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Leadership Love Letters in Dangerous Times is research-creation project (Loveless, 2019; Springgay, 2022) that seeks to affirm and engender knowledge constructed with love and imagination among creative faculty members of color in the field of educational leadership, organizations, and policy (ELOP).

Leadership Love Letters critiques and responds to institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2013) and institutional disaffection (Torcal, 2006)–including K-12 schools and higher education institutions–by integrating art-making with participants and the public as part of data collection, analysis, dissemination, and public pedagogy for the ELOP field, particularly through UCEA Annual Conventions in 2022-2025. This research-creation has explored how Black, Indigenous, and Faculty of Color (BIFOC) practice arts and creativity in their lives and work as assertions of wholeness and renewal. It was born of uncertainty, grief, and just being done with tolerating the selfishness and insincerity demanded by our institutional cultures.

Leadership Love Letters was sponsored in part by the Spencer Foundation’s Racial Equity Initiative.1

Origins of the Love Letters

How can we expect to prepare and support leaders and leadership in K-12 schools to be centered in love, dignity, and justice if we have no idea how to ground ourselves and our own workplaces in those values? How can we answer calls to “reimagine” futures for educational leadership and organizations, for our research, if we do not practice imagining and reflecting through time?

We did not want to be doomed to repeat our pasts.

Since 2017, the study investigators and collaborators have explored love as a central organizing framework for leadership (see Byrne-Jiménez & yoon, 2019). This research-creation extends of our framework–intending to incorporate love habits (wisdom, courage, harmony, and imagination) into research methodology, approaches to researcher-participant relationality, and outreach to the ELOP field and UCEA convention environment. In particular, the project adopted research-creation approaches of public pedagogy to highlight and deepen the imagination component of leadership as love (Springgay, 2022).

The project sought to engage in community of BIPOC faculty members in our field of educational leadership, policy, and organization studies who integrate creative work into their lives and work. We sought to explore the ways that imagination as a “love habit” of leadership (Byrne-Jiménez & yoon, 2019) could be cultivated among our faculty as a way to engage healing and identify pathways for transforming the ways we as scholars experience and participate in the academy (Martínez & Welton, 2017). We sought to embrace and celebrate sides of ourselves that often seem divorced, like escapes, and excluded from our research. These imaginative modes are embodied, freeing, soul-feeding, and fierce. They are resistant to and protect us from the vagaries of traditional modes and ethics of academic production (Gómez, 2025).

We chose to turn inward and understand ourselves and our colleagues and our institutional environments before attempting to influence our programs, curricula, or other realms of leadership practice. This intentional move aligned with numerous leadership and justice/social change frameworks in education and community organizing that emphasize self-awareness and examining and understanding self before being able to lead other through reflection and action (Freire, 1970; Haga, 2020; Kaba, 2021; Venet, 2024). Thus, our project is for us as Black, Indigenous, and Faculty of Color (BIFOC). This project is to us, love letters to BIFOC and our families, communities, and students. This project is a gift toward our futures in and as an ELOP field.

Research-Creation Methodology

Research-creation challenges scholarly traditions of knowledge construction processes, knowledge products, and purposes of research (Loveless, 2019). It does so by embarking on research through creative works, art-making, embodiment, multiple modalities of expression and presentation, and public pedagogies (Springgay, 2022). Thus, research-creation can include multidimensional processes, engagement with participants and members of the public, and multimodal research presentation and pedagogical interventions.

The impetus behind research-creation is the recognition and value of creative modes for communicating meaning and catalyzing meaningful learning experiences that can transform understanding and action (Loveless, 2019). Research-creation is dissatisfied with the timeliness of reporting research findings and critiques the inaccessibility of such reporting to publics that research is purportedly intended to benefit. Inaccessibility can occur through limited ranges of financial means for purchasing books and articles; cognitive or intellectual capacity; and dominant cultural capital such as educational training to make meaning of research and be able to critique it (Price, 2024). As a response, research-creation seeks direct affective and embodied interaction or immersion in knowledge-construction processes and meaning-making with the goal of engaging participants and a broader community in addition to other academics. This intervention discomfits traditional scholars and scholarship, shifts text-centric knowledge frameworks, and opens up the use of research to individual and collective sense-making (Springgay, 2022).

Research-creation allows expansive, responsive, and self-made innovation in research practices while still expecting serious intellectual grounding and contributions to a field. Broadly, this appeals to my prior methodological works on heeding hauntings in research (yoon, 2022; yoon & Chen, 2021) and forthcoming ideas about relationality in research (see Patel, 2016).

In particular, for the Love Letters project I chose to incorporate love habits into our “doing” of research by cripping approaches to time, modality, creative capacity, and mental load (Price & Kerschbaum, 2016). I also took steps to decolonize my research practices, emphasizing relationality, holism, and answerability (Patel, 2016). For example, I used an interview protocol, but conducted interviews as open conversations, sharing and exchanging my own stories and experiences with participants, experiencing connection with each of them. I engaged with my whole self and sought to acknowledge and affirm the wholeness of the participants. I wrote letters to participants that responded to their letters and also created art that represented solely my reactions to what they shared. I have shed tears with and for my participants. A large part of research-creation and cultivating love and imagination is strengthening my ability to recognize and feel interconnections in knowledge creation (Loveless, 2019; Patel, 2016; Price & Kershbaum, 2016; yoon, 2022; yoon & Chen, 2021). This is the approach I took to research-creation for the Love Letters project.

