This paper will focus upon the identification of suitable and experimental methodologies for interrogating ‘the affective turn’ in European educational leadership. As an answer to the global GERM and the plea for improving learning outcomes, educational leadership in countries like Denmark seems to take up an affective agenda and target the constitutive and affective ‘moment before’ (Massumi 2002) learning takes place. As a consequence, issues like how to enhance the “desire for learning” and how to improve the “motivational atmosphere” seem to emerge. Within this setting psy-phenomenon, such as motivation and motivational technologies, are no longer staged only as didactical issues but become crucial matters of concern for leadership. In this paper and in order not to just to ‘quote’, celebrate or reject this affective agenda, I ask how post-human, intra-active and performative approaches developed in Nordic feminist and anti-racist education studies may assist in experimenting with concepts and research formats, interrogate the (unforeseen) effects of affects and affective economies intertwined with new forms of educational leadership, and thereby formulate affirmative critiques of these new types of psy-leadership.

Massumi, B. 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham NC: Duke University Press.