushing for more radical textures and tones in the storytelling event, committee members stopped threatening to quit. Smile bigger. We can’t have another meeting ruined.

Narcissistic Signalling How do I experience myself and others when I feel superficial, foolish or anxious? What are the processes through which I develop a sense of myself as a vital, worthy and competent leader? How do these processes get derailed when I experience narcissistic vulnerability? Narcissistic signalling arises when one individual in a significant dyad expects the other person to shift while claiming a position of exemption for themselves. These moments are often saturated with feelings of moral superiority, defensiveness, shame and envy. In the context of leadership studies, these types of relational encounters might arise when a person feels tempted to claim the mantle of the curriculum expert to defend against her feelings that she is being perceived as an ineffective instructional leader. Narcissistic signalling might surface when a leader feels that he is being outperformed by a colleague in front of the superintendent at council meetings or when he is concerned that his reputation is being publicly blemished (Shaw, 2014) on social media because of a controversial decision to suspend a student from school. In less obvious ways, it can also surface when a teacher is driven to rescue students in ways that minimize their agency. Narcissistic signalling within relational encounters is a momentary denial of another person’s subjectivity and the demand for idealization at the expense of mutual recognition.

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Memo Some people make it difficult to trust one’s own recollections, so much so, that she kept a survival kit full of assignment rubrics, memo pads and extra pens as tools to deal with the inconsistencies in their stories. At 10:26, she dates the page and notes the time, which makes Jamie 26 minutes late. His record adds up to seven absences over the term, two missing assignments plus two reprimands for conduct considered unbecoming of a teacher candidate. She looks up, startled that he has been watching her prepare the materials for their meeting. Without waiting for an invitation, he slides into the chair across from her desk. He informs her that his grandpa is critically ill and that he is responsible for caring for his grandma while his grandpa is hospitalized. As she looks away to write down family issues, she feels him watching her. During the visual dislocation, he leans in and uses his feet to pull his chair closer. The growling sounds of the bits of gravel caught up in the chair’s wheels cause her to sit erect. She relocates his gaze and begins to list her complaints, starting with the least to the most severe. When she tells him his field placement will not begin until he hands in the missing assignments, he bites down on his bottom lip. She couples, “I’m sorry that your grandfather is ill,” with the rejoinder that it is imperative that he fulfil his obligations in the course. Jamie accepts her extension, makes a promise to hand in his work by Friday and then slowly pushes the chair back to its original position. Before he exits the office, he turns and asks, “Hey, why don’t we meet for coffee on Friday? I’ll buy, you know, as a thank you for the extension. You can have my paper then.” The invitation fuses the increasing redness in her cheeks with the widening of the smirk on his face. “No, thank you Jamie. Emailing the paper is just fine.” “Okay then professor. I’ll try and email it to you before the end of the weekend.” Thank You for Your Time His heart beats quickly as picks up the phone. The superintendent informs him that he is not the successful candidate. As the blood rushes through his head, he is somewhat confident that he hears her say, “There were many worthy applicants for the assistant superintendent position and in no way should this decision be interpreted as a lack of confidence in your leadership skills. We truly value you and want you to know that the board sees you as a valuable member of the administrative team.” He bristles at the redundancy in her use of values but works up the courage to inquire about what he could have done differently. “To be honest, we would have liked to have seen a greater focus on the Community Outreach Initiative in your professional e-portfolio. After

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all, it is where the division is investing so much of its time and resources. Teachers need to see that the leadership team is united and unwavering in its commitment to stay the course until COI becomes embedded in each of our school’s strategic plans.” As he thanks her for the opportunity to interview for the position, he scrawls, C O I on the back of a paper copy of this afternoon’s staff meeting agenda. He begins to surround the ‘I’ with ‘I words’ generating a disfigured acrostic poem. Idiotic. Ignorant. Intellectually vapid . . . Irksome . . . Inane process . . . The Principal Goes Into the Hallway AT RISE (The PRINCIPAL sits at his desk smoking a cigarette. He opens his notebook. His reads his field notes to the AUDIENCE.) PRINCIPAL 9:07 am. The purpose of my study is to catch bad actors gyrating methodically against monochromatic policies that leak from my brain. 10:16 am. Hipster kids eat sushi in the cafeteria and spew pithy repudiations into the Twittersphere. Digital codes of intention diffuse their ornamental originality. 10:47 am. Disillusioned fashionistas dress as habituations as to not attract the male gaze. To that end, all pink sequined short shorts are recalled. 11:19 am. (PRINCIPAL picks up a pen and writes. Text is posted on the screen.) “Causal interpretations indicate these teenagers are kitsch.

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Communicative Bodies in Sensuous Encounters The iron cage is the new open concept.” (The PRINCIPAL continues to deliver his lines directly to the audience.) 11:44 am. I’ve been informed that I love Super Sonic Gin & Tonics. 94% of the time the libation expedites the delivery of mediocre expectations to my office. 12:37 pm. Deviant students wait patiently to be Identified. Categorized. Punished. 12:39 pm. Memorialized on the wall are twelve grad class photo panels eclipsed by Father’s porcelain veneers. 12:41 pm. Tiny purple bruises raise the hackles of saintly social workers who traffic in advocacy. 12:59 pm. Bartenders whisper to sweaty drunks. They say, “The GIRL tried to leave but thought better of it” Keenly aware FATHER has no place to buy, He goes to the school to watch the puppets flicker in the firelight. 1:12 pm. An inevitable meeting of the eyes incites radical sober adjustments to the hallway’s architecture. Self-interest forces the Real Father to Adjust his proximity to me. 1:46 pm. Credentials are solicited in front of histrionic disciples.

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Father needs me to love him to be received as the landlord above all other landlords. 2:09 pm. Father decrees, “Educational aristocrats are dreary.” (Lights fade.) I wince unattractively . . . and make my way . . . to the side door. (BLACKOUT) Searching for Higher Ground The school counsellor plays with the lever on the bench vice as she demands to know what happened to the plan. Jordan’s mother is very angry about the lack of communication from the school. The teachers reiterate that Jordan chooses to spend most of his class time smoking on the other side of the shop door, and as of this afternoon, he has yet to complete his practical testing in both the small engines and the carburetor units. With tears in her eyes, the counsellor reminds the teachers of their professional obligation to Jordan, “He has attentional difficulties and as a staff we have committed to the principles of inclusion and to meeting the needs of individual students.” The teachers remind the counsellor that Jordan’s attendance has been spotty and then ask her how she would feel if this student was assigned to fix the breaks on her car. Everybody Loves Linda Linda has 1247 followers on Twitter and she deleted her Facebook account before it was the right thing to do. Linda sleeps with Noam Chomsky books under her pillow. Linda sets the tone in staff meetings. Linda uses her blog to educate anti-vaxers after school but she does it in a way that brings people closer together. Linda creates lesson plans for all of her classes. Linda predicted the whole Donald Trump thing and regrets not making a bigger fuss the night before the election. Internet trolls respect Linda. Linda eats only organic and brings some of the vegetables she grows to the administrative assistants in the office. Linda knows what we should be watching on Netflix. Linda is woke.

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Denial of Loss What do people have to psychologically give up, concede or accept if they adopt a new idea, process or approach? How attuned am I to the emotional side effects of change? Administrators frequently require teachers and students to adjust to better serve the organization and to meet the demands of micro (schoolbased) and macro (educational authority, larger social and environmental context) changes. Think about the number of improvement initiatives that populate strategic plans. Each one of the strategies that feels innocuous on paper inevitably bumps up against a teacher’s or a formal leader’s defensive structures. Those who lead school improvement initiatives without giving any thought to the interpretive losses that arise in the face of school or systemic changes, unwittingly amplify the emotional impact on the people involved. We do not spend enough time thinking about what people have to psychologically give up in order to change their minds, adopt a new program or improve their teaching practice. Interpretive losses tie uncertainty to knowing. It is the moment when what you once thought was true feels suddenly slippery and hard to hold onto in the current context. For instance, an interpretive loss can occur when a change in mandated curriculum demands that teachers move from outcome-based teaching methods to inquiry-based approaches. Learning targets that replace open-ended questions inevitably create a destabilizing effect. To be a good teacher once meant planning with the end in mind, now professional goodness is derived from student-led projects that place students at the centre of their learning. Many leaders and aspiring school leaders apply to get into graduate school in search of professional development, the acquisition of credentials and an increase in pay. Rarely in my experience do students in the earliest phases of their program articulate a wish for an epistemological rupture that will help them question their assumptions about leadership and living. Some time ago, a colleague of mine shared a story about introducing her graduate students to the work of Judith Butler. They were reading Butler (2006) to think about the implications of gender as a social construction in the context of teaching and leading. One of her students had recently returned to her position as a vice-principal after a parental leave. The student told the class that as part of working through the course material, she began to buy gender neutral clothing for the baby. Later in the term, the student recounted a story that culminated with her husband taking a yellow and green cap off of their baby’s head and throwing the cap in the garbage. Her lived experience of gender trouble was rife with moments of uncertainty and interpretive losses. Learning from and with others is an intense affair of the mind that elicits emotional side effects. These effects can make it very difficult to

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mentally adjust as one tries to develop coherence out of what can longer cohere. The pieces in Denial of Loss interrogate the troubling effects of loss on the person who denies the loss and the effects on those who have experienced the loss. The pieces in this section invite questioning about the moments when we privately wish to cement existing interpretations even as we publicly declare a love for life-long learning. Shift Ida hates teaching in a multi-age classroom. She perceives the recent school-wide change as a pet project of the new principal. Over the course of her long career, she has become increasingly weary of the whimsies of freshly minted administrators. She predicts that as soon as the principal moves on to a bigger school, they will quickly return to teaching children in age-based cohorts. Determined to wait out the principal and befuddled by the demands of multi-age teaching, Ida resorts to finding ways to teach each subject by grade level. When it is math period, she teaches grade-specific mini-lessons to the grade ones, then to the grade twos and finally to the grade threes. She reasons the third graders are more mature and thus able to work independently as she makes her way around the room. Ida constructs a familiar world for her and the children inside a universe that feels chaotic and inhospitable. During the first round of parent teacher conferences, several parents complain in hushed tones about multi-age classrooms. They worry their sons and daughters are not getting the direct instruction they need to be successful later in school. They ask Ida to explain how it is even possible to simultaneously teach three separate curricula in each subject area. Relieved to be in the company of sympathetic ears, Ida expresses her frustrations about the lack of functionality and the impracticality of teaching in a multi-age classroom while trying to meet the needs of each diverse learner. Uneasy their children will be ill prepared, and in politically expedient solidarity with Ida, a number of parents indicate they are going to challenge the new school principal’s decision. Ida makes modest attempts to dissuade the parents, but in the end, she decides the parents have the right to question the principal’s decision making. After all, it’s one thing to inform parents about the reorganization, it’s entirely another thing for parents and their children to incur the risks associated with it. The parents’ phone calls and emails to the principal and the superintendent lead to a town hall discussion organized by the parent council. At the request of the principal, Ida and six other well respected teachers are asked to attend the meeting to speak to the pedagogical tenets and benefits of multi-age teaching. One of the parents from Ida’s classroom delivers a strongly worded monologue outlining her concerns. As the parent speaks, Ida feels affirmed and somewhat guilty about the principal’s time on the hot seat, that is, until four of the other teachers begin to

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speak about what the change in the organizational structure has meant to them and to their students. Her younger colleagues use words like thematic approach, inquiry, essential questions, student voice and improvements in student engagement. Ida experiences each trending phrase as an indictment. The same parent who vociferously complained at the beginning of the meeting extends an offer to be a parent supervisor for the next fieldtrip that is designed to enhance the real world applicability of the student-driven projects. Ida exits the multi-purpose room hoping to avoid any of the parents. She heads towards her classroom to collect her things and encounters her principal standing outside of her classroom door. The principal unlocks the door, enters her classroom and begins to walk around scanning the bulletin boards that display what the grade ones, twos and threes are working on this month. She turns to Ida and says that she is willing and very happy to support her in her journey to develop her instructional practice in the face of the new organizational structure. In response, Ida wonders out loud if the structural changes in her school will have the same effect as moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. The principal’s lips form a thin line. As she takes her leave, the principal reminds Ida that she has an obligation to speak to her colleagues first if she has a problem with a decision made in the school. She reminds Ida that it is unhelpful to get the students’ parents flustered over something that, in time, will show significant improvements in student learning. Ida sits down at her desk to visually excavate some the artefacts of her 30-year career. The curated collection reads of misrecognition and apology. She’s not sure how much longer she can remain a stranger in a place that was once so familiar. Big O Avoids Baby Depressives Big O adds another layer of brick Hundreds of dislocated thumbs amplify a virtual allegiance to a bloody mortar mouth who slaughters by consensus Cigar ash in the eye You’ve come a long way, babies If she comes to matter it will be because she sacrifices the witness inside who lubricates a habituation to a system of thought In a school yet to be built sisters, brothers and aunties

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invent new ways to add up what counts as a life Blistered and bruised she stays with the difficulty to expose the work yet to be done Silence is a violence. Let’s get loud. Battling the Cops in My Head About nine years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a week long theatre training session at Headlines Theatre in Vancouver (now called Theatre for Living). The facilitator, David Diamond, used several techniques and exercises from Boal’s theatre arsenal, called The Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979, 1990, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2006). One of the exercises in which I participated was called Cops in the Head, and the experience left a profound impact on my thinking about interpretive losses of self. Cops in the Head is a theatre exercise that is particularly concerned with the oppressions that have been internalized but remain unconscious to the participant. It requires a participant to conjure a recent situation in which he or she was confronted with an incident of oppression and the necessity to make a decision during the confrontation. The theatre facilitator asks him or her to pinpoint the exact moment when he or she was compelled to make a choice. The rest of the exercise takes place inside that sliver of time. The moment I offered to my fellow drama workshop participants occurred at a party I attended in my early 20s. At the party, I met a person that I initially found to be charming and articulate. We spent most of the party trying to impress one another with titles from our obscure vinyl collections. After several hours of intense conversations about music, poetry and life, this man put his hand on my neck and shoved me against the wall after I told him I wasn’t interested in going back to his place after the party. I vividly remember his look of disgust and my terror when he placed his hand on my neck. He said, “what a waste” as he lumbered out of the back porch. Waste of time. Waste of space. Wasting away. The moment of decision centred on what I should do in response to being concussed during the assault. In the theatre exercise, the person who shares the story selects a few other participants to role play the cops and gives each cop a gesture and a word. I invited three cops to role play with me. A critical moment in the Cops in the Head exercise occurs when the other participants in the workshop are invited to add missing cops, reshape images and take one another’s place later in the exercise. The bulk of the exercise is improvisational, giving the original storyteller and the improvisers a chance to debate, work through new scenarios and

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challenge the voices of some of the cops who offer well-intentioned but misguided advice. New injections splinter the story, amplify the shadows of subjectivities and enact a space where multiple interpretations of the same image or word are brought to fruition. The audience members pluralize the dilemma; they take an active role inside the spectacle and dynamize their critiques. Not only does the exercise bring the cops’ words and actions into view, it allows the original actor to experience another way to dialogue with his or her cops. In the liberating space created by the engagement with the cops and the injections by the other actors, the original actor can sometimes relieve some of his or her cops of their duties. During the exercise, I participated in two different worlds simultaneously: the world that contained the oppressions, and the aesthetic world that contains the images of the oppressions (Boal, 1990). Here, in the in between, the exercise is used to name and modify the (real) world: Every oppressor produces two different reactions in the oppressed: subversion and submission. Every oppressed is a submissive subversive. His submission is his Cop in the Head. But he is also subversive. Our goal is to render the subversion more dynamic while making the submission disappear. (p. 38) Cops in the Head is intended to contest essentialized assumptions. Since the exercise is interpretive, malleable and agentic, it makes room to process and make sense of interpretive losses of self. In the exercise, I found a liminal space to unearth buried thoughts of being a waste and a chance to reinterpret the event as not just a physical assault but the indictment of being a feminist as feminist being (Ahmed, 2015, 2017). Cops in the Head as a method and as a metaphor is a potential nexus for relational psychoanalytic theorizing about interpretive losses of self in educational administration. My own encounter with Boal’s Cops in the Head exercise provoked me to think critically about the voices that whisper in our heads during affectively charged encounters. Furthermore, the experience made me take notice of the ways in which the theatre facilitator skilfully isolated gestures, words and tones as the participants interpreted the images and dialogue in each scene. This type of socio-affective questioning was very useful inside the theatre and has become an important departure point in my current approaches to research and teaching. An infusion of the emotive self in the Cops in the Head exercise is an attempt to consciously live out how bodies affect bodies within an improvised encounter. The exercise requires skilful facilitation, trust and a willingness to be vulnerable in front of your fellow participants. In most meeting spaces in educational organizations, the aims would dislocate

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from the process making it an inappropriate exploratory exercise. For instance, it is unlikely that a department meeting or staff meeting could provide the level of emotional safety required to care for the re-enacted stories. Socio-affective questioning can produce illuminating insights, but when it veers towards therapy or confession, it can produce counterproductive effects in institutional settings.

Confession How does confession operate in educational leadership spaces? What do confessions do to bodies in encounters? Describe some of the relational costs of admission. Foucault (2014) begins his inaugural lecture in a series (April 2, 1981) with a disturbing account from 1840 on “the moral treatment of madness” (p. 11). He recounts an interaction between a psychiatrist by the name of Leuret and his patient. The story begins with a description of Doctor Leuret standing beside one of his naked patients in a shower stall. The doctor repeatedly asks the patient to admit that what he sees and hears is evidence of madness. The patient avoids the question or tells the psychiatrist that he is not mad. After each nonresponse, or statement of resistance, the psychiatrist douses the patient with ice cold water. The cold water applications do not stop until the patient confesses that he is in fact mad. Foucault goes on to question what is really going on when the patient finally tells Leuret that he is mad. One of the many significant ideas in the story is that a fundamental requirement for an avowal is that a person must tell the truth about who he is and maintain allegiance to that truth (Foucault, 2014). The individual must place himself “in a relationship of dependence with regard to another, and modify at the same time his relationship to himself” (p. 17). In this sense, social pathologies are attached to the psyche of individual actors. When people commit acts of madness, a thirst is created to rationalize antisocial behaviour. A craving emerges to understand the motive and to label the psychic pathology that corrupts the individual. The labelling process increases the need for diagnoses and the training of fleets of experts who can do the diagnosing. One must remain a little sceptical about the power inherent in interpreting for others, and the ways that a spotlight on individual weaknesses can mute the critique of systems and structures that normalize social causes of psychic dysfunction. If one takes seriously Foucault’s explication of the function of avowal in justice, one must be ready to disrupt the inter-psychic or the systemic tattooing of ideological truths to individuals. That is to say, amidst the power relations that incite the marriage between normative constructions of reality and the body, it is more difficult to limit the impacts of reflexivity deficits in the social milieu

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of the organization. I contend that the spaces occupied by educational leaders provide a rich opportunity to trouble the detrimental effects of the sublimation of reflexive tendencies. Foucault’s work has operated as one of the specters in my head for a number of years in the sense that his work challenges me to look for ways that I and others covet confessions in order to feel knowledgeable, to feel valued and to feel justified in sitting in judgement. He reminds us that sometimes needing to know has more to do with wanting to possess, to have control over an event, an idea or another person. Foucault’s explication on the function of avowal acts as a looming specter to ensure that psychoanalysis does not over play its hand and the turn to affect is not romanticized in the principal’s office. The Confession pieces explore the complementary doer-done-to relations when people in positions of authority use confession to reinforce asymmetries of power. She Doesn’t Go to the Coffee Shop Much Anymore A new grade four teacher moves to town from the east coast. Parents are thrilled the school division is able to hire such a capable and creative young teacher. They dream she will eventually see the beauty in prairie skies and canola fields. She buys a small place on the edge of town and works on the weekends to make her flower garden a work of art. Her life size tree mosaic made from bits of garage sale tea cups and saucers makes quite a stir at the coffee shop when she first puts it in the front yard. She is friendly with a sharp wit, and people admire how she brings people close. In her second year in town, people stop staring at her when she shows up at community events, in part, because she moves in the world like she is always invited. When you live in a small town, students, family, friends and neighbours become a living cumulative file of all your wins and winces. Gatherings at fall suppers, parent council meetings, drama productions, fundraisers and volleyball tournaments are sources of vitality that keep rural places vibrant amidst economic siren songs that press close. Schools are one of the few places left where people collectively keep a close eye. In a time when the very idea of community is slipping from our collective memory, rural schools perform rituals that encode mutuality, milestones and time. The grade four teacher spends many of her evenings at school making preparations for her students to avoid bringing too much work home. Like her, the principal frequently stays late to deal with an overflowing email inbox, bus schedules and a million other administrative tasks. In the leftover minutes between walks out to their cars and impromptu meetings in the staffroom for coffee refills, their friendship deepens. At first they trade well timed movie quote quips, but soon they move on to political debates and then to divulging worries about best laid plans. One night, at the end of term, they climb to the roof to smoke a bit of contraband he keeps locked in the bottom drawer of his desk.

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Relationality in this place moves in swift cycles. The school’s administrative assistant counts how many nights their cars sit side by side in an otherwise empty parking lot. Glances exchanged in the copy room are noted and discussed by other teachers. Moved subconsciously by the rumour mill one night, the principal’s partner packs up supper and drives it to school. She will tell him she’s worried that he’s been working too hard. When she arrives, she finds them laughing just outside his office door. Making a place for them around his desk, they swallow bites of leftover lasagne between awkward pauses. Many of the teachers roll their eyes when they pass him in the hallway, and he swears he hears whispers about the grade four teacher in staff meetings. He worries the rumours are the reason students snicker when he asks them to take off their hats. A place he once loved, now suffocates. Trying to get back to where he once was, he follows his high school playbook to construct a defence that will mute opposition through sarcastic comments and ignoring his good friend. In time, he fades her from their collective focus. Mistrustful of the things they once loved about her, the grade four teacher holds a mortgage on a house that nobody wants to buy. Gender works and reworks unspeakable things. Still living in a time when expressions of women’s sexuality are punished and threatened, they locate her sin in the multiple appearances of her young body in a scene with a married man. At first, they find her resistance to surveillance beguiling when she refuses to let them deem her unsafe for work. Now the verbal barbs are meant to stick and sting. To stay strong, she tills the soil in cyberspace looking for new places to plant gardens. While she remains ambivalent about feeding the trolls, for now, she thinks it best to avoid the coffee shop. Catholic Girl In my early adolescence, the confessional booth became strange to me. I began to think about some sins being in the eyes of the beholder, and conversely, I was uncomfortable with the premise that one could behave very badly towards other people on Saturday night and receive absolution on Sunday morning. Repetitions of Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s and well worn rosary beads seemed a pittance in the face of some of the deeds that were whispered across the church pews. I saw black eyes and gambling debts move through the congregation via a subterranean river of apology. I wondered if some sins should leave a semi-permanent stain upon a person’s life. As a young woman, I became disillusioned with the construction of women’s bodies and the idea that women could not become priests. Above all else, I experienced despair in my conscious awakening to the systematic protection of the few perpetrators who sexually abused some of the youngest members of the church. I learned that those who hover closest

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to the epicentres of power can sometimes operate as great agents of reification, and consequently, some of the most egregious sins are washed away by the institutionalized diminishment of the minor witness. Additionally, my experiences with the Catholic Church may have nurtured both healthy and unhealthy suspicions about the relationships between rigid administrative hierarchies and threats to creative thinking. In the play Last Call for Sincere Liars, Martin’s drift towards anomic suicidal ideations (Durkheim, 1897/2006) is symbolic of the psychic instability that can be caused from a breakdown of purpose and ideals. Indeed, Martin’s loss of faith may be connected to my own in my adolescence. Scratch and Win Just after the lunch bell rings, Delilah receives a panicked phone call from the assistant manager of the convenience store across the street. She informs the principal that after she pulled out a plastic sleeve full of scratch and win tickets for a customer, three youths grabbed it and bolted out of the store. She is convinced that the three individuals in question ran into the school. Just a few days ago, Delilah made a pledge at the board meeting to nurture community relations. In service to her public promise, she tries to soothe the assistant manager who is convinced she is going to be fired if she can’t recover the stolen goods. Based on the detailed descriptions provided by the assistant manager, Delilah is convinced she knows two of the three students who have been accused of stealing the lotto tickets. She calls their homeroom teacher down to the office to inform her about the incident. Delilah asks for her assistance to confirm her suspicions because Mickey has excellent relationships with her students, and if they are going to fess up, it will be to her. Delilah notes the worry in Mickey’s furrowed brow, but she presses on to say that it’s best for the students to have a chance to make restitution. To provide one last nudge, Delilah reminds her about their collective commitment to the principles of restorative justice. On her way into the classroom, out of the corner of her eye, she catches Stephy passing what looks like a ticket to another student. After attendance is taken, Mickey sends her students off to math class but asks Stephy, Marlo and Deya to stay back for a few minutes. She begins the conversation by telling them that everyone makes mistakes, and she reminds them that even if they made a mistake, she still loves them. Deya starts to mutter under her breath, and Marlo puts his head in his hands. Stephy leans back in her chair, looks up and starts to count the number of ceiling tiles out loud. “So what I want to ask you is, did you take the lotto tickets from Mr. Balaban’s store?” “Three, four, five.”

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“I can’t help you make this right unless—” “Eight, nine, ten.” Marlo shifts uneasily in his chair. Mickey refocuses her gaze, “Marlo, did you, Stephy and Deya take the lotto tickets?” Stephy turns her chair so she is perpendicular to Marlo’s face. Flustered, Deya jumps out of her chair and blurts, “She took them. It was her bright idea so I’m not gonna get in trouble for this. My mom would straight up kill me. They’re in her locker, Ms. Daniels.” Stephy turns her chair so it’s back facing Mickey. “Is that the way you see it too, Marlo?” Crying hard now, Marlo grasps for words, “Yes . . . I didn’t . . . my dad . . . he just got back . . . I can’t . . .” “Deya, go to math class. If Mr. Menendez gives you a hard time for being late, just tell him I’ll see him after class. Marlo, why don’t you go for a walk and then meet Deya in math class.” After Marlo and Deya leave the room, Mickey pulls her chair a little closer to Stephy. “Do you want to tell me what you were thinking?” “Twenty-three, twenty-four—” “This is serious, Stephy. Mr. Balaban will call the police if he doesn’t get those lotto tickets back. Is that what you want?” Stephy locks eyes with Mickey. “What do you want me to say?” “I want you to admit that you took the tickets.” “I didn’t.” “Let’s be real. I saw you pass one to Jordan out in the hall just before second bell.” “Then why are you even asking me? Huh?” “I want you to admit what you did so we can make it right.” “We?” They sit in complete silence for a few minutes, and then Stephy gets up and walks out to her locker. She pulls out the sleeve of lottery tickets and slides it across the floor so it lands at Mickey’s feet. She gestures to Mickey to pick up the tickets and then turns her back to exit the scene. “Stephy, we have to go to the office.” “Thanks anyway, Ms. Daniels. I can’t afford to miss any more math classes.”

Living With the Paradox Describe a recent encounter with colleagues when multiple versions of the truth emerged that were perceived as incompatible by those involved. How generous am I when colleagues, friends or family members behave in ways that contravene what I know to be true about them?

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Within educational events, paradoxes can dramatically amplify the affective charge of collegial relations resulting in an inhibition of an actor’s capacity for recognition. As a result, these types of encounters are fruitful sites of inquiry because leadership work involves many occasions in which contradictory sets of truths are proffered by individuals who are convinced the other people involved in the same event are dead wrong. The episodes in this section are inspired by the hundreds of hours that I have spent with current and aspiring leaders in my role as an instructor and in my capacity as a researcher. They emerged in the shared moments of attentiveness displayed by graduate students, practicing school administrators and community leaders as they treated their paradoxical recollections as opportunities for self-analysis, not in self-defence nor as self-deception. These were poignant moments when people spoke of their cravings for consensus and the decision-making models that promised to deliver. Paradoxes are irreconcilable relational elements that appear at the same time during an event. People can be paradoxical when they embody a combination of contradictory qualities. Think about the last time someone you love or admire did something that appeared really out of tune. In these moments, nuance and complexity can be difficult to muster when well developed characters from our lives start to behave in ways that bring about the uncanny. As a result, we often fantasize about the intentions of the important protagonists and antagonists in our lives. We feel compelled to bridge the person we know with the gesture, word or deed that appears so out of character. All three of the episodes in this section illustrate a leadership paradox and locate us in the moments when what we know to be true becomes unmoored from our intellectual dock. In these narratives, I aim to paint a picture of what encounters feel like when they involve reasonable people engaged in thoughtful deliberations that result in senseless or contradictory conclusions. In a field that frequently constructs decision-making processes in hierarchical and linear terms, paradoxical events are unlikely but invaluable sites of deliberation. More specifically, I am suggesting that in our field, we must learn to better live, research and write within disequilibrium and to develop more comfort with serpentine moves between discourses and disciplines. In practical terms, educational leaders ought to frame conflicting moments not as dilemmas or problems but as paradoxes that require imagination, accommodation and discursive flexibility. This type of flexibility and creative thinking necessitates an ability to simultaneously hold counter-narratives, an ability to notice ugly emotions that arise when competing understandings emerge and the humility to invite wisdom and perspectives from unlikely characters.

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To Know We Make Room for the Unknown In my graduate seminars, I often use drama techniques to explore affectively charged leadership encounters with students. During one of these classes, the students improvised conflict scenes that involved high school administrators and parents. In group one’s scene, one student played the role of a school principal who had to tell a furious parent why his son was not going to play in the upcoming hockey tournament because of issues related to skipping class and missing assignments. Halfway through the scene, I noticed the student who played the role of the principal kept looking over his shoulder and extending his right arm. When we debriefed the scene I asked him, “What were you reaching for?” He replied, “Not what, who. When the meeting got heated and the parent said, ‘You’re not doing your job,’ I think I was looking for someone to tag in to the meeting. I got a little nervous or maybe frustrated because I felt what it’s like when there’s no one to tag in.” I asked for a little more, “What was it about the phrase, ‘You’re ‘not doing your job’ that created the intensity in the scene for you?” He responded, “Nobody likes being called the bad guy.” Later in the same class, we discussed the words and phrases uttered during the first group’s improvised scene. Interestingly, the other students in the class noted that the student who played the role of the parent never uttered the phrase, “You’re not doing your job.” The actor who played the role of the principal heard the parent’s feedback as a declaration that he is a “bad guy.” In relational psychoanalytic terms, we might refer to this as an enactment or the moments when we fill in the blanks for other people. The student who played the role of the principal heard the parent’s criticism as an admonishment and then became flummoxed even though the experience was unreal. The affective charge of the scene caused the student to literally reach out, and it gave the class an opportunity to isolate the gesture (the extension of his right arm) and pose questions in relation to individualistic conceptions of leaders and leading. As an educational event, it opened a space for the inherited rhetoric that reduces leadership to the actions of autonomous individual subjects, to exist in the same space as an embodied representation of leadership as a constellation of relations. We wondered together if the concept of leadership can only be sustained through one’s bonds to others or a leadership ontology that is inherently social. A relational positioning in the study and practice of educational administration requires these types of methodological approaches to make room for emergent constructions. Aesthetic treatments of leadership encounters can open us up to imaginative renderings that take us beyond conventional responses and leadership tropes. To come to know, one must let go of knowing to move towards mutual recognition that transcends dualisms and the single subject. Like in many other leadership encounters,

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this scene invited us to work with the paradoxical notion that to pursue greater understanding, one must embrace the unknown. Blue High Heels 8:40 am. “All teachers please report to the band room immediately for an important meeting.” Lydia puts down her coffee cup and inadvertently splashes the pile of Catcher in the Rye essays. The worry that tried to escape her hands makes another mess she will have to clean up later. 8:43 am. One at a time, they file into the band room. Lydia moves a euphonium and a French horn case out of the aisle so no one else trips. Those who already know why they have been summoned do not make eye contact with the others. She pulls her seat down, wraps her shawl around herself as tight as it will go and then uses her fingers to lock her hands together. Ed, the math teacher whose classroom is right next door to Lydia’s classroom, whispers, “Who is it this time?” She doesn’t answer him because Ed said “this time,” which reminds Lydia of how much she dislikes the way he talks to students in the hallway, which reminds her of how much she hates Ed. 8:47 am. Students will pour into classrooms any minute now. Her right leg starts to bounce. Backs straighten in unison. Margaret walks to the centre of the stage on the balls of her feet so that her blue heels make no sound. Lydia wonders if Margaret thought about what these kinds of moments would require of her when she accepted the position. Margaret looks at Lydia, and her bottom lip quivers. Lydia knows. Margaret clears her throat. “Late last night Mason was killed in an incident that took place outside of the convenience store on the corner. His brother, who is also one of our students, was there when it happened.” Blood rushes through Lydia’s head. “There will be counsellors on site to support students and staff for the rest of the week . . .” The ringing in her head makes it hard to hear. Lydia’s teaching partner grabs her hand and says she’s going to take her first period class, a kindness she hasn’t forgotten. Lydia makes her way to Margaret’s office. When she walks in, she finds Margaret crying by the window. Lydia sits down and locks her hands together until she can feel pain in each of her finger joints. “You didn’t move,” Margaret says. “All of you. I waited for someone to do something. You just . . . I was there, up there in the quiet.” When Lydia goes back to this story, she thinks about silences in schools and wonders what sound Margaret longed for as she walked so carefully on the balls of her feet across the stage. She thinks about what prevented her from leaving her seat to stand beside Margaret while she delivered the news. In the few seconds before she opened her mouth, Lydia somehow knew. Lydia knew what she was going to say and yet she stayed in her