Participants and Activities

This project included participation from 9 BIPOC faculty members over 2.5 years. Two participants were in the first three years of the tenure track; two were past retention review, and pre-tenure; two were undergoing tenure review during the study, two were associate professors with tenure, and one was a full professor with tenure. Five participants held leadership roles in programs and on campus.

Participants were ciswomen, though gender was not a criterion to participate. They identified as Latina, Black, Asian and Asian American, Indigenous, and multiracial. Gendered intersections with race thus became evident throughout data collection and analysis. In addition to participating in 1-2 interviews and writing love letters, research participants gathered for lunch and creative activities (1-3 times, depending on the person’s availability) and provided commentary on the artworks inspired by their stories and the themes of the research.

Data Collection, Analysis, and Creation Process

Creation and imagination were embedded in the full process of the project. Examples of “data” creation included:

  • Writing love letters to our past selves (these were handwritten, sometimes decorated, at times on special stationery or enclosed with photos or drawings or a poem).
  • Drawing on postcards and writing messages on the back–I sent these out to participants after the 2023 UCEA Convention;
  • Group activities (exquisite corpse stories constructed with each person writing a segment, only able to read three words that came before them);
  • Drawing, coloring, and poster-making during interviews.

Analysis included traditional methods of in vivo coding and categorizing; these were applied to transcripts of all recordings (interviews and group gatherings) as well as multimodal products (letters, photos, etc.). Analysis also included following steps of creating participant summary tables, analytic memoing of themes from coding, and peer discussion of guiding metaphors in individual participants’ data. All data were reviewed and coded by myself and my research assistant, while my research collaborator read all interviews and collaborated with me to develop thematic memos.

In addition, I listened to each interview recording 3-5 times, drawing and doodling phrases, images, feelings, and stories from the interviews. This practice of “listening with my fingers,” as my former advisor Mike Knapp used to say (personal communication, 2006-2011), generated ideas for the thematic memos and for the artworks I created later. Since data collection continued on an unstructured schedule depending on participants’ interests and availability, I was creating the artworks for the Art Immersion Experience between May 2024 and September 2025.

The initial plan included more collective time amongst the participants as a group. It was challenging to build community among research participants, though all were eager to join the project and they were comfortable sharing in one-on-one conversations. There were several possible reasons for the difficulty of gathering as a group, such as: capacity for new relationships, logistical conflicts in schedule, distrust of academic colleagues in general, being over-extended in work and life, and the difficulty of being vulnerable in front of others. Data collection felt like stolen time for both researcher and participants, especially for those with caregiving responsibilities, health challenges, disabilities, and other extenuating circumstances (including life celebrations) beyond workloads. Given the purpose of the project and my commitments to relational and cripped methodologies, I embraced the slowness of repeated encounters, even beyond the life of the grant.

The Art Immersion Experience at #UCEA25

The goal of the Art Immersion Experience is to provide an interactive space to engage with images that are drawn from the data, an alternative mode of presenting research findings that allows you to move, participate, comment, wonder, feel, and connect with other people around you. In addition to looking at the works at the Convention in person, please leave comments, attend a UCEA Art Salon, chat with people near you about what you notice, wonder, and feel, and take care of your bodymindspirits (yoon, 2022).

We are looking forward to engaging with scholarly colleagues in a new dimension.

If you post on Instagram, please use #UCEA25LoveLetters and #UCEAArtSalon so we can see what you post!

  1. The research reported in this exhibit catalog was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202200171). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation. ↩︎

References

Byrne-Jiménez, M. C., & Yoon, I. H. (2019). Leadership as an act of love: Leading in dangerous times. Frontiers in Education, 3, Article 117. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00117
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary). Continuum.
Haga, K. (2020). Healing resistance: A radically different response to harm. Parallax Press.
Kaba, M. (2021). We do this ’til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books.
Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Duke University Press.
Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge.
Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press.
Price, M., & Kerschbaum, S. L. (2016). Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked and Crip. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 5(3), 18–56. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v5i3.295
Springgay, S. (2022). Feltness: Research-creation, socially engaged art, and affective pedagogies. Duke University Press.
Venet, A. S. (2024). Becoming an everyday changemaker: Healing and justice at school. Routledge.
Yoon, I. H., & Chen, G. A. (2021). Heeding hauntings in research for mattering. In A. R. Tachine & Z. Nicolazzo (Eds.), Weaving an otherwise: In-relations methodological practice (pp. 76–91). Stylus.
yoon, i. h. (2022). Justice-in-the-doing: An epilogue on whiteness-at-work in higher education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 35(4), 438–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2025498

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