How do school leaders make sense of the mess of the regimes of the normal (Warner, 1993) when they themselves are beyond the norm? While we may be beyond the normal, we are also “awash in the flow of the everyday” (Manalansan, 2018, p. 2). Though we may resist and see ourselves as beyond the norm (Weiser et al., 2019), we are never “in a position of exteriority in relation” (Foucault, 1978, p. 95) to the norms of power. Using data from several different projects collected over the past several years, we conceptualize a new way to consider not only data, but also how embracing new formations of leadership, which may appear messy, can work toward liberatory praxis. Drawing upon our archive of previous projects (DeMartino & Weiser, 2021; Weiser, 2018; Weiser et al., 2019, DeMartino, 2020) that have been published, as well as completed but not-yet-published projects, we funk (Warner, 1993) up our relations to these archives (Cvetkovich, 2003; Manalansan, 2014) to uncover how we have been engaged in the act of making a mess through our research. Parallel to the idea of failure as distinctly queer (Halberstam, 2011),we aim to understand how engaging in the messiness of identity-based research using art and visual methods (Leavy, 2017) can provide pathways forward for educational leaders who are willing to get dirty in order to support members of the educational community who do not fit cleanly into cisheteropatriarchal standards.
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