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seat. What was it about their relationship to Margaret that compelled them to behave too well, to sit so quietly in the face of such loss? Margaret once told Lydia that as one of the only women in the school division who was the principal of a large high school, composure in the face of chaos was essential. The stories Margaret inherited about leadership and chaos valourized images of stoicism and coolness under pressure. But Margaret’s allegiance to these stories takes its toll because they are laden with affective externalities—externalities that mask the system of approval that disavows emotions as embodied social practices in leading and learning contexts. Herein lays the paradox. Margaret’s desire for recognition, to hear an echo of herself within the field of relations, is negated by the repetitive encounters that construct her as an object, one incapable of sharing or expressing different states of affect. Why is it that the things one desires most as a leader (control in the face of chaos) are often the biggest obstacles to one’s flourishing? Dweeps Miranda steps nervously up to the front of the room. She is grateful that she wore a blazer to cover up the sweat pooling under her arms. Her principal has asked her to prepare a presentation to introduce the staff to the merits and assumptions that underpin the Great Student Game, a behaviour modification program that has been in existence since the 1960s. Two elementary school principals on the district leadership team recommended the game when it was revealed that incidents of fighting during recess had sharply increased in her school over the first two terms. The principal had been lamenting to her colleagues that her work had become an excruciating series of recess complaints from teachers and then monitoring students who were serving in-school suspensions. Many teachers have already expressed their frustrations to Miranda, and as a group, the teachers look much too exhausted for the third week in January. In part, because she was new to the school and to the role of vice-principal, she really wanted to demonstrate support for the teachers. Not only was it politically smart, but it would assist her in building relationships with the staff. Miranda moves to her first slide: “In the Great Student Game, teachers work with students to collaboratively identify and monitor positive and negative behaviours in the classroom and on the playground. In the process, students become critical thinkers about their behaviour and the behaviour of others in school.” She goes on to explain, “To play the game, teachers identify a set amount of time for the Great Student Game (GSG) to be in effect during instructional time.” Spotting several quizzical looks she moves to slide five. “For instance, your students might be ‘playing’ during a presentation from our school librarian, Mrs. Warton. After the presentation, you would ask your students

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to identify the good behaviours or GSG behaviours they saw exhibited over the 20-minute presentation (no talking, putting one’s hand up to ask a question, staying in one’s seat). Then you would ask the students to identify the negative behaviours or Dweeps they observed during the game (passing notes, throwing marker caps, interrupting the speaker).” Prima, one of the grade three teachers, puts up her hand and her teaching partner chortles, “Great Student behaviour, Prima.” “Very funny. But Miranda, I’m curious, what about the bad behaviour that occurs between the games?” Miranda, drops the clicker. The battery pops out and onto the floor. She stands up quickly and uses the arrow keys to move to slide 13. “Maintenance of good behaviour between the games is developed through common language such as, Let’s GSG line-up or Take out your novel to GSG silent read.” “Another question, Miranda. So what are the rewards in this system? Are you expecting us to spend a bunch of money on stickers and candies?” “No of course not. That wouldn’t be fair.” Miranda tries to reassure the room that the program will not be a burden. “If the students are able to keep quiet and stay on task during a round of the game, they get one of Grampa’s Zany Prizes.” Prima’s teaching partner mutters to himself. Blushing, Miranda flips to slide 11. “Grampa’s Zany Prizes can be anything. They are not the typical materialistic prizes given out in school. Two examples of Grampa’s Zany Prizes are: 1. Take 20 seconds to hop around the classroom. 2. For 15 seconds, make loud animal noises.” She secretly worries that the words falling out of her mouth sound cartoonish, or worse, that the teachers feel infantilized. Prima’s teaching partner begins to tap his pen loudly on the table. She observes the people sitting at his table shuffle in their seats. “A friend of mine teaches at Silver Birch Elementary and they implemented this game two years ago. Last week, he saw a group of second graders surround a child in grade one yelling, ‘Dweep! Dweep! Dweep!’ Very Lord of the Flies if you ask me.” Straightening her back, Miranda elects to gently push. “I know that many of you are frustrated with some of our students’ behaviour at recess. Correct?” Many teachers nod their heads in unison. “This program will help us provide consistent consequences, develop our students’ capacity to critically reflect on their own behaviour and assist us in developing common lang—” “Is this presentation to inform us that we are going to implement this game, or are you asking for our opinion? Because I for one, am uncomfortable with this kind of behaviour mod stuff.” Miranda scans the back of the room and notes that her principal must have exited the room some time earlier. “Well, we can’t just go on the way we’ve been going. In-school suspensions are not a sustainable or an effective strategy, and we want better behaviour from the kids.”

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“So to address an administrative problem, and let’s be fair to you, to address the fact that some people in this room are having trouble with classroom management, you want all of us to adopt a program that will train the children to engage in critical thinking to self-regulate their own and their peers’ behaviour in service of Grampa’s Zany Prizes?” Miranda makes a show of looking at her watch. “Those are really important questions but we’re 15 minutes over. You’re all busy so I will draft a memo for your upcoming grade team meetings. If not the Great Student Game, then what? I’ll leave it to you to come to consensus on what you are going to do as a grade team to consistently and effectively address the increases in misbehaviour on the recess playground. The grade team leaders need to come prepared to speak to this at the next staff meeting.” At the thought of mustering the energy to develop yet another initiative that would suit all of the members of her grade team, Prima sighs and opens up her laptop to search for “Creative examples of Grampa’s Zany Prizes.”

The Unbidden When I’m caught off guard, what happens inside my body? What might be lost if I consistently lead with the end in mind? If I allowed myself to be surprised by people and the unfolding of events, what beauty may arrive? The Unbidden are moments of uncertainty. Often sourced in the mystery of the aporetic body, confusion and emotional disjunctures provoke an instantaneous attunement to one’s inner world. To welcome the unbidden (Stern, 2015) encourages active participation in the world through one’s affects and senses. Leaning into uncertainty has both its vices and virtues, but we do not ask often enough why leaders need so badly to be certain. To be sure, procedures, plans and decisions always contain a surfeit of affect, but the emotionality of leading remains an undervalued source of knowledge. Leaders, especially new ones, can become more restrictive or controlling when they smell the approach of dissent. In other instances, selfcriticism, or what Kristeva (1989) refers to as one’s internalized tyrannical judge, forces leaders to remain rigid in their positioning with others. Defensiveness makes sense because the tyrannical judge can demean, amplify self-criticism and make it difficult for a person to expunge what feels ugly from one’s interior life. Kristeva grounds her thinking in the analysis of trauma, but there is much to learn from her in terms of the cumulative costs of everyday cruelties and minor emotional injuries. Kristeva’s work (1989) makes the case that sadness is the “psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external or internal traumas” (p. 21), and these

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psychic displacements can cause people to lose their interest in the symbolic world in order to defend themselves against the psychic segmentation that threatens the integrity of their interiority. In other words, losing one’s emotional grip can incite a person to retreat from the symbolic world and to doubt that one’s emotional pain will eventually subside. Asymbolia, which, in a psychoanalytic context, is the loss or a suspension in one’s capacity to recognize familiar signs and symbols, is evidence of a person being overwhelmed by affect. Mistrustful of language, asymbolic echoes of tears, bursts of laughter or fits of fury become an individual’s turbulent linkages to others. Before someone in this stage can participate wholly in their relationships again, she must establish an affective connection with the symbolic world. Again, Kristeva’s (1987, 1989, 2012) source material for her theoretical work is in reference to individuals who have experienced trauma. However, her concept of the tyrannical judge and her theorizing about the linkages between trauma and the resymbolization of signs and symbols in the face of excesses of affect are useful when taking up less intense aporetic fractures that occur between people. For instance, the image of the tyrannical judge helps one to better understand why welcoming the unforeseen can feel like a perilous stance because it grates against attempts to remain isolated and guarded from emotional wounds. As another illustration, in Boalian (1990) terms, the cops in one’s head covet routine exercises of control and demands for predictability to guard against the unexpected. In an educational leadership context, the emotionally charged encounters, the ones in which a leader describes feeling at a loss for words, make one susceptible to the excesses of affect. In these cases, the inability to conjure the words or the incapacity to symbolize what is happening in the here and now is a signal that the reorientation of affect trajectories is underway. These emotionally charged events are not all bad news, far from it. Aporetic bodies in leadership encounters are on the move, affectively charged and open to new possibilities. But for this kind of potentiality to have a chance of surfacing between people, it requires that people in encounters adopt a stance of curiosity and that they make a commitment to develop a greater sensitization to the relational shifts that whisper, not wallop. Leadership is emergent, but to fully accept its unpredictability means we dare to be swept away by aesthetic ruptures in communicative action in which tongues loosen, bodies slack and words wielded hurtle people into unchartered territory. These new relational spaces can forge openings to the unseen and help us grasp the essence of what deeply matters to a group, even if the language to describe it as such is still on the way. If leaders never engage in improvisation, they may cause less trouble for themselves, but they will never approach the limits of what they can do and who they can be with others.

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Wonderment requires a leader to follow people and ideas where they go without determining the destination in advance of an intellectual, spiritual or creative adventure in thought. It means that leaders must allow themselves and others to escape from imposed character descriptions or past performances that have become difficult to outrun. Furthermore, it obligates the leader to act as a kind witnessing presence, or dare I say, it begs the leader to take pleasure in the moments when someone else in the organization behaves in ways that transgress normative ideas, activities and assumptions in pursuit of a more joyful and peaceful existence with others. It also means that leadership development must account for the development of one’s capacity to look at oneself through the eyes of others to monitor shifts in self-states as multi-subjectivities interact. To improvise in the face of the unbidden is to reconnect with the nascence of education and educational leadership. The pieces in this section explore various expressions of affect that interrupt the flow of meaning. These are the moments that disrupt and cause a rearrangement in a given set of relations (Knafo, 2012). They are the types of encounters that undo the training we undergo in childhood, the training facilitated by those who loved us in the name of protecting us against the vicissitudes of life. To welcome the unbidden, leaders must allow an experience to impress itself. It requires the submission of one’s impulses to exert oneself in service of conventionalizing an experience that feels unfamiliar. Lit Up Donna has been working with Mike for two years as his educational assistant. Now in grade seven, Mike spends most of his class time carefully measuring her proximity to him and scanning for bemused looks from other students. His mother fought so hard to get Donna placed in his junior high school to minimize any disruptions caused by the transition from elementary school. Mike repeatedly told his mom how much he appreciated Donna’s help over the last two years but that he really wanted to try school on his own again. After all, if he agreed to take his meds everyday, she promised him more freedom at school. Before the school year began, Donna vowed she would give Mike space and only help when needed. But to complicate matters, Donna becomes anxious when she is on the sidelines watching, especially right after she takes a position at a new school. She doesn’t relax until she’s been there long enough to find a reliable group to sit with for lunch in the staffroom. No, to wait as the watcher makes her feel like others might think she is taking advantage. She is committed to helping the classroom teacher survive this rambunctious group of grade sevens, and she will not be seen as someone who is lazy or incapable.

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Wednesday is Passion Project Hour in science class—Mike’s favourite class period of the week. This is a time when students can work on their own or with others on a project that inspires them. Mike is working with two other boys on a robotics inquiry. The teacher promised the trio that if their work goes well, she is prepared to enter them into this year’s Robotic Wars event. Two weeks ago, the teacher handed out a goal setting sheet to help the students identify the next steps in their projects. After reviewing her mark book, the teacher realizes that Mike has not handed in his goal sheet. Before the class begins, the teacher asks Donna to ensure that Mike gets the assignment finished before he meets with his group. Delighted to have received a sign that she has the confidence of the teacher, Donna makes space at one of the tables at the back of the room to work on the goal sheet. She asks Mike to join her, and he tells her he can’t because he has a project meeting with the guys. They have plans to test the strength and mobility of the new robotic arm. Mike heads towards his group. The teacher shoots Donna a quizzical look, which prompts her to go and retrieve Mike. Donna apologizes to the group for interrupting but tells Mike that the teacher wants him to complete the goal sheet before he does his group work. The other two boys roll their eyes, and they tell Mike they’ll only wait 15 minutes before they do the arm test. Mike stomps to the back table. Donna places the goal sheet in front of him, and Mike slides it onto the floor. The boys in his group snicker in response. Donna wonders out loud what is going on with him today. Mike will not answer. Donna reminds him that he has 13 minutes left until his group begins testing the robotic arm. She places the sheet in front of him again, and he crumples it up and shoots it into the recycling bin. Donna stands up, retrieves the wad of paper, straightens it out and then places it like she means it on the table in front of him. She tells Mike that she is going to let him sit there and that he can either complete the goal sheet or he will miss the robotic arm testing that is supposed to happen 10 minutes from now. Donna walks around the room circulating amongst the other groups. Mike reaches into his pocket, takes out a lighter, lights the goal sheet on fire and places it in the recycling bin. The smell and the wisps of smoke cause Donna and the teacher to fly to the back of the room with the fire extinguisher. Soon after class, Donna is summoned to the principal’s office to discuss her perception of what happened in science class. She describes Mike’s behaviour as a regression to old behavioural patterns, and she predicts that Mike’s mother is going to be quite devastated by the news. The principal asks Donna to wonder with her about Mike’s individual responses as she was trying to get Mike to complete the goal sheet. What was his emotional state? What was he communicating with his body? Like the skip in a scratched record, Donna continues to describe his

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diagnoses and how his behavioural difficulties make it difficult for Mike to do what he needs to do in class. As she furiously taps her pen on her desk, the principal asks Donna what Mike was trying to tell her before the recycling bin was lit on fire. Donna responds that he did not say anything when she asked him what was wrong. Perplexed by Donna’s suggestion that Mike was nonresponsive, she tells Donna that from where she is sitting, Mike told her three times what he wasn’t ready to do. What We Become After the Freeze Frame Your language swirls in my mouth A little taste to become real You read my memoir in your missteps If I’m not curious, it doesn’t matter Keep me guessing Use the star maps on my face It’s on the tip of your tongue Let’s just talk about the weather Stop the car to paint your queerly elongated legs? You might resolve me in a self-conscious swirl of sass Ethereal depths beckon a never ending cycle of reviewing what we collect Laying down the law is always crueller than it looks To be satisfied You need to be a little baroco We choose to love Even though I draw big objects close and I paint small things far away Bunny Dance Leo greets Ms. Nahler with a smile and a bow as he slips off his ruby coloured bowler hat. Leo’s mom told him he’d always be a lot smaller than most, so he had to make up for it with a big personality and some smarts. Living in one of the toughest postal codes meant that if somebody in the community was hurt really bad or killed, you were just about guaranteed to find people in the school who were living with or related to the victim. Leo’s mom was right. In a school where the students were all raised to be survivors, you had to hold your own in the hallway. Carl, a grade six boy who had been called down to confess something to the principal, asks, “Where’d you get that hat, Lil Leo?” “It used to be my Pop’s.”

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Carl nods in affirmation and offers, “Respect, Lil Leo.” Leo beams. “Ms. Nahler, can I see Mr. Sinclair?” Ms. Nahler comes out from behind her desk, crouches down and asks, “What business does our favourite student in grade one have with Mr. Sinclair today?” Leo pulls out what looks like a birthday card and says, “I really gotta show him what my mom got me for my birthday.” She turns to Carl. “Mr. Carberry, are you willing to wait a few more minutes to see Mr. Sinclair?” Carl groans, “I don’t even know why he’s got me coming in here this morning.” “I’ll take that as a yes, Mr. Carberry.” Ms. Nahler pops her head into Mr. Sinclair’s office for a minute, and Mr. Sinclair appears wearing a black tie covered in multi-coloured popsicles. “What can I do for you this morning, Leo?” “Mr. Sinclair, I wanted to show you what my mom got me for my birthday.” “I’d love to see it, son.” Beaming, Leo holds up a birthday card above his head. On the front of the card, there is a big pink bunny standing on a skateboard. “Your mom got you a stupid card?” snarled Carl. Leo’s face falls a little. After giving Carl a stern look, Mr. Sinclair bends down and gently responds, “I bet there is something really special about that birthday card.” The joy begins to seep back into his face as Leo bursts out, “Listen to this!” He opens the card and the pop-dance Bunny dance Song pours into the office. Leo begins to tap his left foot to the beat, and eight bars in he begins to shake his hips. Mr. Sinclair starts to clap his hands, and then he twirls Leo while Carl tries to remain unimpressed. As the grade two class makes their way to the gym, they suddenly stop and press their faces against the office window, startled to see Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Nahler dancing in the office. The music stops and Leo reopens the card and yells, “One more time!” For the next 90 seconds, Leo, Ms. Nahler, Mr. Sinclair and the grade twos in the hallway do the Bunny dance. With little expression on his face, Carl tracks their eyes carefully, so they don’t catch him tapping his foot to the beat.

Recognition What is the purpose of cultivating relationships in educational organizations? Who are some of my trusted partners-in-thought? How would I describe my tendencies in encounters where I am compelled to bear witness?

