Introduction

A few years ago, I became a female leader in academia. It was not my intention to become a leader, but I realised that it was something that came with the job of being an associate professor heading towards full professorship, who was determined to influence faculty policies and practices. As time passed I learned about the relentless pursuit of individual orientation in different situations related to leadership in neoliberal rationalism, where academics become human capital consisting of ungendered productive units. I understood that the power effects of neoliberalism through the affect of anxiety is a particular governing strategy of subjectivation, and that it directs academic leaders direct towards an economic logic, where the self of academics and their work is shaped as insufficient (see also Brunila and Valero, 2017). When the amount of my leadership duties grew, the complexity of issues that I had to deal with in academia led to me critically exploring leadership by analysing and politicising my experiences through affective academic encounters.

Because of my theoretical and methodological aspirations in the field of critical studies in education and concerns about power and social justice, my aim was to give up my authorial right to stand outside of power relations as well as my desire for authenticity. I chose to focus on my experiences as an academic leader at the centre. I believed that this would help me to discover the fault lines in leadership discourses as well as to find new discursive practices and subject positions to be able to continue as an educationalist and critical scholar and politically active academic while utilising my leadership position for more collective purposes and for challenging the contemporary neoliberal order.

One of the reasons I wrote this chapter was the pervasiveness of the neoliberal order, where it was sometimes hard, or nearly impossible, to find room for political imaginary outside of the market and a market metrics, which are colonialising all spheres of academic life. It was also a surprise to me that while there has been a mass of critical literature related to the effects of changes in academia, little critical analysis was available about how academics are themselves deeply, affectively and ethically entangled with these changes (see also Chapter 5, this book).