In this conceptual paper, I argue that the notion of intersectionality plays a distinct role in informing policy enactment frameworks deployed in educational leadership research. I suggest that a perspective informed by intersectionality offers analytical tools that could enrich the ontological frameworks of researchers interested in investigating policy actors’, such as principals, enactment practices. While much has been discussed on policy enactment within leadership discourse, one notable discussion that permeates studies in the field is on the factors that inform principals’ sensemaking and agency when enacting policies (See Ganon-Shilon & Schechter, 2017; Gu et al., 2018). Particularly, principals have been the subject of significant debates on the contexts in which successful enactment occurs and the organizational supports that necessitate its occurrence—with limited discussion on how intersecting identity markers inform enactment outcomes. The absence of incorporating an intersectional perspective to policy enactment frameworks is problematic as it omits to acknowledge policy actors’ intersectional identity markers as contributing factors to enactment outcomes. When applied to educational studies, the limitations of the framework may stand as a barrier for analyzing how systems of oppression influence the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that principals navigate in their enactment practices. Consequently, reproducing and reinforcing the very systems of oppression that provincial and school board policies aim to diminish. As well, it obscures critical ontological discussions of educational inequities further advancing the conceptualization of policy enactment as gender and race neutral.

Expanding the dimensions of policy enactment frameworks to incorporate an intersectional perspective has the potential to highlight and enrich the work of researchers investigating educational inequities and leaders’ sensemaking and enactment practices. Further offering a multifaceted perspective to critical discussions and debates in the field. This inquiry was guided by the question, how can an intersectional perspective inform research on policy enactment? This conceptual paper offers a theoretical contribution to the expanding body of research that examines the use of policy enactment frameworks by policy actors such as principals as they enact policies in K-12 contexts. 

For this conceptual study, I conducted a review of the literature on 1) critical theories of policy enactment and 2) intersectional approaches to the study of educational administration and leadership, with a specific analysis of principalship. To conduct such an examination, I situated the inquiry in the existing literature and theoretical conceptions in the field, highlighting the integration, or lack thereof, of policy enactment with the notion of intersectionality in education leadership discourse. I was particularly interested in identifying studies that incorporated policy enactment frameworks and theories to the study of principalship. Given the underdevelopment of literature on intersectional perspectives in policy enactment frameworks, I found few but notable studies that addressed principals’ intersectional identity markers in relation to policy enactment outcomes in education. The data sources used for this inquiry are informed by the work of critical theorists of policy enactment, namely Ball (2011) and colleagues (Meg Maguire, Annette Braun, Kate Hoskins, and Jane Perryman) and Crenshaw’s (1994/2005) contributions to the theory of intersectionality. Policy enactment is argued to be a process of translating texts to actions, where in the complexities of the process lies how education policies are “made sense of, mediated and struggled over, and sometimes ignored” (Ball et al., 2012a, p. 4). As a continuous process of becoming and change, policy enactment is “framed by institutional factors involving a range of actors” (Ball et al., 2012b, p. 14). Intersectionality is a theoretical perspective that claims space for understanding individual’s lives as being constructed by intersecting systems of oppression (Carastathis, 2014; Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1998; Collins 2019). Since Crenshaw’s inception of intersectionality into academic discourses, scholars have advanced various interpretations and guiding assumptions of intersectionality (Bitton & Jones, 2021; Duran & Jones, 2019). Contemporary use of intersectionality in education has the tendency to avoid uniformity and follows context-specific application, in part due to varying iterations of how the term is defined (Bitton & Jones, 2021; Harris & Patton, 2019). These iterations are not without merit and warrant a deeper understanding of the contentions posed by intersectionality’s predecessors and the theory’s contributions to advancing theoretical discourse in relation to leadership. This study uses the aforementioned theorization to highlight that intersectionality has the potential to address the forms of oppression that emerge and the shortcomings of enactment practices in educational administration and leadership research.

The analysis revealed key insights on the theoretical implications of an intersectional approach for conducting enactment research in educational administration and leadership. Particularly, the recognition of intersectionality as an important factor in expanding discussions of principal’s professional identity and enactment practices. For educational actors such as Black female principals, the neglect of identifying the role of intersectional identities in how they enact policies perpetuates a lack of access to tailored theoretical and practical supports and mentorship opportunities as they negotiate their racial and gendered identities in historically White institutions (Armstrong & Mitchell, 2017). This analysis warrant that research revisit the theoretical assumptions of policy enactment and create space for interrogating the enactment frameworks not as isolated processes void of identity markers, but rather a tool that can further illuminate structural barriers for minoritized social actors. Bitton and Jones (2021) explain that social justice tends to be presumed as an end goal of intersectionality however “not all intersectional work that addresses some aspect of social inequality necessarily advances social justice” (p. 63). A key component to this assertion is the use of the word address. In agreeance with Bitton and Jones’ (2021) argument, intersectionality in isolation cannot remedy social inequities but rather can be used as a perspective for advancing a framework’s capability for enacting change and/or social justice initiatives and policies. Incorporating an intersectional perspective to policy enactment frameworks may provide researchers with a means for identifying the relational and power complexities that are embedded in enactment outcomes prior to using enactment frameworks for remedying social inequities. Expanding the analytical tools that policy enactment researchers deploy invites researchers to illuminate the role of intersectionality in policy enactment outcomes generally as well as the occurrence of exclusion and social inequities in educational administration and leadership specifically.

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