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Recognition is the state of awareness in which bodies in an encounter reflect one another’s knowing mind. Always on the edge of disappearing, recognition is a moment of mutuality that creates a dialogic structure that accommodates multiple expressions of self. Recognition involves bearing witness to the struggles of another person and a willingness to co-construct a shared perception of reality. Through communicative gestures that convey what Orange (2011) calls “radical receptivity,” we experience another person as a like subject. Benjamin (1998, 2018) in her seminal work on the Rhythmic Third, built on Lacan’s introduction of The Third in psychoanalysis. She describes an intersubjective process that is constituted early in the pre-symbolic experiences of accommodation and the willingness and capacity to recognize and be recognized by the other. Analysts such as Stern (2005, 2015) take Benjamin’s concept of thirdness to imagine a shared space of attuned play. Like the rhythmic call and response of scat singers, the third space is a dynamic exchange within a mutually developed communication structure in which both parties play and get played. When we are in the third space with another person, we become increasingly capable of recognizing the feelings of the other. Benjamin (2018) speaks of the process of recognition as an “affectively meaningful experience of the other as not simply an object of need to be controlled or resisted, consumed or pushed away, but another mind we can connect with” (p. 3). Most significantly, in the context of leadership, it is a way to conceive of a communicative process of leadership that lives in the tensions of vulnerability, giving language to the moments when educational leaders absorb another person’s perspective without trying to coerce or dominate. Efforts to relinquish control call for surrender, but in the context of educational leadership, surrender is full of personal risks. It requires faith in another person’s ability to tend to one’s emotional paper cuts and an expectation of generosity in the face of one’s verbal missteps. Another potentially adverse side effect is that surrendering forces you to breathe in another person’s point of view, even when you first sense it as offensive or even odious. Outrage culture and online shaming can make this kind of vulnerability in the face of another feel unsafe. In affectively charged non-linear communication zones, self-awareness and self-assuredness are always on the way but never fully arrive. What, then, are the potential relational gifts that may come of such vulnerability in the context of educational leadership? I would unapologetically begin by saying the world is in desperate need of more people who can artfully improvise in communicative structures that orient towards a recognition of the other. In face-to-face encounters and in online spaces, there are important openings for educational leaders, teachers and instructors to more explicitly connect the aims of educational praxis to the enhancement of emotional responsiveness in the exchange of words and gestures. The essence of the work of educational leaders, instructors and

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teachers then becomes a practice of becoming more conscious of the continuous fluctuations between one’s emotional interiorities and the lived experiences of others. Scratch below the surface of relationship talk in educational institutions and one quickly finds that relationships are discussed in terms of more effectively exerting one’s will. As an illustration, talk of building relationships with students is often married to a teacher’s desire for increases in student productivity, engagement in classroom activities and improvements in student behaviour. Relationships in service of structuralfunctional ends become the vehicles to build alliances, achieve organizational goals and to limit the impacts of overt and covert acts of resistance to stated priorities. What is called for now more than ever in educative spaces is a focus on relational circuits, a greater sensitization to others (human and nonhuman) if we are to write less hatred and more love for all living beings into the fossil record of the Anthropocene (Seyfert, 2012). Educational leaders can and do play a critical role in reorienting aims talk in education towards the pursuit of becoming more fully human in the face of the other. This means that relationship talk in education must be dislocated from the service of institutional ends (goals, student learning outcomes, positive behaviour) and centred as a fundamental purpose of education. The analytic of the witness is a way to centre mutuality and recognition in educative spaces. Cue the Witness They call out to you. At times, they traffic in hearsay and admonish your failures. It is their public chastisements that cut to the bone. Some of them live their lives as testimony to be given at your funeral, while others stand close enough so that you can see the beauty of the world reflected in their eyes. Our flesh and blood witnesses, and the witnesses who take up residence in our minds, are fascinating keepers of who we were, who we are and who we want to become . . . Due to the codified responsibilities and socially constructed anchors of administration, leadership work is often studied as a one-way transmission process. Studies that focus on the individual acts of leadership abound in the literature. For instance, there is a significant body of work that examines the effects of instructional leadership behaviours on student achievement (Brazer & Bauer, 2013; Hallinger, 2010; Heck & Hallinger, 1999, 2005; Leithwood, 2005; Neumerski, 2012; Tan, 2012; Valentine & Prater, 2011) and a budding body of research that focuses on a leader’s ability to build professional capital across their organizations (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). A relational psychoanalytic treatment of leadership resists the construction of leadership as the set of an individual’s

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behaviours, words and gestures and situates leadership within relational circuits. For example, the concept of enactment, discussed in the section “You Bring Something Out in Me,” is one way to construct leadership as the mutually affecting influences of witnesses who are present in a given leadership space. A leader’s living witnesses, as well as the ones who live in the hallways of one’s mind, influence the potency and diversity of the interpretive possibilities available in any given situation. This is because educational leaders exist in interconnected paradoxical webs of conceptual understanding and conflict. In this way, living witnesses can be influential live thirds (Gerson, 2009, p. 1343) in leaders’ lives. Live thirds are people who respond thoughtfully and compassionately as individuals try to make liveable meaning of their experience. Dead thirds are like phantoms and are experienced as a loss of individuals or social structures that, at one time, helped individuals to develop a shared sense of meaning and continuity about themselves and the world around them (Gerson, 2009, p. 1343). Our psychic structures are constructed betwixt and between our relations to other people, therefore, one’s witnesses have a tremendous influence on who we were, who we are and who we hope to become in a leadership encounter. The analytic of the witness may be useful when thinking about leadership as a set of unfolding affective relations that emerge organically in the interactions between people in the social field as they pursue intersecting and competing interests. The first conceptualization of the witness is the empathic witness. This witness is a person who has the capacity to listen in-between gestures, words and images to help a fellow sufferer revise the meaning of his memories in hopes that both people can live a more thoughtful and compassionate existence at work and at home. Years ago, a friend of mine lost her partner to a stroke. She told me that her actor friends were the only people who could bear to be with her in the first few weeks after her partner’s death. She attributed the gift of their presence to their chosen profession. She said they found a way to breathe with her through sobbing descriptions of her partner’s empty shoes and the cat’s refusal to leave her partner’s side of the bed. Empathic witnesses to her grief, they released her from preoccupations with selfcensoring and the social pressures to celebrate her partner’s life at the expense of mourning. She speaks of those encounters with significant others as a disruption of emerging productions in her mind that dislocated her from the vitality of living. A second type of witness that can present in the context of leadership is the myopic witness. If we picture a significant dyad in conversation, the myopic witness either consciously or unconsciously attempts to dominate the other so the other will behave in ways that reflect the script that the myopic witness has prepared well in advance of the encounter. Picture

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the school principal who informs the child, I know what’s best for you little one. As the principal claims her authority, she inadvertently raises the psychological stakes and objectifies the child. The child is forced to choose between asserting her own subjectivity or operating as the object of the principal’s wishes and judgements. If you have ever watched improvisational theatre or if you have had the opportunity to participate in an improvisation class, you can probably describe a flopped scene. A flopped scene is one that feels forced and like it spins aimlessly in circles. In lacklustre improv, the actors might be guilty of committing one or more of the following three sins. The first sin is blocking or negating other people’s suggestions. A second is hedging or an avoidance of doing or saying something specific. The third sin is wimping or the refusal to give other actors information they need to progress in the scene. Myopic witnesses block, hedge and wimp in relational encounters in ways that make improvisation difficult or impossible. A third iteration of the witness is the phantom. These imaginary witnesses (Stern, 2015) are part of the cast of one’s intimate dead or relatives who have died and reappear in the subconscious to ensure their secrets are kept. I stand on the shoulders of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok and their work (1971, 1972) on transgenerational haunting to imagine the psychic implications for a leader when an emotional loss is “swallowed and preserved” (Abraham, 1968, p. 85). Abraham and Torok built upon Sándor Ferenczi’s work on introjection to theorize about nescience or the gap in knowledge where trauma remains hidden from the sufferer’s conscious awareness. Ferenczi understood introjection as: an extension of autoerotic interests, the broadening of the ego through the removal of repression and the inclusion of the object in the ego (Torok, 1968, p. 112). They use his preliminary work on ego expansion to demarcate between introjection and incorporation. Introjection is used to describe psychic assimilation or growth. Something happens to a person, and she is able to reconcile that happening and make it part of his identity and emotional experience. When someone is faced with a traumatic event, one’s ability to spontaneously introject is disrupted. A deformation of spontaneous introjection causes incorporation. Incorporation results from losses that are denied as such (Abraham & Torok, 1972). More specifically, it is the inability to mourn or give language to mourning that leads to the development of a secret crypt in the psyche. Abraham and Torok contend that a child can spend their childhood and adulthood unknowingly living as a cemetery guard to protect the secrets their parents unknowingly leave to them. Although phantoms may be conceived of as merely the vestiges of unprocessed trauma, they are skilled liars and tricksters, and they manifest in the aliveness of aural flashbacks that seep into stressful encounters. Their presence signals that one’s inherited representations of traumatic experiences and familial distortions are infusing present-day leadership

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encounters. The characters in the play Last Call for Sincere Liars, and the characters in many of the other pieces in this text, spend time negotiating with the phantoms from the past to demonstrate how one’s imaginary witnesses can operate as subjugating specters. Phantoms as witnesses are provocations to be more conscious of the moments in our lives when we inexplicably deny recognition to the person sitting across from us at the meeting or the dinner table but demand it for ourselves. To think leadership is to think relationally, even if you are the only person sitting in the room. My purpose in sketching three types of witnesses is to attach language that centres mutuality and decentres the construct of leadership as a series of acts performed by individual actors. I want to capitalize on the agency of words to organize themselves (Derrida, 1994). The analytic of the witness sets leadership within a relational field with multiple subjectivities at work. Leadership as a concept and leadership as practice must accommodate unique moments that span across particularized social worlds that are always in flux. To navigate such a complex psychic matrix requires agile partners in thought. When improvising with one’s empathic witnesses, novel contributions can thrust us into heightened awareness and move us to places that take us closer to embodying the values that are closest to our hearts. Ordinary Specters Rodger tells the class during show-and-tell that he saw a monster at the grocery store last night. The teacher reminds him how important it is to always tell the truth. Rodger crosses his heart and goes on to say the monster had yellow teeth, red eyes, ripped jeans and a scary voice. All of the students’ become transfixed by this dynamic show-and-teller. Mille asks if the monster tried to bite him or his mom. Rodger replies that it did, but his mom picked him up and swung his legs out of the way just in time. Lennie wants to know if the monster did any other bad things. Rodger describes how the monster pushed some shopping carts into the door and how it threw lots of apples and oranges at the security guard. Giggles ripple across the carpet, which elicits a stern look from the teacher. She tells Rodger he must quickly finish his story. Louise implores the teacher to let her ask one more question. She needs to know how Rodger and his mom escaped the monster. Rodger says that the monster did not want anyone to leave. If you moved, it got louder and showed its sword. He says the police and some medicine people tackled the monster and tied it to a skinny bed on wheels. Seeing some worried faces materialize across the carpet, the teacher emphatically tells the children that there is no such thing as monsters. Rodger’s cheeks burn and his eyes begin to water. Lennie leans over, cups his hand over Rodger’s ear and tells him it’s going to be okay. Everyone knows monsters are real.

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What You Bring Lately Nuri has been walking around half asleep. Words leave her mouth in sepia tones and a few colleagues take notice that last week, she wore the same pair of pants everyday. Students complain to the principal that she misplaces assignments, and parents have called the office to ask why their children have been working on the same project all term. Something is different with Nuri, but people are afraid to intrude, everyone except for Leena. Leena hears students ceaselessly complain about Nuri in the hallway. After a particularly animated critique over the lunch hour, Leena is compelled to walk into Nuri’s room to ask her what’s wrong. Nuri keeps her eyes fixed on her computer screen and mutters, “I’m fine. You can go.” Leena stands in place for a few seconds, somewhat discombobulated by the interaction. Sitting at her desk, she replays the 30 seconds in her mind a half-dozen times. Each repetition tempers her initial feelings of annoyance with being brushed back. She promises herself she will try again with Nuri tomorrow. Making good on her word, the following afternoon Leena takes a small container of homemade oatmeal raisin cookies to Nuri’s classroom. She knocks gently on the door and asks, “Is this a good time to chat?” “No. Not really.” “But what if you knew I brought homemade oatmeal raisin cookies with me?” “Did you?” Leena walks over to Nuri’s desk and opens the container of cookies before the assumed permission to enter is rescinded. She sees Nuri has been crying. “Are you okay, Nuri?” Nuri puts down her cookie and shakes her head, eyes still fixed on her computer screen. “Thank you for the cookies, Leena, but I just can’t today.” Leena places her hand on Nuri’s and then leaves her classroom. For the next three weeks, every other day, Leena brings Nuri a new batch of cookies. Peanut butter, white chocolate chip, shortbread and toffee crunch, each new batch baked to elicit a few more words and to fill in a few more of the silences. Late in November, Nuri takes a medical leave. The principal receives fewer angry phone calls from parents. The new term teacher infuses joy into what was a melancholy room. She takes them to the art gallery, and on warm days, the students read their books outside. Students don’t complain in the hallway anymore, and the absence of their fretting is a reminder of Nuri’s slow disappearance from the school. On the last day of school, Leena walks into her classroom eager to send her students off for the summer. On her desk, she finds a beautiful silver tin filled with oatmeal raisin cookies. On top of the tin is a handwritten note. “Thank you for sharing your generous spirit, Nuri.”

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Burdens of Listening Rhyming storybook characters gone missing the little boy doesn’t sleep much anymore another 8 year old in night sweats inherits a future made to sharpen survival skills After the mother says her piece the defense lawyer asks the judge to recuse Guilty of crying during the victim impact statement “Without neutrality there is no justice!” The stenographer swallows hard to make objections part of the record of what happens to the guilty when you see the boy in the sentence Rally Each year, the student council organizes a pep rally to honor the athletes who play on the football team. Most members of this year’s student council do not spend a lot of time in the gym, but the event is an important ritual that is inherited by each new crop of student leaders. In the midst of a winning season, the high school football team has become a teleplay of what-might-have-been fantasies. At 2:40 pm, the marching band plays. The cheer team kicks up momentum for the play-offs, while nostalgic parents and teachers forget about cumulative head injuries and bone snapping collisions on the field. Students who attended the rally tell reporters that the male student athletes who were blindfolded were told they would be kissed by a female student athlete or girlfriend. Mothers on the other side of the blindfold were to act as the punchline. Cell phone videos show most of the mothers giving their sons a quick peck on the cheek but one of the mother’s lips lingers for a few seconds too long. Spectacles of bodies affecting bodies shape shift online. News stories blur the faces of underage students, but unedited videos captured in the bleachers are shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media. The young man is made and remade through twisted circuits of titillation, revulsion and curiosity. Several participants who were at the rally are interviewed about the controversy. They say people aren’t trying to being mean, but a lot of people are making easy jokes at his expense. Video watchers are instructed to get over it and to let the guy have his privacy back. They wring their hands, worried that his reputation might be tarnished. Just below the public shaming lecture is a palpable fear they, too, have become a joke. The day after the pep rally, the principal writes the public apology and sends it to parents and to the media. He wants you to know the prank

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was supposed to be in good fun, but it did not turn out as intended. Everyone involved deeply regrets how it unfolded. Lessons were learned, and you have his word that this type of thing will never happen again. As a school, they recognize these types of activities are not acceptable. In case you’re wondering, the administrators have already met with the rally organizers to discuss their concerns and to declare these types of pranks will no longer be allowed at pep rallies. The school has reached out to the family involved to offer support, and he sincerely regrets any embarrassment this may have caused.

