Abstract
Life writing, a collection of writing practices including biography, educational biography, autobiography, autoethnography, oral history, life history, collective biography, prosopography, social fictions, and other variants, has been an understudied area in the field of educational leadership. Reexamining the history of the commingling of leadership concepts with life writing conventions opens up new pathways for understanding how life writing can powerfully propel leadership development. The conceptual history of life writing is traced by using the mapping tools offered by Foucault’s (1972. The archeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York, NY: Pantheon Books) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourses on Language, specifically “the field of memory,” “the field of presence,” and “the field of concomitance.” Creating an intellectual archaeology of the use of biography in the field of educational leadership, and other forms of life writing, opens spaces for reimagining theoretical and practical possibilities for impacting the way educational leaders are defined, described, educated, and evaluated.
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Mulvihill, T. (2022). Life Writing, Biography, and the Making of Educational Leaders. In: English, F.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99097-8_32
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