On our own terms: Asian diasporic onto-epistemologies of educational leadership as radical relationality

In this dialogic essay, we raise onto-epistemological questions to interrogate the field of educational leadership. Informed by codesign and "thinking with" approaches to inquiry, we aimed to generate new ways of conceptualizing educational leadership that normalize our embodied ways of knowing, living, and seeing the world as Asian American scholars. Against a backdrop of settler colonialism and enslavement, alien labor, and the geopolitics of knowledge, writing ourselves into the scholarship of educational leadership represents an act of refusal. We first challenge conceptions of leadership as white-male-driven universal and also essentialized cultural practices attached to racialized groups. We then critique coloniality within Asian American discourses and explore possibilities for futurities that recognize but do not begin from stereotypes and deficit-based racialized narratives imposed by white supremacy. We conclude by examining leadership as radical relationality toward solidarity as rooted in onto-epistemologies and lived experiences of Asian Americans and other racialized communities.