Part 4

Relational Leadership as Socio-Aesthetic Inquiry Staging Educational Leadership as Psychoanalytic Theatre In the theatre, an audience encounters storytellers who fabricate evocative lies that shimmer against a multiplicity of psychically inherited mise en scènes. Each performance gathers a curious collection of actors, complicit in their desire to be deceived in three acts. Willing participants sit night after night, drenched in a sensory-scape that denaturalizes personal, familial and social imperfections. As the play simultaneously distorts and clarifies the most recent version of the psychic coda, inner monologues become sharper and amplified. To put it differently, the stage foregrounds images of alternative realities, making it possible for the characters’ desires to pierce through entrenched assumptions. For a fleeting moment in time, these beautiful and painful fictions shine a spotlight on the assumptions that form the foundation of one’s psychic inheritances. To that end, a powerfully staged fiction can illuminate what one desperately needs to be true about the world. Within this highly charged emotional field, which is at once public and private, the ontological ground can abruptly shift between rows of seats. Held captive by the proximity of the other participants, feeling their breath up close, an audience member may be confronted by a fantasy that breaks its epistemological promises. For instance, the interactions between the characters throughout this text point to a shared unconscious in-between space where the living’s intimate dead interact and influence moments and understandings in the present. In response to epistemological ruptures, a person may sometimes choose. The auditory and visual syncopations presented on stage reach into the unconscious and reverberate between old psychic allegiances to formative relationships and the play of the play. Outside of the theatre one is less autonomous in this regard because the play of the play is muted by routinized thinking and behaviour. Like the sound and movements a needle makes when trapped inside the scratch on a favourite record, the mind rapidly repeats a disharmonious pattern. Complexity is reduced and relational aberrations are recreated, which

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can significantly limit one’s ability to compose a life. Trapped inside a mental scratch, emotional toxicity can fuel the enactments that are a barrier to composing mutual recognition. Fantasy, which could be considered an intricate lie that threads and unthreads symbolic personas, fills in empty signifiers when passions are enflamed. It happens because people project their own desires and fears onto what is being said, and language is ambiguous. Filling in the blanks on behalf of others when one’s truths about the world are threatened is both a limitation and a possibility. For instance, fantasy could be constructed as deviant in hyper-rational terms if one assumes that there are clear and agreed upon demarcations between what is real and unreal and what is true and what constitutes a lie. In contrast, one might conceive of fantasy as a revelatory process that draws attention to fresh metaphors and more emancipatory interpretations of life’s events. When individuals stage reality in theatrical terms, it may be possible to tune in to the presence of the symbolic chain of psychic events that testify to the ways people seek the familiarity of formative relationships in present-day circumstances (Bonovitz, 2010). Social Dis/Location When I was four I discovered a secret world under my bed where Sally Anne Spiderman and I could escape Du Maurier villains and the throaty howls of whiskey kings Mother Goose and Shel Silverstein built a fortress of words around my mind so I could rest safely under dusty book jackets and silly rhymes The nylon clad kindergarten teacher turned my bottle cap collection into good girl crowns She winked at my ‘Jesus riding a turtle’ drawing and wondered like me where all the girls were in the bible Over the next few years nuns and wrist stinging rulers gave chase but I kept a sweaty grip on my question marks Buried in my locker under stacks of wafers and rosary beads were Cohen and hooks who cavorted past my slinky Dylan clichés And with the help of a solemn English teacher who wore an abstract painting for a face I learned that all great plays were about death and sex Curiosity became an intoxicant of the approved kind

Relational Leadership In the band room I tuned my arguments and struggled for the pen until he put down his glasses and held my hand for just a moment too long In first year uni I sewed my lips together to avoid coming under the gaze of differentiated instruction technologists who made camp in curriculum courses Much later in my own classroom students wrote provocative stories discovered in sculptures reborn while external examiners redacted their words I saw invisible kids who leaked from the sharp edges of curriculum and became numb as staffroom banter located school pathologies inside little children Who are you? Where do you come from? Why are you here? Who will you become? What shall we do together? I fled back to school to account for myself Words smash apart before they leave the mouth so I located my graduate work on a shard of glass Poems and lyrical romps delivered by ghosts and ancestors opened a liminal space for my research peculiarities I found a new secret world Under the academy’s bed What is research? Who is it for? What beauties and terrors might it unleash? My social dis/location defines a wild space for acts of re/creation I hope that in the in-between we might escape the facsimiles

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Dreams, memories and childhood dramas staged in adulthood contain latent versions of counterfeit selves that escape psychic crypts in times of stress to chase disappointments and desires across multiple zones of intimacy. These symbolic representations that emerge in the unconscious disrupt relational performances and disorient negotiations with multiple subjectivities. In this way, the sincere lies buried in the unconscious are doubly potent. One can treat dreams, memories and childhood dramas as an overconfident historian who promises to deliver explanations about the past. An alternative treatment is one that opens a space for the anarchistic revenants in one’s psyche to provoke the dreamer, memoirist or the child actor in the adult to stage new performances of self. Staging the Entrance to the Field Greenfield’s critics were often provoked because he troubled the very idea that it is possible to train leaders. In The Man Who Comes Back through the Door in the Wall, Greenfield (1980) engages with the trouble by stating the “solution to the problem of training administrators is to recognize that administrative training is training for life and that only those who have some insight into life—its ironies, joys and tragedies—are fit to be administrators” (p. 112). I concur with Greenfield’s provocation that leadership is about becoming more attuned to life’s beauty as well as its disappointments. Ideally, graduate school for aspiring leaders would be filled with travel, philosophical retreats with mentors and sustained partnerships with people in various community-based organizations who are working towards making communities more peaceful, joyful and just. The image of a philosophical quest and a release from one’s other professional obligations is compelling, but it can rest heavily on an intersection of privileges (economic, colourism, gender, culture). Outside of the sabbatical and inside more ordinary educational situations, I am advocating for the inclusion of a socio-affective shift in the study of educational leadership, one that invites a greater sensitization to life’s ironies, joys and tragedies. In “Images of Practice,” I explore several methods that may enhance relational psychoanalytic inquiries that take seriously the immaterial ripples of affect in leadership. An affective turn in educational leadership is always a socio-affective one that decentres the individual subject and reimagines the subject as a constellation of relations between subjectivities. A turn to affect opens a space to better understand the objectification of bodies in organizations. Second, it heightens awareness of the limits of reason for understanding how power works on bodies in institutions. Further, in many theoretical treatments of affect in the humanities, once

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affect is registered cognitively by a human subject, it is often treated as closed or dead, but the principal’s office is a pulsing node of amplification in educative spaces, where senses under the skin coagulate and gather more energy. A turn to affect in educational leadership can make contributions within and beyond the field of education to develop more nuanced understandings about how power works in and through encounters. Finally, the affective turn is a way to trouble the pervasiveness of discourses of determinism (Blackman, 2012) and to enliven the intersections between the universal and the particular in the study of education. Nodes of inquiry in a socio-affective approach to the study of leadership would emerge in encounters already underway and account for emotions as embodied social practices in leading and learning contexts. Other inquiry nodes could provoke analyses of how and why different affects register publicly and how publicly registered affects determine who is allowed to speak and under what conditions in education and community contexts. A third node could follow an attunement to the ways in which various communicative practices amplify or inhibit divestments from problematic repetitions of relational patterns that impact one’s capacity to recognize the other. Other significant nodes might coalesce around the multi-vocal potential of arts-informed methodologies in relation to authorship, hierarchical knowledge production and the dissemination of knowledge within and beyond research processes. These nodes could offer fruitful fields in which to critically reflect on communicative practices; practices that open up mutual zones of recognition in conflictual deliberations about the most pressing concerns facing people within organizations.

Images of Practice A turn to affect in the study of educational leadership should not be reduced to an esoteric adventure in thought elicited by a spin across disciplinary boundaries. It is a commitment to deeply understand the affective relational matrices of desire that are embodied and enacted in leadership spaces. But because affects are sensations, intensities and traces that circulate underneath the skin between the unconscious and the emergence of language, it might be helpful to sketch some middle-way-methods that I have used that have often elicited a deeper connection with sensuous events in educative spaces. I offer these images of practice not as blueprints, but as a way to imagine some initial invitations one could extend to others to take up leadership relationally. Budding nodes of inquiry are not meant to be read as prescriptions, nor should they be reduced to add-ons in the context of leadership training. These are invitations that are already pulsing in the midst of learning encounters that perpetually accumulate affects (Watkins, 2010) where bodies affect bodies. The professor or principal may gather people around

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an activity, article, poem, or agenda, but meaning is made with others as the complexity of one’s own storied life is enmeshed with others in the pulsing event. The reader will notice that many of the images of practice I share have roots in drama education. Not only do drama processes and texts provide some security for exploration, drama penetrates the inner world of individuals to seek new places of common ground (Rowe, 2007). Rooted in what we think we know, it paradoxically makes room for the unbidden. As an illustration, relational approaches to leading and teaching share many commonalities with devised theatre. Devised theatre is influenced by outside events, objects or texts. A significant and compelling article, tweet, headline or event pulls people together to make sense of a shared experience in the form of creating a play. It does not use a predetermined script. The scenes emerge from playful, improvised encounters amongst the actors who are exploring the same topic. As a process, devised theatre cultivates a receptive state that beckons individual players to take some pleasure in not being in control of the final product. It requires the actors to surrender to the unfolding process. Like relational leadership, it cannot be lived in a mechanistic way. Approaches to drama can work to aestheticize the analyses of everyday encounters in educational organizations. For example, one could metaphorically cut out a happening in a class and examine its structure to make judgements about its capacity to fulfil the needs of the actors (principals, students, instructors, teachers, community members . . .) involved in the scene. Descriptions of evocative phrases and observations about how different bodies communicate their wants focus the gaze on certain actions to add new textures and shadings to the conflictual thoughts that bubble below the surface. These tensions can be used to shed light on what communicative gestures are made possible during particular events when messy feelings abound. By putting a specific event under the microscope, it slows the action down so one can feel through deeper layers of meaning in the subtext. Make Yourself a Program of Study To expand one’s capacity for mutual recognition, current and aspiring leaders would do well to spend time throughout their careers engaging in autobiographical writing in the form of freewriting. Freewriting sessions often surface repressed desires. More significantly, the thoughtful analyses and reanalyses of freewriting pages can help leaders to make sense of how leadership is doing its work on them. The process is simple. One has to carve out a small amount of uninterrupted time to write continuously without a specific goal or topic in mind. It is a kind of textual free association and performance of self in which the writer becomes the witness, analyst and philosopher.

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Through freewriting, writers might linger in particular illustrations of tension in their texts to identify instances when it was difficult to fully enter into the feelings of others, moments when self-protection trumped mutuality. Autobiographical writings can surface inherited leadership metaphors or internalized symbols that inhibit or promote one’s flourishing in the face of others. Freewrites may evolve into troves of memorialized communicative acts of reciprocity that have trouble making it into the records of professional lives amidst the frenzied pace of the day. In addition, they can be used to deepen and widen the affective flickers that move through autobiographical texts. Some of the seeds for the poems, scripts and episodes in this book emanated from excerpts of my own freewriting journals. To introduce a multiplier effect into autobiographical writing and to engage in mutuality-in-text, duoethnography (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2012) may serve as a compelling research methodology for two people to explore the affective charge of leadership encounters. Duoethnographic texts become sites to co-investigate the same phenomenon from two unique vantage points. The poem What We Become After the Freeze Frame resembles a poeticized excerpt of duoethnography that speaks to the unbidden in leadership encounters. In a duoethnography, each writer draws upon their own life histories to challenge their partner to reconceptualize events and their connections to the broader world. Scripting Relational Ethnographic Inquires In his text Ethnotheatre from Page to Stage, Saldaña (2011) outlines the arc of an ethnodramatic monologue. The arc could shape a process to interrogate events and experiences in ways that open up the possibility for co-constructed interpretations. The monologue arc consists of the following elements: The Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, the Final Happening and the Coda. Imagine using the monologue arc with graduate students or aspiring school leaders to interpret leadership stories in ways that trouble normative constructions of leaders and leadership. The Abstract: If we read between the lines, what is this leadership story about? Orientation: Who is in this story? What happens? Where and when does it take place? What are the contextual factors that frame the story? What is visible in the frame? What is left out of the frame? Complicating Action: In this leadership story, what do the actors want? How do their wants conflict? What happens as a result of the conflicts? Name the paradoxes in the story. Evaluation: What are the affective currents that move through the story? In what ways did emotion amplify encounters? Describe the emotional impacts on the characters and on the events.

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The leadership stories would come from the students’ lives and from evocative plays, films, novels, paintings or song lyrics. Arts-based content in leadership classes would imply that the leadership coda is never fully brought to a close. In this way, leadership classes would open a space for the psychoanalytic re-symbolization of disciplinary regimes of knowledge. Some of the psychoanalytically informed questions professors in educational leadership programs could broach are: a.

In a field where the practitioners are so intensely affected by stress and heightened states of emotional engagement, what do you think accounts for the absence of language around this topic? b. How do your past experiences with power and authority as a child in school intersect with your current understandings of leadership? c. Is leadership an interpretive act? d. What are some of the myths that construct you as a leader? e. How might you conceive of yourself as a compassionate and emotionally grounded witness in your organization? f. How might you, as an educational leader, make space for counternarratives to challenge your understandings of your leadership work and the work of others in your organization? g. In what ways does love intersect with your desire for control? As an illustration of how one could make Saldaña’s (2011) monologue arc sing with an affective turn in leadership, I briefly take up the first and third verse of W.B. Yeats’s (2010) poem What Then? (p. 400) in the context of an educational leadership class: Verse One What Then? His chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; ‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. What then? Verse Two All his happier dreams came true— A small old house, wife, daughter and son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew. Poets and Wits about him drew; ‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. What then?

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I might begin by inviting students to offer some of their initial interpretations of the poem. These initial responses could lead to a conversation about the times in their lives that were “crammed with toil” or what it felt like when they “lived by the rule” of others in a professional context. Further, they might start to write about their leadership desires. I could ask, “What is your leadership plum?” They might think about plums in relation to their stories of professional toiling and living by someone else’s rule. Then we could wonder about the appearance of Plato’s ghost. They or I might ask, Why Plato? When does the ghost appear? What does the ghost want? Why does the ghost make its presence known even after “All his happier dreams came true?” Who and what are some of the ghosts that haunt our collective educational leadership stories? As a way for students to give language to some of their emerging thoughts, I might ask them to experiment with scriptwriting as a way to deconstruct their leadership plums if “All their happier dreams were to come true.” For example, if the plum was the successful enactment of the principles of instructional leadership, they might stage a scene that illustrates what the school would look like and how different people in the school would feel if instructional leadership was fully and successfully implemented. Students could perform scenes and intervene in other students’ plays by introducing new conflicts or characters that complicate the leadership episodes and the assumptions that frame the initial scenes. As a group, they might think about the emotional demands placed on the characters, irresolvable paradoxes and what happens as a result of the conflicts that are embodied on stage. The scenes and the interventions might provoke a “second-chance” interpretation of the plum and the inheritance of the plum’s mythology. I Did Not Know You Were Going to Say That Drama allows a person to be a participant and an observer at the same time. An aspect of leading relationally involves becoming more perceptive of one’s own emotional register and the emotional registers of others. Often students, teachers, professors and workshop facilitators rely on case studies to think through dilemmas of practice. Although case studies have much to offer in terms of inviting analysis and interpretation, because they sit flat on the page, and they are often written in cooler academic tones, it is difficult to place oneself in the case. Theatrical improvisation puts you in the case, where you, as a character in the scene, have to experience the consequences of your actions. The art of improvisation is about becoming more playful in the world. I use the word playful in reference to one’s capacity to tune in to another person’s word, gesture, mood or tone in order to move a story forward together. To delve into feeling other people’s feelings, dramatic exercises in which improvisers provide the secret thoughts of the other characters to explore the emotional subtext of a scene can be powerful exploratory

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exercises. Imagine if one of the participants in the exercise is given the role of the principal and another participant is given the role of the parent. The parent of one of the school’s high performing athletes is angry that the middle school sports teams will not have tryouts anymore. The principal decides prior to the meeting that every student who wants to play on a team will get the opportunity to play. As the principal character and the parent character improvise a conversation, two other participants speak their secret thoughts, the things the parent or the principal would never say out loud but actually think. In this type of exercise, the juxtaposition between the spoken and the unspoken thought is generative terrain to delve into tensions between what is said and felt in an event. For instance, it would be telling for the participants and the observers to reflect together on what words or tones fuelled the secret thought characters. To add another layer, the actors could improvise another scene without words, limiting the actors to using gestures to focus on what is communicated through eye contact, height, moving hands or proximity. Another improvisation exercise that focuses more on mood and tone than on dialogue is the creation of a new emotional context for the same words. For example, take the following lines of dialogue: Character One: I’ve been waiting for you all morning. Character Two: I know, I’m running late. Character One: Please sit. Character Two: Could I bother you for a glass of water? Character One: That’s not possible. The lab results are in. Invite character one to play the scene as someone who is increasingly bewildered and have character two say his lines in such a way that he becomes more frustrated. Play the scene multiple times and give the players new emotional vectors to trace as they attune their bodies to one another. As another creative twist on the exercise, you can change the location of the scene but keep the dialogue the same. I used the change the location version of the exercise with a group of teachers who wanted to explore the emotional impacts of evaluation on various players in the education system. We wrote dialogue for short scenes using standardized report card comments that teachers could select as options from the school division’s platform. (This exercise can also be done with the options students select when they are evaluating their university instructors.) They performed the same dialogue multiple times, but we changed the location. We placed the scenes in school, the grocery store, at a place of worship, a visitation room in a prison, on Twitter and at the dinner table. Another improvisation practice that one could experiment with as a university instructor, facilitator, principal or arts-based researcher is to play the missing scenes. In this exercise, participants are invited to share

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a story of a compelling incident (a fusion of reality and fiction that does not betray privacy) that relates to the phenomenon under investigation. The next phase of the exercise is for small groups to improvise scenes that could have occurred five minutes before, ten years before or maybe five years after the incident. Dislocating time, the improvised scenes allow people to dramatize the emotional lines of flight that emanate from an inciting event. This exercise is a compelling way to deepen a felt understanding of how future relations are always in conversation with relations from the past. Misrecognition makes imprints on future personal and professional relationships. Leaders have a responsibility to be good in the moment. One could also build evocative improvised scenes from excerpts of poetry, film and literature. For instance, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (2012) is a text one can use to explore the affective charge of resistance and feelings of futility while sitting in the principal’s chair. Bartleby is hired as a scrivener to copy and proofread legal documents. At first, he does good work, but there comes a day when he refuses to do anything. After each of his boss’s subsequent requests to complete a task, he responds, “I prefer not to.” Bartleby’s decision to move into the office without permission and the emotional turmoil experienced by his boss because he cannot bring himself to evict Bartleby are rich metaphors that can evoke improvised scenes around what happens between bodies when someone refuses to play. I have had the pleasure of witnessing some incredible scenes and critical deliberations that were inspired by the sentence “I prefer not to.” To make space for the art of improvisation in discussions of classroom practice outside of the drama room produces tensions, but the unfolding of arts-based research (ABR) within the field of educational leadership adds another layer of complexity. In the first part of the book, I discuss the shadow of the aesthetic in the study of educational leadership as well as the potential inherent in socio-aesthetic inquiries for studying affective relations in educational leadership. In the following section, I think about the researcher who wants to capture what she learns when bodies affect bodies in the study of leadership. First, I discuss the emergence of ABR, then I begin to tease out some tenets of ABR and, finally, I offer a few cautionary notes about transposing ABR methods and methodologies into educational leadership research when well intentioned but untrained facilitators employ methods that privilege pedagogical innovation or research products over artistic expression.

