Ecological materialism: redescribing educational leadership through Actor-Network Theory

In the latest two decades, there has been an increasing number of publications in education studies drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). However, the uptake of ANT in education studies was not immediate, and the investigations on educational leadership through ANT have been rare. With the aim of promoting the study of educational leadership through ANT, this article shows that ANT is a vocabulary to counter modernistic thinking in education and brings ecological materialism to critical educational leadership studies. While modernity inscribes educational leadership in binary (mind vs body; people vs things; human vs machine) and humanist thinking (humans above things), ANT invites to see it as a more-than-human activity of (re)assemblage of people, technologies, and things for the (re)composition of the common world.