School leadership in (poly)crisis: Navigating the intersection of migration and disaster

This study examines how school principals enact leadership during a (poly)crisis shaped by forced migration and major disasters within a highly centralised education system. Focusing on Hatay, Türkiye, after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, the study adopts a qualitative case study design using the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method, supported by critical thematic and contrapuntal analysis. The findings show that leadership in a (poly)crisis extends beyond technical crisis management. Principals navigated bureaucratic constraints, institutional uncertainty and competing forms of knowledge while using locally embedded relationships to sustain educational access and support their communities. At the same time, centralised accountability systems and gendered power relations continued to reproduce structural inequalities during the crisis. Drawing on the concepts of governmentality, institutional liminality and epistemic injustice, the study offers a critical framework for understanding leadership in conditions of prolonged and overlapping crises. It contributes to crisis leadership research by examining leadership in a highly centralised education system experiencing sustained disruption beyond the predominantly Global North and single-crisis contexts that dominate existing literature.