Arts-Based Research Origins of Arts-Based Research A significant rupture in social sciences that created an opening for ABR was Geertz’s (1980, 2000) introduction of the concept of blurred genres.

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He made the argument that the demarcation between the humanities and social sciences was a seductive fiction. Blurred genres can do more than bring Bartleby to class, it can disrupt how one thinks about education as a social science. He surmised (1980) that “social events do have causes and social institutions effects; but it just may be that the road to discovering what we assert in asserting this lies less through postulating forces and measuring them than through noting expressions and inspecting them” (p. 178). His theoretical work in anthropology created some of the necessary space for ABR to emerge as a methodological genre. There are little references to the arts in social science research prior to the 1980s (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Eisner, 2008, 2010). Certain conference proceedings, keynote addresses and papers figure prominently into ABR’s origin stories and have garnered a great deal of status in the literature, while others have withered in the textual umbra. Eisner’s development of educational criticism and Barone’s exploration of narrative storytelling as research are cited as key ABR developments in education (Barone, 2010; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Leavy, 2009; Eisner, 2008, 2010; Finley, 2011). One of the most well circulated origin stories in ABR is the telling of the first ABR institute offered at the 1993 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (Cole & Knowles, 2008; Eisner, 2010). Eisner and Barone state that it was at this conference where the term arts-based research was coined (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Rolling, 2013). ABR appeared in the literature amidst the postmodern turn (CahnmannTaylor, 2010), which has contributed to its epistemological humility (Barone, 2010) and to the recognition of its interpretive possibilities. There are three major strands of ABR in the field of education: research as art (Saldaña, 2008, 2010); art as scholarship (McNiff, 2011) and a/r/ tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2010; Leavy, 2009; Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2008). Each strand has precipitated several methodological innovations across multiple disciplines. Although there are a number of significant elements that unite ABR within each of the strands, the usefulness of the following descriptions lies in the emphases placed upon aesthetics and form within each of the strands. Research as art (Saldaña, 2008) is ABR that utilizes various art forms as methods to generate, analyze and represent data in innovative and powerful ways. These studies often employ mixed methods from the sciences and the arts (McNiff, 2011). Research as art arguably privileges research over aesthetics and form (Finley, 2011). The researcher in this context is a central figure who documents and disseminates what is learned from the research in order to inform and activate audiences from outside and inside the academy. This type of ABR is an example of blurred genre (Geertz, 2000) work in which the researcher uses a bricolage of methods and theories that transgress disciplinary boundaries. Art as scholarship produces art that represents concepts, questions or findings in an evocative manner. This research looks, sounds and feels

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like a work of art (Barone & Eisner, 2012). ABR in this domain privileges aesthetics and form throughout the research process. Many researchers who engage in this kind of ABR have extensive training in their field as well as in the social sciences (Eisner, 2008). A great deal of art as scholarship is rooted in social activism (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Finley, 2011), and it often engages research participants in the making and representation of art during various stages of the research process. Research participants, as well as the spectators who encounter the art, are meaningfully involved in the discovery and the representation of the findings. The ABR methodology a/r/tography was developed at the University of British Columbia (Leavy, 2009). It is concerned with the ways in which the identities of artist, teacher and researcher integrate to form a third space of inquiry (Springgay et al., 2008). A/r/tographers use a variety of art forms and writing in an interconnected way to discover and enhance meanings throughout the research process. The researcher who works with this methodology is reflexive about the circumstances in which knowing, making and doing emerge (Irwin & Springgay, 2010). A/r/tographers talk about their work as being a way of living in the world (Irwin & Springgay, 2010; Leavy, 2009; Springgay et al., 2008). They discover new conceptual relationships through metaphors and metonyms in order to trouble well-rehearsed subject/object relationships (Irwin & Springgay, 2010). The essence of a/r/tography is an integrated self-examination of one’s self as artist, researcher and teacher. Key Elements of Arts-Based Research ABR is an attempt to make meaning from some of the most difficult existential questions that concern humanity. More concretely, ABR uses the arts as the primary way to understand and examine the experiences of the researcher and the participants (Bagley, 2009; McNiff, 2008) and the larger social context in which the art/research is located. There are several key assumptions that permeate ABR. For the purposes of this text, I will address six integral elements of ABR. The elements exist simultaneously and in different places on continuums of intensity and emphases across the bricolage of arts-based scholarship. For example, one of the defining characteristics of ABR is the involvement of participants in the generation and representation of data. Involvement is contested terrain. A researcher’s judgements about who is involved, the relative authenticity of the involvement and the conditions under which the participant/ researcher is involved are just some of the factors that make this ABR element, and all other ABR elements, contested. Concerned With What Happens Before Knowing ABR is a relational psychoanalytic endeavour in that it is concerned with the contexts in which researchers and participants come to know what

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they know. ABR assumes there are many aspects of knowing that exist between an experience and the articulation of the experience, so the process makes room for the exploration of emotional tensions that have yet to become attached to spoken or written languages. Art forms such as dance and music are particularly amenable to the expression of concepts that hover around discourses. ABR incites researchers to make part of their work about the analysis and the enrichment of experiential realm so that researchers, participants and audiences can attune their senses towards essential learnings about the human condition that have yet to be named (Cole & Knowles, 2008; Eisner, 2010; Greene, 2001). Incites Disruptions to Mental Scripts The inquiry process is organic in this methodological genre. Researchers and participants allow the research process to breathe, to devolve and to go through a series of metamorphoses. ABR’s commitment to flexibility and its resistance to rigidity opens spaces for radical ideas to surface. Researchers are able to uncover peculiar relationships between what initially appeared to be disparate phenomena when they allow themselves to give up control and embrace uncertainty. New parings elicit fresh questions (Eisner, 2010) and disrupt mental habits (Bharucha, 2011), which cause researchers, participants and audiences to question some of their most cherished binary relationships (King, 2008). ABR’s flexibility, its capacity to uncover new intersections between previously unrelated concepts and its ability to make absurdities tolerable put meta-narratives in danger (Barone, 2010; Finley, 2011). Conceptual Inquiry The necessity to expand or contract one’s theoretical position strongly influences what research questions can be sensibly pursued. Structuralfunctional research is designed to reduce what is observed and measured in order to improve things like outcomes and performance. However, there are ethical, moral and political questions that cannot be reasonably considered in structural-functional research (Samier, 2006). Epistemologies that savour imagination (Greene, 1995), sensory perception and ambiguity are sparse in traditional research. ABR expands the sight lines between the wider social ecosystem and the inner lifeworld of the participants so they may pursue more existential lines of questioning. ABR allows us to use our imaginations and emotions (Cranston & Kusanovich, 2012) to ask questions about important concepts such as love, forgiveness, death, jealousy, loneliness and hope. ABR refocuses our attention on the dance between non-symbolic and symbolic meaning to form innovative conceptual understandings throughout all phases of the research process (Capous Desyllas, 2013;

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Gallagher, Freeman, & Wessells, 2010). ABR honours the complexity of lived and represented realities because artistic practices intersect amongst subjectivities and make space for unsanctioned voices and activities. The intersections occur because makers and spectators generate meaning from the artistic act. In an ABR paradigm, artistic connections between symbolic and non-symbolic meanings render the complexity of the lived world (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Irwin & Springgay, 2010) because participants, researchers and audiences can see and insert themselves and their struggles in the art/research. ABR’s pliable, organic and responsive methods allow competing understandings of the same phenomena to exist at the same time and in the same place. Socially Engaged Research ABR processes often culminate in public performances or exhibitions (Barone, 2010; Irwin & Springgay, 2010). Audiences, participants and researchers are faced with provocations to find something new in themselves and their social contexts through the affective currents that move through gesture, mood, form, perspective, metaphor and metonyms. Obviously, there are degrees of political activism in ABR (Capous Desyllas, 2013; Finley, 2011), but ABR commonly privileges nuance and complexity over the heavy-handedness of a form such as agit-prop to problematize normative assumptions. ABR pulses outside of the academy, and it is inextricably linked to what we aspire to become (Barone, 2010; Cole & Knowles, 2008; Rydzik, Pritchard, Morgan, & Sedgley, 2013). Participant Involvement Researchers within a structural-functional research paradigm attempt to mitigate bias by maintaining distance between themselves and the research participants (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Conversely, researchers who conduct ABR try to develop meaningful relationships with participants throughout the research process (Capous Desyllas, 2013; Rydzik et al., 2013), and they recognize and value subjectivity. In ABR, participants are often directly involved in the research process, but the degree of participant involvement varies substantially across projects. In some ABR, participants work closely with the researcher to design the study, generate data and represent the data to a wider audience. Participants in these types of inquiry projects creatively tell their own stories (Capous Desyllas, 2013) in order to engage in relational dialogue with the researcher and the audience. ABR expects a life outside the academy. Much of the work produced by researchers in the academy is consumed within its ranks to bend to a system that overvalues competition, privileges individual accomplishments

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and allocates merit points via the peer review process. Consequently, the knowledge and power that results from research is rarely consumed by the wider public. One of the essential elements of ABR is that it creates dialogical interactions with audiences outside of the academy (Rydzik et al., 2013). The art in ABR beckons a diverse audience to become actively involved in knowledge creation and dissemination as they encounter the art (Barone, 2010; Irwin & Springgay, 2010; Finley, 2011). In theatre parlance, ABR has the potential to break the fourth wall in research. Role of the Researcher/Artist in Arts-Based Research Art opens up a state of consciousness that allows people to see connections, absurdities or disparities that were previously living in the shadows of our minds and literature reviews. In the introduction of Starr’s (2015) insightful text on the relationships between the sister arts (music, painting, poetry), the aesthetic experience and neuroscience, she asks, “How is a sonata like a sunset or a beloved face?” Starr’s question and others like it are posed by those who claim the positionality of a researcher/ artist. What brought me to this work is my passion for and an ability to notice how creative acts “map emotion on to the world around us into previously unchartered territory” (Starr, 2015, p. 26). For the last two decades, several other proponents of arts-based research have endeavoured to describe the passions and abilities of arts-based researchers. The next section is a response to the question, what is peculiar or important about the work of researcher/artists? Researcher/Artists Make Art That Disrupts Habitual Thinking Art making is an integral part of ABR. The researcher who works with this methodology actualizes the subjectivities of a researcher and an artist. For centuries, artists have described and critiqued the world as they see it and challenged spectators to imagine a better one. An aesthetic interruption provokes researcher/artists to escape normative thought patterns as they become immersed in experiences that lift them out of the normality that can suffocate the creativity in our lives (Sloane & Wallin, 2013). For that reason, the researcher/artist carefully selects appropriate art forms that will evocatively provoke and represent the aforementioned interplay (Leggo, 2010). The relationship between form and findings is critical because the art form allows the researcher to pursue more nuanced questions. Researcher/Artists Clearly Explain Their Methodological Choices Researcher/artists are required to describe their processes and products so they are decipherable to other researchers and practitioners

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(Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Eisner, 2008, 2010). Eisner is particularly vocal on this matter (Eisner, 2008, 2010). He contends that abstract ABR, or ABR that is primarily about the researcher, is self-indulgent. The way to protect the researcher/artist and the audience from self-indulgence is to ensure there is potential for the research to be useful to those who work in the field (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Leggo (2010) is somewhat apprehensive about the accusation of self-indulgence and suggests that each researcher/artist has something important to share with an audience through the process of echolocation. Even if the research is autobiographical, it is part of a network of stories that allows the researcher and the audience to send out resonances that move back and forth from the personal to the professional. The personal is worthy of research. Researcher/Artists Are Reflexive In ABR, the reflexive presence of the researcher is public (Cole & Knowles, 2008). A researcher/artist selects an art form to represent a distillation of provocative findings. The play, dance or poem makes it very clear that a distillation process existed and choices were made by the participants and the researcher. The interpretive possibilities inherent to a play, dance or poem sew important seeds of doubt because the audience knows there are other stories that did not make it into the script, choreography or stanza, provoking researchers to be reflexive about representations of the other (Spry, 2011) when they are telling other people’s stories. Judges and Judgements The most biting criticisms that come from formally trained artist/researchers is that the focus on the aesthetic qualities of ABR have become subordinate to the therapeutic (McNiff, 2011), justice oriented (Finley, 2011), emotional (Barone, 2010), the personal and the socially transformative (Greene, 2001). Process is overvalued at the expense of making compelling art. In response, researcher/artists have been encouraged to develop expertise in their field and to have formal training in their art form (Eisner, 2008; Saldaña, 2010). If a researcher/artist is not formally trained in the art form, there are those who strongly recommend that an arts-based researcher work collaboratively with an artist throughout the research process (Eisner, 2008, 2010). Conversely, there are arts-based researchers and instructors who disagree with the assertion that a researcher/artist requires outside experts because the privileging of expertise violates the elements of ABR that are grounded in egalitarianism (Finley, 2011). In other words, art belongs to the commons. I would place myself in between these two camps. For example, if someone is exploring the possibility of using improvisation in their classes, I would encourage her to learn more about theatrical

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or musical improvisation. If an arts-based researcher planned to use photography, I would suggest that the artist-researcher have some basic knowledge about his camera, composition and lighting. Part of the ethos of arts-based research and its potential to affect and be affected by audiences is to make the most aesthetically compelling art we can, but not at the expense of inscribing territorial demarcations about who is entitled to use ABR methods. Arts-based researchers challenge the appropriateness of using terms like rigor, validity, reliability and generalizability to talk about the quality of arts-based research because these terms are epistemologically incompatible with the essential elements of ABR (Eisner, 2010; Finley, 2011). For instance, many ABR sites or topics are intuitively selected (Eisner, 2010; Springgay et al., 2008), and vigour is more relevant than rigour (Leavy, 2009). Validity checks make little sense within a methodology that is supposed to shift spontaneously in response to new lines of inquiry. Another dilemma that faces those who are asked to make judgements about the quality of ABR can be a lack of expertise in a plethora of art forms. Even the savviest qualitative researchers may have difficulty judging the relative goodness of an ethnodrama if they have little knowledge about the theatre (Saldaña, 2010). More significantly, ABR is especially concerned with unique cases, whereas studies that operate within a structuralfunctional research paradigm may be uncomfortable with numbers, ideas and individuals who stray too far from the mean. It is not appropriate to make judgements about the relative goodness of ABR using tools that violate the aims, methodology and ethics of ABR. Arts-based research is a relatively new research genre (Rolling, 2013), and as a caution to new academics, it has been viewed with some suspicion within the academy (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Eisner, 2008, 2010). As ABR emerged as a sub-field in education, it was perceived as an outlier because the criteria used to evaluate the worthiness of more traditional iterations of qualitative work were not very useful when making judgements about ABR. To further complicate matters, arts-based researchers have been self-critical about the paucity of ABR studies that include dissections of their own inquiry processes (Fraser & al Sayeh, 2011; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). As a corollary, because ABR does not recoil from the unexpected, scholars in educational leadership would do well to offer descriptive accounts of the circumstances that contextualize changes in their inquiry processes. ABR is interdisciplinary work, so the contributions that result from these inquiries should enrich the theory and practice of artists as well as the respective social/science field in which the research/art is situated. Cahnmann-Taylor (2010) suggests that navigating the following five tensions can help researchers assess the affective potential of ABR in their respective disciplines. Effective ABR should dynamically operate between: the specific versus the general, the aesthetics of beauty versus

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the pursuit of objective truth, posing complicated questions versus offering definitive answers, metaphoric novelty versus pragmatic language and imagination versus the need to be definitive. Some researcher/artists suggest that it is most important to look for consensual validation amongst ABR’s audiences (Knowles & Promislow, 2008; McNiff, 2011) and amongst artists who are experts in the art form (Bagley, 2009; KerryMoran, 2008). Effective ABR enriches the public discourse about significant social concerns because it amplifies voices that are sometimes marginalized in communities. To cast a wide audience net, many performance artists, visual artists and applied theatre practitioners have discovered and shared creative ways to make their art more accessible to the general public. A researcher/artist doing provocative ABR in the field of educational leadership must find ways to use his art form and research process to reach new audiences inside and outside of the academy. New publics emerge in dissemination events. Participation in these fleeting publics necessitates that a researcher/artist have an ability to attune to the ways his social location is entangled with others who participate in the event. Gender, sexuality, colourism, language, class, age and disability are some of the many aspects that construct our social locations. Looking for indexical signs or the fusions between the signifiers and the signified of social dislocation are part of the work. Arts-based researchers in educational leadership should engage critically with symbols that represent asymmetries of power in the social field. Although educational leadership has made some fleeting appearances in the aesthetic world, there is a great deal of terrain yet to explore. Socio-affective communication in event publics can bring the communicative potential inherent in affectively charged gestures and dialogic encounters to light in the study of leadership.

