Abstract:
Building on the ideas of the Portuguese intellectual and sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016), this paper examines possibilities for research-led pedagogies (Zembylas, 2017) which support an awareness of the dominance of the overall northern-centric pattern of global knowledge production (Connell, 2014) as well as a deeper understanding, through processes of intelligibility (Butler, 1997), of how culture and leadership are interwoven. Such research-led pedagogies and understandings of culture and leadership support an understanding that what I can do as a leader is “conditioned by what is available for me to do within the culture and by what other practices are and by what practices are legitimating” (Olsen & Worsham, 2004, p. 345). The bounds of intelligibility and what is ‘received’ as ‘leadership’ can be changed because the constraints and norms are recreated in each interaction. This connection between culture and leadership and knowledge hierarchies challenges students to question their own ‘extraversion’ (Hountondji, 1997[1994])—expectations that overseas study is designed to facilitate the transport of Western or Northern theory as the solution—and through so doing, makes possible the re-imagining of possibilities for transformation of leadership through the emergence of alternatives. Santos (2016) suggests that one path, is to subject global North assumptions to critique—to not privilege any knowledge through the assumption of superiority. This would include the critique of Western ethno-centric models of leadership, not to exclude them but to include ways of becoming more culturally sensitive. The diversity of knowledges comes about by enabling contradictions and possibilities. It also opens up the possibility of engagement with Western-centric conceptions (for example - democracy) alongside others as hybrids “of strangeness and familiarity” (Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, , 2016, p. 239). Rather than subscribing to a single, universal and abstract hierarchy among knowledges, which privileges Western theories, cognitive justice favours context dependent knowledges which enables preparing the ground for students thinking about the knowledges they bring, and the importance of their unique contextual and cultural factors (Santos, Boaventura de Sousa,, 2007). Dialogue and interpretation can occur across cultures, at the same time as raising the awareness of reciprocal incompleteness of knowledges. This work enables a reframing of an approach to leadership taught within a university Masters course, which is more closely aligned with epistemic justice.