ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that leadership is largely an ideological construct. In pursuing a dynamic notion of space, which is central to the idea of critical educational leadership for disruption, the chapter focuses in particular on one element of the socially just school that of socially critical youth voice. It shows the existential reality that schools worldwide have been subjected to a relentless assault for more than 30 years by an unremitting neoliberal project designed to convert them into annexes of the economy. The moral worth of the very notion of educational leadership will be tested around whether it continues to remain implicated in and complicit in reproducing a toxic and sadistic ideology, or whether it has the courage to stand up and speak back to it with an articulate alternative. Educational leadership is a linguistic turn that is used to construct schools as organisations in particular ways, most notably in the contemporary context, according to neoliberal market logics.