The Field of Educational Leadership In “Images of Practice,” I discussed several socio-aesthetic methods that hold promise to generate a state of play in educative spaces for those who want to explore some of the affective dimensions of leadership. The previous section, “Arts-based Research,” is an introduction to ABR for those in the field of educational leadership who are interested in tracing affective nodes of inquiry but who are unfamiliar with some of the key figures and tenets of ABR in the broader field of education. “The Field of Educational Leadership” takes the affective approach to the study of educational leadership into the field. Beginning with an unlikely encounter with Dewey the Pragmatist, I mine Democracy in Education (1916) for a few seeds to grow relational encounters that marry particularized affective encounters with collective aspirations for greater nuance, generosity and tolerance in dialogic leadership events.

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A Fleeting Encounter With Dewey John Dewey (1859–1952) was a philosopher, psychologist and teacher; he was a democrat who focused much of his work on the relationship between education and democracy. Dewey is considered one of the most important Western philosophers of the twentieth century (Fallace, 2010) and a central figure within the pragmatist tradition. His seminal work, Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1916), is cited widely, and it is his most thorough conceptualization of the relationship between education and democracy. In the first six chapters of Democracy and Education (1916), he outlines his philosophy of education. Education is the process by which immature members of social groups are “initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skills and practices of the mature members” (Dewey, 1916, Chapter 1, para. 6). The young are born indifferent to the customs and habits of the social group, and education is the only process capable of spanning the divide between generations (Dewey, 1916). Adults create the conditions whereby the immature members of the social group become curious about the habits of the more mature members. The cultivation of the immature members’ curiosity is critical to mention because it lays the foundation for Dewey’s contention that educative processes in a democracy are relational, in that they must take into account the students’ interests, skills and abilities. Dewey contends that social life is identical with communication and that all communication and social life is educative (Dewey, 1916). Here I find another intersection with socio-aesthetic communication in educative spaces. Communication is a process that changes bodies, and bodies change communicative processes. People communicate about their lived experiences until language about those experiences becomes a common possession. In this specific area, Dewey’s (1938) work intersects with relational psychoanalytic theory’s early focus on mutuality and its later conceptualizations of recognition. He believed in the generative capacity of dialogical spaces and saw rational deliberation as central to an individual’s social development. Although members of the social group must encounter novel perspectives in order for intellectual growth to occur, these novel perspectives cannot be received as insensitive or harsh. Coercive speech or directives will never elicit mutual influence. To tell children what is right is insufficient if we expect “the young [to] assimilate the point of view of the old” (Dewey, 1916, Chapter 2, para. 2). According to Dewey, we educate indirectly through the creation of an environment in which the activities of the young cannot be accomplished unless they take into account the activities of others within their environment. Individual responsibility is negotiated within the context of social relationships in educative environments. Dewey was critical of attempts to train young people because their instincts remained connected to basal responses to pain and pleasure

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(Dewey, 1916). A young person must consciously choose to behave in a way that is harmonious with the social group if the desirable behaviour is to be retained as the child matures into adulthood. Dewey suggests that adults often fail to “recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all” (Dewey, 1916, “The Social Medium as Educative,” para. 3). Young people must be free to make choices in relational spaces in order for intellectual growth to flourish within educative environments. Although Dewey thoroughly explicates some of the potential impediments to mutual communication, his theories are unable to effectively deal with a person’s social location, irrational communication and its relevance to power and competing interests. Another serious problem with Dewey’s communication theory is his contention that rational dialogue between equals is both the cause and evidence of social progress. Furthermore, his discussion of culture as a unified concept and his linear notion of social progress make him, to say the least, an imperfect ancestor. Although it is complicated to bring Dewey too close as an ancestor, I do it to demonstrate that the study of how communication processes and content change all parties involved in educative encounters, is a disciplinary root and part of our history. Additionally, his theorizing about the detrimental impacts on communication when authoritarian and punitive language emerge is a thread that connects to contemporary work on the concept of enactments. His work in these two areas provides important traces in contemporary discussions on the inability of coercive speech to produce mutual impact and influence within the field.

The Field The field in the study of educational leadership is the sum total of all of the influences and the outcomes of those influences (Stern, 2003, 2015). Material and psychic realities are mutually influencing, and they expand and contract between a multiplicity of inner and outer worlds. As a result, reality and consensus amongst bodies are constructed within and between relational matrices. Although it is impossible to know the boundaries of the field, it is possible to feel its sensuous presence when encounters bring about the uncanny. In the field, we simultaneously desire solidity and stability and motion and multiplicity (Ringstrom, 2014). In this way, each encounter with another person holds within it the potential for both repetition and innovation. To put it in theatrical terms, we often stick to the script, but sometimes, we are provoked to toss the script away, improvising in the unfolding event, tuning in to the other actors’ affect, mood, tone, gestures and words. A socio-affective approach to relational leadership situates the field as the focus of analysis. It invites researchers to dissolve the mind–body duality of leaders and to treat leadership as a

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set of unfolding affective relations that emerge organically in the interactions between people as they pursue intersecting and competing interests. This type of inquiry requires socio-aesthetic middle-way-methods to better understand unfolding communicative processes and the messy feelings that impact one’s capacity to recognize the subjectivity of the other. The quality of a leadership encounter ought to be assessed against its relational depth. Wrecking Ball Regimes of accountability erect intellectual pharmacies employing representatives of the state who will get you in the mood while melancholy vice-principals do a lot of sand tray therapy to pay the rake for love, joy and justice Leonard Cohen sings “There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in” But I can’t find the cipher in the storm if the weather women won’t call for rain What might it look like to locate a node of inquiry in the field of educational leadership? As a way to invite the shadows in educational leadership to play, I begin by discussing some of the sensitivities that may need to be cultivated to engage more fully in a research encounter that accounts for affect and messy feelings. This will eventually take us to a place where I describe what it might look like to stage socio-aesthetic inquiries into relational leadership. As stated previously, these images are not manuals but sketches that must be enlivened and refined by the unique questions, passions, insights and imagination of each researcher-in-play. Emotional Reverberations: What Is Worthy of Notice? The essence of leadership is conversation. Bodies appear and affect other bodies to vie for recognition through an exchange of emotionally laden gestures and words. Researchers interested in exploring affect and mood textures in relational leadership might focus on the moments that strike subjective awareness or events that give one pause. These can be stark in your face provocations or as subtle as the traces of eye contact that amplify asymmetries of power between people in the field. To find an

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illustration of subtle communication that might be worth noticing, at your next meeting, pay attention to where different attendees look when contentious issues arise. Eye contact can speak volumes about recognition, dismissal and affirmation. Further, entry points that give institutional actors an opportunity for aural self-expression about important matters of the heart or communicative acts of empathy that ameliorate the suffering of people in organizations can be worthy nodes of inquiry. States of recognition in the field are fleeting. It is difficult to remain connected to another, especially when a deeply held assumption is contested or when positional or influential power elicits narcissistic signalling. Consequently, educational leadership as a relational practice is obligated to focus some attention on the seeds of misrecognition that grow into more injurious communication, communication that devolves into misrecognition and objectifies the other. Enactments or zones of rigidity that create communication deadlocks in the field are especially worthy nodes of inquiry. Impasses in the field might appear as emphatic pronouncements, always/ never declarations that strip an idea of complexity and wonder. Other deadlocks in the field can appear as oppositional fusions. She is a nice person who does terrible things. I like working with him, but he’s not very reliable. They are such a high performing team, but they’re misinformed. In a similar vein, affect splits can signal breakdowns of recognition. Affect splits paint someone or something as all good or all bad. Further communication impasses may arise when one person expects the other to agree with their position but the agreement never arrives. And finally, one’s insistence on being right is a common and effective way to deaden communication. To become more empathetic in encounters, you must privilege the pursuit of self-knowledge. As a consciousness raising endeavour, it is worth noticing what happens in your body or what types of aural flashbacks surface when you feel ashamed or weak. Additionally, it is important to take note of the types of situations that elicit narcissistic signalling when you feel disrespected, ignored or challenged. Recognition depends on the willingness of both parties to be earnest in communicating about their feelings, so it is essential to analyze your capacity for self-disclosure. Leading relationally is a provocation to see one’s greatest weakness as a source of fascination and learning so that one is better prepared to dive into another’s words even when they grate against one’s leadership fantasies. Those who do not invest time in cultivating self-knowledge often end up writing policies and making rules that are rooted in stitching up childhood wounds. Relational leadership as practice is a conversation of emotions and the continuous striving to recognize the subjectivity of another. Not only are the ideas, assumptions and values we hold affectively charged, but each person in an encounter brings with them internalized relational patterns

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that shape what they are able to sense and do in the face of the other. As a consequence, participating fully in a conversation of emotions requires you to surrender to another’s point of view to allow the meaning of an important topic to slowly reveal itself. All the while, you appreciate that the field makes another’s intent, word or deed more abundant than you can ever fully know. Leading ought to be a cultivation of the proclivity for improvisation, a willingness to welcome the unbidden, to put oneself in a position to attune to the tell-me-more-gestures in the event. Squirming fingers, rolling eyes and crossing arms are important signals that communicate information about the topic and the relationships between people engaged in conversation. Noticing where people place their bodies around a table or when they lean back or forward in their chairs can signal when other more significant nodes of exploration in the conversation have appeared. Relational approaches invite you to let go of the meeting script and to delve deeper into unexpected provocations that catch your eye, or to deal with your own feelings when a meeting turns on a word. The willingness to let go of your script can increase your tolerance for emotional discomfort when paradoxical thinking emerges. Paradoxes are small but potent specters in educational leadership. The student who wrote such a poor sentence cannot write at all. Nobody ever gets in to see her in her office; it’s too crowded. The field of educational leadership is full of paradoxes, yet many educational leaders and professors frame relational difficulties as problems or dilemmas to disavow the affective currents that pulse under the surface when perspectives of reality are disturbed. Relational leadership requires us to build our tolerance for conflicting truths that appear at the same time and in the same place. To Study Glimmers and Shades What might it look like to locate a node of inquiry in the field of relational leadership, one that is enriched by the questions, passions and imagination of the participants and a researcher-in-play? I offer a few possibilities beginning with self-study and then move to more layered research encounters. These are meant to be read as sketches of possibilities for socio-affective inquiries in the field. Leitmotif Life-Writing A life is a field. Your body contains an infinite amount of source material to study the imprints of relational encounters, and these are worth writing about and sharing. I encourage researchers in educational leadership and those with whom they work to write about their lives and to identify leitmotifs or recurrent themes that appear in their autobiographical writing across time to create encounters with ancestors. Dare to experiment

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with vacillations between academic prose and more poeticized writing. Poetry leaves a lot of space for interpretation between words and images, while playwriting as a form allows different characters to confront conflicting desires in the same scene. As an illustration, the poem Social Dis/ location is an example of leitmotif writing about educative encounters across time. As a place for the reader to begin, the questions at the beginning of each section in parts two and three of this text might be useful prompts for this kind of writing. Paradoxical Play Paradoxical play can become a self-study or a more layered inquiry with others. It begins with a detailed description of a significant encounter or a series of related encounters in which conflicting truths about the same event or idea surfaced at the same time. The next step is to create dialogue between two characters who were at the scene when the paradox emerged. The aim of the dialogue is to create a greater understanding about each of the characters’ perspectives and emotional states without eliminating the paradox. Writers are encouraged to write nuanced dialogue that respects the personality of each character and to resist framing either character as a hero or a villain. The character dialogues would be read or performed to communicate changes in emotional valences when paradoxes surface in encounters. Clowning Implementation To clown in the theatre is to dramatically amplify or exaggerate. In this type of inquiry, the researcher and/or the participants select an initiative or program and describe its history and evolution in as much detail as possible; this includes the initiative’s connections to the outside world. For instance, the creation of an anti-cyber-bullying policy would be situated in the literature as well as in the wider social context that infuses relations in the school. An example of a relevant infusion would be a declaration from an educational authority to produce such a policy or a violent incident in the school that involves a student who has been repeatedly bullied online. The second step involves writing a creative piece in which the initiative, program or policy is fully implemented and adopted without resistance. Building from the possible to the absurd, the creative piece accounts for the relational costs and benefits when all of one’s implementation dreams come true. Improvising in the Face of Oppositions Even if you have never experimented with theatrical improvisation or witnessed an improvisation game, you might be familiar with the yes,

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and . . . mantra. It refers to the premise that an actor should accept what another actor says as real and then build on that line of thinking in the scene. Improvising in the face of oppositions can operate as a formal inquiry and, at the same time, act as a method to build the researcher’s and the participants’ capacity for recognition. The initial phase of this inquiry involves soliciting some critical issues from the participants and then engaging them in improvising scenes that are connected to the topic under exploration. The improvised scenes proceed until one of the actors inevitably blocks another actor. In this context, to block is to reject or ignore another actor’s offer. Blocks provide the researcher and the participants with openings to explore and poeticize out loud the interiority of the actors’ choices (words and gestures) to learn more about the ways in which communication was altered or deadened. Blocks become nodes of inquiry and sources of inspiration to develop more artful communication practices. Reflections on the participants’ choices before, during and after the block are a way to tease out novel metaphors from isolated words, tones and gestures to alter the psychic structures of entrenched assumptions about others and their perspectives. Text Distillations As a research method, text distillations involves a collection and distillation of documents related to an initiative or a process that has had a significant emotional impact on the participants. As an example, researchers and participants might gather newspaper articles about austerity measures and the resultant impacts on local school programs. Participants would be asked to reduce the article to its essence, with each participant working with the same reduction requirements. For instance, participants might be required to reduce an article to seven phrases or to distil it into five words. The distillations would be used to make collective sense of the essence of the impacts and then to devise creative texts that explore the emotional experience of the initiative on participants and members of the wider community. Found poetry, photo-symbolism essays and one act plays are wonderful forms to play with individual and collective distillations. Shadow Scenes In Part One of the book, I reference some of the large shadows in the field that obfuscate the psychoanalytic and affective elements of leadership. There are also smaller shadows that shade encounters between bodies. Shadow scenes as a research method is a way to analyze what hovers in the umbra when misrecognition and other breakdowns in communication occur. Participants write a short script for a scene that

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illustrates a conflict related to a shared topic of interest. In the scene, a communication breakdown occurs. The scene is performed for an audience. Audience members are invited to add missing scenes and characters that represent the shadow influences on the original scene. The aim of this type of inquiry is to perform a shared mental space in the same way that a relational analyst calls for the patient’s help to figure out what is happening in the background. Undercurrents are suggested and discussed to try and create a space of thirdness by way of the audience’s witnessing (Ogden, 2005). Emotional Reverberations in the Outside World While it is true that all people play a complicated hand in the mitigation of their desires to control the behaviour of others, this tension is intensified in the educational leader’s office. When educational leaders enact unhealthy relational patterns, it exerts a multiplier effect in the organization. Power over children, combined with the dominant view of education as good medicine, drive children (and emotionally vulnerable adults) to subsume their emotional needs. They instinctively pacify authority figures because they are subjected to their conscious and unconscious desires. As a consequence, emotionally charged encounters between adults and children in school leave imprints that attach to new people, places and events later in life. We do not spend enough time thinking about what people have to psychologically lose in order to behave, change their mind or to fall in line in educational institutions. When loss is ignored, it affectively deadens the person who has experienced the loss and the person who denies the loss. Educational leaders frequently expect teachers and students to change in ways that better serve the functioning of the organization. Learning and serving impacts how one sees oneself in an educative space. When loss is disavowed, identity issues disrupt relational matrices, causing leaders to misrecognize the subjectivity of others. A relational approach to leading must give attention and meaning to the suffering of another in the midst of learning and loss. Leaders are called to act in response to some of the most emotionally depleting events in the school. Through the poems, scripts and episodes, my aim was to sensuously engage the reader in a socio-aesthetic treatment of relational leadership. The telling and retelling of stories about leadership often valourizes images of stoicism under pressure, calmness and measured language in the face of emotional wildness. Rationality, focus, quietness and control are often thought of as anchors in leadership work. The arts-based pieces in the book are an attempt to circulate feelings, textures and tones that speak to the passionate feelings of love, hate, joy, jealousy, shame and anger that also pulse in the undercurrents

