In this presentation, we interrogate ourselves if a critical sociology of educational leadership is possible. To offer an answer, we will try to put at work the anti-anthropocentric subject (Rebughini, 2014): a subjectivity domesticated in mechanisms of power, while maintaining a link with the ‘immanence of life’ or is ‘dispersed in the cognitive and material tools and networks of techno-science, as well as in a broader idea of life and nature’ (Rebughini, p. 6, 2014). Rethinking educational leadership in this direction means to work ‘within’ and ‘against’ the contemporary practice of educational leadership and management, informed by economics and managerialism, opening up a way for a sociological problematization of this central issue.

To do so, we will focus on the digital turn in educational leadership in Italy. By drawing on ANT and Foucauldian perspectives, our work envisages tracing how the New Public Management and the digital turn are reshaping practices of educational leadership and management. Basing on recent investigations about the introduction of the digital governance of education in Italy. We will highlight how the practice of educational leadership is becoming an emergent human-paper-digital assemblage. We will see how the work of school leaders in Italy is immersed in a network of attachments where digital platforms, software and applications are playing an increasing role. At the same time, we will also illustrate how school leaders are not ‘cultural dopes’ of the digital governance of education: they reply, surprisingly and in creative ways, to the digitalization and datafication of education, paving the way to the development of autonomous subjectivities.

This work includes a theoretical and an empirical section. Theoretically, we will draw on a vocabulary trying to combine ANT and After (Law & Hassard, 1999) and Foucault: a) to disentangle the assemblages of humans and nonhumans in contemporary educational leadership; b) to underline the relevance of the processes of subjectivation; c) to illustrate educational leadership as emerging from a network of attachment. Empirically, we will offer a description of the changing conditions of the work of school leaders, paying attention to the concatenation of paper, humans and digital, through several on-going ethnographies in some schools in Souther Italy. We will look at how the materiality of the paper and the technology of writing associated with the paper do not disappear from the scene of the everyday work: despite they are not important as it was in the past; circulars, decisions and also signatures entangle with complex processes of transferring and merging between analogic and digital devices, producing the multiplication both of documents and of leader’s presences.

We will finally summarise our presentation by illustrating how the current trends are producing novel post-humanist actor-networks. Studying leadership from a perspective that de-centres the subject is the chance to re-find it at the end of a process of subjectivation. It emerges from a network of attachment of bits and pieces, human and non-human, analogic and digital, which in turn objectifies or autonomyzes the subject. Our analysis underlines three aspects that invite to problematize sociologically educational digital leadership: it is not a personal trait of a human individual, but a subjective configuration that emerges by a network of attachments; leadership and digitalization, often presented as systems for surveillance, entangle in array of practices that produce control as a contingent effect; it is a process that concerns the modification of practices and that can produce both domesticated and autonomous subjects. This permits to reconsider leadership and digitalization, taking distance from the enlightening gaze through which we look at them as divine gifts (Bourdieu, 1990) and from the pessimistic perspective that talks about ‘new nazisms’ (Berardi, 2019).

Drawing on Actor-Network Theory to analyse educational leadership and management could appear to some extent, a paradox. By definition, the vocabulary of ANT invites to decentring from humans and considering the materialities of practice, to shift attention to how objects, technologies and things make the social. ANT undermines the role generally attributed to the humans in the classic and the contemporary literature on leadership, both in management and education studies. Is it possible to use ANT as a companion to study educational leadership and management dynamics? We make a trial in this direction, by proposing to move to ‘ANT and After’ framework and, partly, recovering the Foucauldian heritage (Law & Hassard, 1999). Also Foucault has often been considered to hold an anti-humanist position, since when he argued for the death of the man (Foucault, 1989) and for dismissing the authorial function (Foucault, 1981). Despite this official reception of his thought, Deleuze (2006) underlines that Foucault was interested not in subjects as reified entities, but in those processes that shape subjectivities’ form: the processes of subjectivation. So, both in Foucault and in ANT, the decentering of the subject was not conducive to a rude materialistic or technological determinism, leading to a radical anti-humanism. Instead, it suggests to pay attention: 1) to the human not as an essence, but as a contingent and situated form, and 2) to the entanglement of humans and nonhumans as a critical unit of analysis. We propose to use the notion of attachment, which collapses objects and subjects of actions by directing towards ‘bonds to our nearest and dearest, to places, to memberships, to origins’ (Hennion, 2007, 2017).Then, assembling this concept with the Foucauldian conceptualization of subjectivation as a chiasmatic process (Revel, 2016), we argue for an analytical split of the concept of attachment that could make it useful for detecting both the power dynamics and the traces of the new emergences that are implied in the shaping of subjectivities. On the one side, ‘objectifying attachments’ talk about operations of objectivation; on the other side, ‘autonomyzing attachments’ bring to the fore those act of subjectivation that are partially autonomous from the logics of objectivation. So, we will put to test our framework by analysing the new school leadership in Italy, by offering some analysis of how Italian educational leadership is becoming a paper-digital-human assemblage.

Educational leadership is considered as a key variable for the intervention and modification of whole educational systems, even more in this post-Covid era (Peters et al., 2020). Our empirical analysis underlines at least three aspects that invite to think sociologically about educational digital leadership. First of all, digital leadership is not an additional competence that must be learned by a human subjetc, as economics and managerialism argue, but a subjective configuration that emerges by a network of attachments. By focusing on events, such as accounting and reporting, we were quite surprised discovering that platforms presuppose a leader and seem to be enacted by specific individuals, but in practice they are made operative by multiple attachments of different humans and non-humans, both analogic and digital. Secondly, our research shows that digital leaders’ control is an effect which emerges from situated and contingent practices. Here, the concepts of ‘objectifying attachment’ and ‘autonomyzing attachment’ could help to underline the entanglement of practices. While there is a strong effect of surveillance which emerges from objectifying attachments, there are also other opposite effects, that open up spaces for resistance and dissidence: not necessarily a political resistance, but surely an act which makes difference a practised possibility (Foucault, 2011). Finally, we show that school digital leaders face every day a great number of platforms: we could say that they could be considered fully digitalized. However, these platforms are imbricated in a continuous series of shiftings and trespassings between the analogic and the digital. Furthermore, the analytical split between objectifying and autonomyzing attachment allows for shifting the attention on the linkages between these operations and power dynamics. Where usual functionings forecasted by objectifying attachments succeed to flow undaunted, as much as where deviations by autonomyzing attachments suddenly arise, we can find both digital and analogic elements.

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