Intellectual Histories, Power and Activism. Understanding and Modeling Plurality within Educational Life in the Works of Helen M. Gunter

This chapter recognises the intellectual legacy of the works of Helen M. Gunter for my own work as education policy sociologist and more generally for the fields of educational leadership and education policy research. Moving from a brief account of the experience of the Network Le@ds (Leading Democratic Schools) that Helen contributed to create in 2011, the chapter will reflect on the generative interplay in her work of three major intellectual gestures: (a) the use of intellectual histories as a way to understand our social relations, social conditions and abilities as emerging through processes of knowledge production and circulation; (b) the use of the Arendtian concept of ‘action’, intended as an anti-categorical and interrupting dialogical gesture, as a tool to engage with educational institutions as a primary and unavoidable space of inquiry, reflection and involvement; and (c) a practice as public intellectual that proposes a distinctive understanding of the relation between ideas and action, knowledge production and activism. I will argue that these three gestures combine into an intellectual attitude that is about taking action and responsibility, engaging in issues of political educational concern, and exercising judgement to contribute to model democratically plurality and freedom within educational life.