6 Summary of Week 1

Leadership is a practice that influences perceptions and imaginations, disrupting the status quo and generating new ways of doing, thinking and feeling. Leadership is therefore a crucial practice for racial equity and justice, as it can not only help to resist deep-seated racism, but also build a positive and alternative future beyond it. The definition suggests a checklist of leadership that can be used to evaluate and enhance practice. Similarly to leadership, race is a concept that is deeply contested. Viewing it as a floating signifier, rather than as something fixed, helps us to see how it can be used as a positive category for generating empowering change, but also abused in hateful, racist ways. Going deeper into leadership means exploring various focuses that can be applied to leadership practice, each of which suggests a different emphasis. These focuses can be understood through the Five Ps of leadership: person, process, position, product and purpose.

You should now be able to:

• communicate a definition of leadership, articulating its distinctiveness and importance as a practice that shapes meaning and challenges status quo ways of thinking, feeling and doing
• evaluate practices from the media or your own experience using a six-part leadership checklist
• identify and understand five key focuses of leadership, each of which present a different emphasis on leadership practice
• communicate a definition of race as something socially constructed with real material consequences, views of which can be challenged through robust leadership.

In the next week of study, you will learn how to distinguish leadership from concepts it is frequently confused with. By doing so, you will become more able to prevent leadership from sliding into – and becoming indistinguishable from – the practices of management and command.

You can now go to Week 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .