Despite little agreement on how to conceptualize resistance in Critical Education and Leadership Studies (CEPaLS), its working is generally recognized as a ‘struggle against/with’ something, which is practically treated as coming before. It works through opposition: an act or a ‘counter-conduct’ that is opposed to a previously settled gesture, directive or policy. This way of intending ‘resistance’ has contributed to substantial accumulation of knowledge about individuals or collectives who challenge a dominant form of power.

The same understanding of power/resistance finds rich literature in the Critical Studies of Digital Education, where powerful digital platforms are often presented as effecting processes of subjugation of school subjects, among which school leaders. Many studies, in this frame, produces knowledge about the strategies and tactics the latter adopts for subtly coping or overtly struggling against/with the former. 

This is a critique that is based on taking a distance from the world to exactly discern what is bad and what is good: bad policies and the good, rare counter-conduct, bad platforms and the good heroic opting-out school. Following Latour, this way of judging the world in completely negative terms has ‘run out of steam’ and has become useless and not so different by conspiracy theories: it promotes a sort of flat discredit about how the world is going on that gives no justice to the multiple, varied and differentiated realities that live in everyday practices. This is even more relevant when talking about the educational world, so crucial for the possibility of pedagogically countering the effects of the current complex scenario, marked by the same negativity and deconstructivist tendencies that animate the negative critique: CEPaLS do not simply talk about educational leadership, but performatively construct it. An additional plane is crossed when coming to the digitalization of educational leadership because it is a process intertwined with the capitalist acceleration in the educational world. So, what we need ‘is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts’, in order to perform alternative educational possibilities.

In this presentation, we will explore the positive and affirmative consequences of considering resistance as something that ‘is in some way before what it resists’ when critically researching digital educational leadership. In a neo-materialist and vital frame, we use Deleuze’s re-reading of Foucault’s concepts of knowledge as ‘two-fold’ and power as ‘a diagram’ to turn upside-down the power/resistance conceptual couple. By this reversal, we adopt a resistance/power perspective: resistance emerges as the multiple ways in which things are going on in the world before and despite the attempts of normalization promoted by institutions through codifying knowledges.

By using data produced for a qualitative study on the introduction and the impact of the digital governance of education in Italy, we show that resistant leadership is a widespread practice emerging as a situated and contingent assemblage of the human, the digital, and the analogic, whose daily effort in leading a school is repeatedly challenged by digitalization policies.

This presentation builds on theory to develop a set of analytical lenses, which use is at last exemplified by using ethnographic materials from ongoing field researches. Theoretically, we introduce the re-reading that Deleuze advances of two Foucauldian concepts: the diagram of power and the knowledge. The Diagram is a crucial concept, stated that it is what permits Foucault to establish the identical dispositivity of prisons, factories, schools, and hospitals. Starting from this, Deleuze tries to go to the roots of the concept and looks at it as a transposition of the Nietzschean Will to Power, differential and genetic at the same time. We can think of the concept of diagram as ‘a function that must be detached from any specific use’: an attempt to organize the whole social life following a specific rule; an ‘abstract machine’ that incites the social dispositif towards ‘educate, look after, punish, and so on’. But the diagram is a sort of a two-faced Janus: the perfect structuration of the social whole is the aim it tends, without ever reaching it. As well as the ordering of what can happen, it is also an ‘emission of singularities’ that moves away from its attempt of normalization. Acting as an immanent cause coextensive with the social field, it is implied also in the production of the unforeseen. But how is this difference produced? Deleuze points out that, in Foucault, everything is knowledge (ontology is an epistemology), but knowledge itself is two-fold. The discursive and the non-discursive play an equal role: the visible and the articulable, the expression and the content, are the two forms of exteriority, put together by the Diagram of power. In the exteriority and irreducibility between the articulable and the visible that compose knowledge, there is the possibility for the diagram to fail its normalization and for singularities to emerge. For the otherness, the different, the diverse, the varied to be alive. More: these singularities are what the diagram, without stopping to emit, wants to normalize. In this way, the upside-down is completed: singularities are in some way before power, and resistance ‘is in some way before what it resists’. Starting from this, we will sketch out a possible articulation of analytical lenses that deploy the resistance/power perspective along four dimensions useful for being applied to educational field research: the when, the what, the who, and the where of the resistance functioning.

By exemplifying the use of our analytical lenses in a real school life scene from ongoing ethnographic research on the digitalization of school leadership in Southern Italy, we show that the enactment of a digitalization policy could be easily considered as a no-resistance case, from a power/resistance perspective; while a more nuanced and complex understanding could be presented through the application of a resistance/power frame. We argue that our analytical lenses help in framing differently the present of educational resistance. Our exemplification helps us make clear that, in that specific school, connected to that specific digitalization policy enactment, what was at stake was the epistemic space of education: how those subjects consider their educational roles, identities and values. Their resisting communitarian set of organizational practices is challenged by the new articulation of technologies and ideas related to the effectiveness of school management. The headteacher, who could seem to lead the digitalization policy process, is differently lightened: despite all, she is still there, at the entrance hall, every morning, looking at the eyes of her pupils and teachers, but in a different assemblage with technologies and ideas. An opportunity for the survival and prosecution of resistance is produced through this kind of political (re-)presentation: certainly not an oppositional resistance, but rather a ‘mangling’ one. We argue that this understanding of resistance connects CEPaLS and critical post-humanities, producing knowledge with and giving visibility to the ‘missing’ resistant leadership which has not yet been subject of knowledge but is deeply involved in the political production of other educational possibilities. It allows: (a) to compose post-human subjects through the alliance of digital, analogic and human entities; (b) to give value to under-valued daily endeavours of making ‘minor’ education(s) (still) possible; and (c) to accelerate the production of non-capitalist ‘modes of becoming’.

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