Chapter 11:: Transpositions Toward Becoming Leading Subjects

As educational leadership faculty interested in helping shape emerging and current leaders’ discursive literacy, we began reading closely the work of transcontinental philosopher and feminist Rosi Braidotti (1994a, 2006), focusing our gaze especially on her conceptualization of transpositions, mining it for possibilities of thinking about our pedagogical aims and means anew. We have begun to see her ideas as offering a generous and flexible cartography, helping point a way to teaching and learning that fosters an ability and desire to negotiate successfully the complex tension between the commitment to positive, emancipatory social action and the multiplicity of political forces that work to produce and sustain the effects and affects of globalization. This chapter is a carefully considered beginning—an entrance to Braidotti’s ideas as a way of both understanding past teaching enactments and as an avenue for incitement to future engagement with transpositioning our students and ourselves. In this spirit, the work is not a “naming” of what we have done. Instead, it stands as an invitation to others in this volume and beyond who are thinking with and teaching across disciplinary discourses to help shape not just what is but also what could be socially just educational leadership in a global context.