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of relational leadership. A focus on negative patterns of relating can assist educational leaders to manage the meanings of their stories or to complicate narratives that may protect against unconscious attempts to force people to play characters from one’s past. Empathic witnesses can encourage leaders in educational organizations to see the beauty in allowing trusted others to write into the stories of their professional lives. The absence of socio-affective questioning in educational leadership classrooms is problematic. We pay a collective price for ignoring how the field contours the identity and relational patterns of leaders. For instance, it is important for current and aspiring leaders to consider the ways in which their unconscious desires subvert rational decision making. We are less rational than we think, and to pretend otherwise by adorning ourselves in more elaborate decision-making models or datadrenched school improvement plans will not allow new school leaders to outrun the psychoanalytic implications embedded in their work. Becoming more adept at exploring the affective dimensions of relational leadership can help one to suffer better, confront the inadequacies of our personalities and spend less time guarding the secrets buried in us by others. Professors and graduate students in leadership programs of study are witnesses to the relational patterns in organizations, and they have a great deal to share about their own experiences of enactments and recognition when bodies affect bodies in the field. Indeed, many of them will have experienced moments when they acted as trusted witnesses in their respective organizations. Here I’m referring specifically to the type of witnessing that “requires that the self empathically join the other in an absence by which they are both at that moment ephemerally constituted” (Butler, 2016, p. 128). Enhancing one’s understanding of self and tuning in to the emotional register of another is a powerful means to produce new relational effects and healthy patterns of relating in times of increased stress and anxiety. These efforts can have infinite positive effects if aspiring leaders become more conscious of what leading does to leaders. Just as negative encounters between adults and children in school leave imprints that attach to new people, places and events later in life, so do positive emotional engagements. How one empathically joins another is a leadership art that, I imagine, takes a lifetime to develop. Leadership programs of study could inspire and further develop this artful practice. Relational psychoanalytic theory helps us to better understand how the field shapes individual and collective subjectivities. For leaders in educational institutions, time is always running out. It is therefore understandable that leaders find it difficult to co-create a contemplative space for alternative interpretations of school phenomena to emerge. In an

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environment that prizes efficiency, speed and order, the third space may actually be, at times, elusive. To that end, enactments may be related to living in a perpetual state of urgency. In the play Last Call for Sincere Liars, Martin teaches us about some of the effects of living in this way. He shows us that in a place that presses in on wildness, one can become emotionally depleted and reliant on relational patterns. In the most extreme cases, the environment can produce a splitting and an incorporation of the harshness of the environment. I am drawn to relational psychoanalytic theory because educational institutions are in many respects like a psychoanalytic theatre. They, too, frequently conjure fantasies of formative relations. Principals, are expected to care for the people in their buildings as if they were their own. In the context of relational leadership, how leaders respond as witnesses when people disclose their emotional injuries can significantly impact how resilient people are in dealing with emotional wounds in the future. In this way, the leader, as an empathic witness, replicates the caring parent who acknowledges the psychic wounds the other experienced as a child.

Conclusion as Distillation

Photo 4.1 Aural Phantoms

Photo 4.2 Enactment

Photo 4.3 Self-study

Photo 4.4 Relational Echoes

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Index

Abraham, Nicholas 43, 49, 142–143 administrative gaze 107–108, 127, 143, 149 advocacy 116 affect 1–2, 3–4, 10, 150–151; charge 5–6, 19, 21, 24, 42, 128, 129, 151, 153, 157, 169, 170; currents 20, 153, 161, 170; excesses 134; intensities 2, 5, 10, 12, 151; pedagogy 12–13; publically registered 151; register 3, 25, 31, 106, 112, 151, 155, 174; relations 4, 6, 12, 21, 141, 157, 168; shadows 10–13; turn 10, 151, 154 affirmation 31, 60, 110, 138, 169 agency 61, 113, 143 Ahmed, Sarah 2, 51, 122 ambiguity 1, 6, 14, 24, 28, 109–110, 160 amplification 9, 151, 153 ancestors 49, 50, 149, 170 antidote for desensitization 24 Anti-Social-Mediations 47 anxiety 28, 43, 45, 88, 135, 174 aporetic body 5, 133–134 art as scholarship 158–159 a/r/tography 159 arts-based research 157–165; origins 157–158; participant involvement 159, 161–162 asymbolia 134 asymmetries of power 9, 21, 124, 165, 168 attunement 3, 11, 21, 31, 133, 139, 151, 160 audience 36, 46, 110, 122, 147, 158, 160–163, 165, 173 aural flashbacks 142, 169 aural phantoms 3, 37–38, 175 aural splits 169

aural tic 38 authoritarian leadership 3, 9 authority 5, 16, 27, 42–42, 124, 142, 154, 171 authority figures 43, 173 autobiographical writing 152–153, 170 avowal 123–124 Bartleby 8, 157, 158 Battling the Cops in My Head 121–123 beauty shadows 22 Benjamin, Jessica 10, 20, 28, 139 Big O Avoids Baby Depressives 120–121 binary 25, 64, 160; gender 112 Blood Pressure 48 Blue High Heels 130–131 Blue Light Filter 12 blurred genres 157–158 Boal, Augusto 121–122, 134 bodies affect bodies 4, 108, 122, 151, 157, 168, 174 body memories 108 break the fourth wall 162 Brecht, Bertolt 3 Bunny Dance 137–138 Burdens of Listening 144 cabinet of curiosities xiii, 98 Catholic Girl 125–126 change 4, 15, 21, 35, 46, 59, 95, 112, 118, 119–120, 156, 164, 166–167, 171, 173 Cigar Puffery 25 Clean Up 28 clever babies 18, 25, 62 clowning implementation 171 cocoons 11, 46

Index communicative: gestures 134, 139, 152, 156; practices and processes 139, 151, 153, 166, 168 compassion 111, 141, 154 complementarity 9–10 confession 5, 28, 123–127, 137 consciousness raising 31, 59, 162, 169 consensus 120, 128, 133, 167 control 4, 11, 17, 21, 25, 32, 44, 65, 72, 74, 79, 94, 106–107, 124, 131, 134, 139, 152, 154, 160, 173 Cops in the Head 121 counter-narratives 110, 128, 144, 154 countertransference 15–17, 27; interfering 17; intersubjective 17; useful 17 creativity 22, 162 cruelty 47, 49, 73 curiosity 4, 134, 137, 145, 148, 166 curriculum 36, 96, 113, 118, 149 decision-making 7, 91, 120, 128, 174 decolonizing lens 38 Democracy in Education 165–167 Derrida, Jacques 1, 143 desire 12, 15, 17, 21, 105, 107, 131, 140, 147–148, 152, 154, 155, 167, 171, 173 devised theatre 152 Dewey, John 165–167 digital circulation 47 dilemmas 128, 155, 170 discursive flexibility 128 disinterpellation 110 distillations: text 172; photo 175–177 dominate 4, 9, 139, 141–142 disavowal 14, 17, 50, 110 dismissal 18, 21, 169 drama: in childhood 18, 49, 150; collaborative 37; form 25; generative 37, 152–153; processes 121, 152, 155, 157; script 24–25; structure 23; techniques 108, 129, 155 dreams 18, 49, 56, 58, 75–76, 78, 84, 105–108, 112, 124, 150, 154–155, 171; archeological analysis 105; teleological analysis 106 duo-ethnography 153 Dweeps 131–133 echo chamber 68, 94 echo location 163 embarrassment 67, 146

189

emotional: charge 134, 147, 173; contagion 12, 13; entanglements 4, 15, 27–28; impacts 15, 153, 156; labour 11, 106; motifs 6; register 25, 106, 112, 155, 174; responsiveness 139; side effects 5, 118–119; state 21, 60, 136, 154, 171; suppression 11, 50; taxing 32, 106; toxicity 148; upheaval 48; wildness 43, 173, 175 emotions 3, 11, 13–14, 21, 44, 128, 131, 151, 160, 169, 170 empathy 24, 27, 169 emphatic pronouncements 72, 143, 169 enactments 27–28, 32, 129, 148, 167, 169, 174, 175 encounter 4–6, 13, 20–21, 42, 111, 127–128, 135, 138, 141, 152, 167; affirming 109, 169; between bodies 5, 10, 19, 123, 139, 172; doer-done-to 28; educative 3, 12, 13, 151, 171; emotionally charged 134, 153, 173; face-to-face 3, 139; leadership 2, 4, 6, 9, 129, 134, 141, 153, 168; oppressive 31; sensuous 1, 4 ends and values 14 enfant terrible 15–16 equity 29, 111–112 ethnotheatre 153 Everybody Loves Linda 117 familiarity 36, 148 fantasies of objectivity 3, 7–10 fantasizing 128, 145, 148 fantasy 20, 105, 147–148 Ferenczi, Sándor 4, 15–18, 27, 43, 142 ficto-research 1–2 field 1, 4, 6, 10, 21, 43, 106, 131, 141, 143, 165, 167–168, 174 formative relations 2, 5, 15, 36, 49, 147–148, 175 Foucault, Michel 123–124 free association 105, 152 Freud, Sigmund 15–17, 19, 24, 44, 57 gender 53–54, 63–64, 112, 118, 150, 165; power 31, 124–125, 131, 145–146; trouble 118 ghosts 2, 49–51, 54, 92, 112, 149, 155 Greenfield, Thomas B. 3, 8–10, 24, 150–151 guilt 43, 87, 90, 119, 142, 145

190

Index

haunting 44, 46, 49, 69, 105, 107, 155; transgenerational 142 heteronormativity 112 humanities 4, 10, 22–23, 150, 158 identity 9, 43–44, 73, 106, 109, 131, 142, 159, 173–174 images of practice 151–157 imagination 160, 168 imaginative beholding 23 imago 15 impression management 113 improvisation 26, 92, 121–122, 134–135, 139, 142–143, 155–157, 163, 170–172; blocking 142, 172; flopped scene 142; hedging 142; sins 142; wimping 142 inclusion 64, 111, 117 incorporation 142, 175 inherited narratives 109, 129 inner script 63 instructional leadership 61, 120, 140, 155 International Intervisitation Programme 8 interpretation 122, 141, 153, 155, 163 intersubjective approach 1, 2, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27, 139 introjection 142 Kristeva, Julia 133–134 language 4, 9, 13, 29, 31, 36, 43, 50, 101, 106, 109–112, 132, 134, 137, 139, 143, 148, 151, 155, 165, 167, 173 Last Call for Sincere Liars 51–104 leadership 1, 3; definition 21; praxis 19, 21, 24; as relations 1, 18, 21, 140–141, 152, 169; skills 114; stories 153–154 leitmotif life writing 170–171 listening 61, 145 Lit Up 135–137 loss 8, 43, 51, 118–119, 121, 126, 131, 134, 141–142, 173; denial 118; interpretive 118, 122 lost objects 75 love 14, 20, 37, 40, 43, 83–84, 87, 100, 107–108, 116–117, 126, 135, 137, 140, 154, 160, 168, 173 masks 95 Massumi, Brian 2, 3, 10, 13 melancholia 14, 51, 144

Memo 114 memoirists 42–43 memories 5, 32, 37, 42–44, 66, 77, 96, 101, 108, 124, 141, 150; colonization 43 memory theatre 25, 42, 44 messy feelings 4, 9, 12, 152, 168 metaphors 43, 106, 148, 153, 157, 159, 172 micro-aggressions 112 middle-way-methods 151, 168 misrecognition 120, 157, 169, 172 Mitchell, Stephen 18–19 monologue 119, 147, 153; arc 153; coda 154; complicating action 153; evaluation 153; final happening 154; orientation 153 monsters 50, 65, 76, 89, 143 Moth Women 44–47 mottephobia 45 mourning 56, 80, 141–142 multiculturalism vampire 38 multiplier effect 153, 173 multi-vocal 151 mutual analysis 16–17 mutuality 4, 15, 20, 124, 139–140, 143, 153, 166 mutual recognition 21, 113, 129, 148, 152 narcissistic signalling 113–117, 169 node of inquiry 6, 151, 165, 168, 170, 172 oppositional fusions 169 oppressed 122 oppressor 122 Ordinary Specters 143 paradox 25, 141, 153, 155, 170 paradoxical play 171; living with 127–133 parent council 28–29, 37, 95, 111, 119, 124 People Think Drew Ruins Every Meeting 112–113 performatives 110 periperformatives 109–110 phantoms 50–51, 57, 71, 74, 89, 101–102, 104, 142 poetic fragments 108 poeticize out loud 172 poetics of rupture 11 poetry 24, 121, 157, 162, 171 policy 3, 35, 110, 115

Index Popper, Samuel 7, 22–23 positionality 162, 165 power 9, 14, 21, 27, 32, 35, 46, 94, 109–110, 123, 124, 126, 150–151, 154, 162, 167–168, 173 primary motivators 19 Principal Goes into the Hallway 115–117 professional capital 140 psychical alchemy 12, 19 psychic displacements 134 psychoanalytic: inquiry 4; shadows 13–22; theatre 147–148; theory 4, 13–15, 174 Queer Straight Alliance 64 radical receptivity 139 Rally 145–146 recognition 20–21, 106, 113, 128, 131, 138–140, 143, 151, 166, 169 reflection 9, 85, 105 reflexivity 123, 159, 163, 172 rehearsal 2, 36, 49, 159 relational: asymmetry 31; configurations 19, 125; echoes 177; encounters 113, 142, 165, 170; gifts 139, 141; leadership 151, 155, 169–170, 173; matrices 151, 167; patterns 173–174; psychoanalytic theory 15, 129, 140, 174–175; psychoanalysis 15, 18–19; spaces 134; webs 106 relationships 131, 134, 140; between phenomena 160 remainders 107 repetition 31, 36, 81, 96, 125, 144, 151, 167 reputation 113, 145 research as art 158 resilience 18, 113 resistance 12, 15, 30, 123, 125, 132, 140, 157, 171 Reunion 47 rhythmic third 139 sacrifice 32, 55, 100, 128 Saldaña, Johnny 24, 153–154 scene 110, 125, 156, 173 school improvement 9, 14, 30–31, 37, 118, 174 Scratch and Win 126–127 script 167, 170 scriptwriting 155 Searching for Higher Ground 117

191

secrets 3, 5, 49, 102, 142, 174 Secret Thoughts 156 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky 109–110 self-analysis 31, 128, 176 self-disclosure 169 self-indulgence 163 self-knowledge 169, 174 self-protection 153 shadow scenes 172 shame 5, 12, 43, 61, 66, 87, 113, 139, 169, 173 She Doesn’t Go to the Coffee Shop Anymore 124–125 Shift 119–120 significant dyads 10, 28, 113, 141 silence 18, 78, 111, 121, 127, 130, 144 social activism 159, 165 Social Dis/location 148–150 social media 3, 9, 47, 113, 120, 125, 145; Facebook 117; Twitter 115, 117 socio-aesthetic 24, 157, 165, 168 socio-affective 151, 165; questioning 174 Solo Martini 112 spectacle 110–111, 122, 145 spectators 161 specter 31, 50, 106, 124, 143, 170 Stewart, Kathleen 2 storytelling 25, 113, 158, 161, 173 structural-functional research 11, 160–161 student learning 14, 120, 140 subjectivity 113, 122, 135, 150, 161, 173 submission 4, 12, 28, 122, 135 suffering 169, 173 surfaces of emergence 1, 6 surrender 21, 139, 152, 170 Take Charge Moment 19 Taubman, Peter 2, 49, 107 Thank You for Your Time 114–115 Theatre of the Oppressed 122 theory movement 7, 13 therapeutic 163 third eye 23 Three Ways 38–42 time 100, 104, 114–115, 157, 174 To Know We Make Room for the Unknown 129–130 Torok, Maria 43, 106, 142 training 7–8, 15, 22, 27, 123, 135, 150–151 trauma 5, 49–50, 97, 133–134, 142 traumatic events 18, 45–46, 130–131, 142, 145

192

Index

trust 122, 125 tyrannical judge 133–134 unbidden 4, 28, 133–138, 152–153, 170 uncanny 24, 44, 128, 167 unconscious 105, 108, 147, 150, 151; desires 17; relational 4 unhomely reminders 71 University Council for Educational Administration 22, 23 verbal tics 5, 36 vitality 124 vulnerability 4, 113, 139

Warm Mittens 37 Weber, Max 22 weakness 169 What is Called for Now 20 What We Become after the Freeze Frame 137 What You Bring 144 What Then 154 witness 91, 140–143, 152, 174–175; empathic 141, 175; myopic 141; phantoms 142 witnessing presence 135 word play 109–111, 137, 149, 170 Yeats, W. B. 154