Bush fires are extraordinarily dangerous and possess precarious capacity for growth and destruction. Driven by changeable winds, bushfires devour, transform, and territorialise. In the immediate period after fires school communities swing into actions of care and recovery. Crisis leadership plays a critical role in navigating the aftermath of these devastating events that causes catastrophic harm and leave long-lasting impacts on communities (Striepe & Cunningham, 2021).Leadership from a posthuman perspective reworks notions of solely human agency as more-than-human relations between human and non-human bodies produces distributed subjectivity (Fairchild, 2019). Moreover, ‘selves’ are not individual subjects, but are collective enunciations that are produced through the processes and movements with assemblages (Strom & Lupinacci, 2019).
The more-than-human entanglement of fire, schools, communities, wildlife, and the anthropogenic landscape provoke a challenging debate around ethics of care. This study embraces critical posthumanism, which challenges the traditional centrism of the human in ethical discourse (Taylor, 2018). Specifically the aftermath of bushfires are examined through the lenses of affect and ethico-onto-epistemology. Ethical considerations during crisis leadership are reframed as an interplay of relationships, engagements, and entanglements, emphasising material interactions that encompass more than just human actors. The engagement of posthuman concepts enable ethical and political affordances that fracture binary dualisms and discourses. (Fairchild, 2019). Drawing on new materialism we conceptualise the post- bushfire aftermath as spaces for ethico-onto-epistemological mattering. The physical devastation and recovery are inextricably linked to ethical, ontological, and epistemological dimensions.
Ethico- onto-espitemology foregrounds the moral dimensions of our interactions with the world (Barad, 2007). Ethics are immanent so that ethical considerations are not external to us but arise from relations. Therefore ethics, ontology, and epistemology are not separate domains but are deeply intertwined, with our ethical decisions (ethico-) are influenced by our understanding of being (onto-) and our knowledge (epistemology) (Geerts & Carstens, 2019). In short, our way of knowing the world is shaped by our ethical positions and our ontological understandings
In the aftermath of fires, the challenges are shaped by uncertainty and moving frontiers (Drysdale & Gurr, 2017; Mutch, 2015; Smith & Riley, 2012). As Bozalek suggests “research is a matter of opening possibilities and immersion in the indeterminancy of the world, which is never settled. It is about being aware of how one part of the world makes itself intelligible to another part of the world and what matters in the flourishing of the world, where politics, ethics, ontology and epistemology are intertwined” (2021, 147). At every step the affective encounter is new and different; and unknown. “Affect is a material encounter where we change in relation to an experience” (Hickey-Moody, 2009).
This research into school leadership during such crises addresses the nexus between destruction and regeneration. Bushfires are more than freely occurring natural disasters; they are active agents that reshape landscapes, lives, and communities. They challenge a traditional human-centered perspective of leadership and crisis management by highlighting the significant role of non-human elements in these scenarios. The immediate actions of care and recovery in school communities post-bushfires, as observed by Striepe & Cunningham (2021), demonstrate a collective, emergent response, transcending individual human efforts. This collective response is a manifestation of Fairchild's (2019) concept of distributed subjectivity, where the agency is not just a human attribute but a product of the interplay between humans, nature, and the environment. The catastrophic impact of bushfires necessitates a leadership approach that acknowledges this interconnectedness.
