Educational Leadership as an Act of Epistemic Transformation: Towards Epistemic Justice
摘要
While the existing scholarship on leadership often emphasizes the transformation of unjust systems, structures, and practices, there remains a critical gap in analyzing an epistemic dimension—involving questions of what counts as knowledge, whose knowledge matters, and how knowledge is legitimized—for leading change. This chapter aims to delve into the critical, yet often overlooked, epistemic dimension of leadership for change. According to Fricker (2015), epistemic contribution is essential to human capability, as human subjectivity is shaped not just by receiving but also by generating and sharing epistemic resources as a giver. In this sense, educational leadership can be situated at the center of creating and disseminating epistemic resources. This chapter first explores forms of epistemic injustice and how they manifest in educational settings. Second, the chapter then shifts to explore radical transformative agency that focuses on the interconnectedness of ethics, ontology, and epistemology, positing that knowing, being, and doing are intertwined in the pursuit of social justice. Finally, this chapter explores a possible conceptualization of leadership as an act of transforming epistemic foundations by discussing two case narratives of educational leaders.