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Various authors have identified specific types of dark leadership. These types focus largely on the behaviors and impact of the dark leaders. In contrast, we introduce the notion of heretical leadership. The construct relies on the interpreted meanings of the wounded as opposed to actual leader actions. Heretical leadership violates the canon of educational organizations, which is to serve and uplift students. We share two stories of our own wounding in a dialogic fashion, drawing lessons from the intersection of the literature and our own stories. We identify and define scarring as stage distinct from wounding. Findings include suggestions for using story as a vehicle for healing and working to raise awareness of and embrace new perspectives, especially in regards to the nature of organizational systems.

The emotions of the aspirant leader are underexplored. In this chapter, we detail how aspirants experience the transition from teacher to leader and report on the kinds of emotional labour associated with the transition. This was examined during events of high emotional arousal for 130 school aspirants: when they felt professionally wounded, either by colleagues, leaders, parents or students. During a time of wounding, emotional work and emotional labour hinged on the dissonance between ‘display rules’ of the school and what aspirants’ actually felt. Exploring the wounding stories revealed common display rules, which were often broken. Breaking these rules always had consequences and emotional correlates. The most prevalent form of emotional labour was surface acting. The final discovery was the resilience of the aspirants as they recovered. Invariably, aspirants progressed through an emotion cycle of Regrouping, Recovery and Resolution. The quality of collegial relationships was the key to resolving the woundings.

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

Often new principals approach their first appointments with a high expectation to make their mark by introducing changes that would lead to school improvement. However, these expectations may be void of thoughts of how an inherited school culture may weigh on their emotions and upset their notions about principalship on a daily basis. Emerging from a multiple case study research design, in which a critical incident technique was the main source of data on new principals’ emotional experiences, the findings show that the new principals experienced predominantly negative emotions and wounding, often linked to pre-formed expectations of school members. Also, influenced by a need to protect their leadership authority, they selected which emotions to disclose versus which to suppress. These findings as drawn from a broader study conducted in Trinidad and Tobago imply a need for training and continuing professional development that would support aspirant and practising principals’ emotion regulation.

This chapter focuses on women's descriptions of their own violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, as revealed in prisoner petitions held in the National Archives of Ireland. It uses the case files of women imprisoned or sentenced to death for violent crimes such as infanticide, manslaughter, murder, wounding and assault. This chapter takes an empirical approach and considers the ways that women explained and rationalised their violent acts. An analysis of the petitions offers an insight into women's views of their own violence, gendered attitudes at the time, and women's sense of the factors that might lead to a commutation of sentence. The accuracy or truthfulness of the petitions is not important in this study; instead, the chapter explores the self-image that women wanted to portray and the tactics that they opted to use to seek a reduction in their sentences. As shown in this chapter, most women emphasised their passivity: they typically claimed to be innocent, coerced or provoked into violence.

Under Anglo-American law, the consent of the masochist furnishes no defense to a charge of assault arising from sadomasochistic sexual practices. Our unwillingness to recognize consent in this context suggests disquiet with the ways in which S/M reflects the operations of law. Although the case law casts the masochist as a victim, other accounts represent masochism as a forceful enactment of submission. Masochism also challenges certain ideals of masculinity central to legal reason. Misgivings about the legitimacy of consent to S/M find a useful analogy in critiques of psychoanalytic treatment that understand consent in that context as irreducibly fraught.

The burnt-out Grenfell tower is a symbol of trauma and sacrificed lives. The brutalist block as a technology of trauma, viewed through its mediated depictions, reveals its condemned predicament between slippages in bureaucracy and governance. Through the formal enquiry into the disaster, the Grenfell victims' trauma is revived, replayed and contained within an archive in which victimhood is captured in a number of stages. The charred remains of the tower as a chronotrope of trauma and of lives cut short yields readings into the politics of social housing, gentrification and social displacement. The testimonials from Grenfell are temporally elongated both through the public review but also in the traces of victims' narratives left on social media in real time through flesh witnessing and as an online repository of death narratives. As a tower of trauma and as the forensic evidence of a disaster, Grenfell is part of the iconography of the ‘blackened’ and their necroaesthetics.

In 2020, the Westminster Government proposed statutory provision prohibiting the use of ‘consent to serious harm for sexual gratification’ as a defence to criminal charges of violence. This addition to the Domestic Abuse bill was made in response to the 18 month campaign by We Can’t Consent To This and a cross party group of MPs, after rising numbers of homicides of women where the perpetrators claimed the woman asked for the violence, in ‘rough sex’, ‘gone wrong’.

This research is based on new data and detailed analysis on 67 non-fatal violent assaults and 24 homicides where the accused claimed that this violence was consensual, focussing on criminal cases in England and Wales over the 10 years from 2010. Some earlier cases are included for historical context and particularly where they became influential in later Criminal Justice System (CJS) outcomes. It addresses a shortage of data on the use of ‘consent’ claims in defence to charges of fatal and non-fatal violence, using keyword searches on historic news and legal archives and submissions from victims in criminal cases to establish the extent of these claims, the nature of the assaults claimed consensual, and to assess the CJS’s response to the claims.

This research – part of the evidence from We Can’t Consent To This which was considered by Government – set out the case for new law on consent defences to violence, despite there being existing common law in England and Wales. This research finds that the so-called ‘rough sex’ defences have been successful in deflecting prosecution for violence against women for decades, identifying failings at every stage of the CJS, in fatal and non-fatal violent assaults. Notably the women injured in these criminal cases do not agree that they consented to the violence, where they are able to take part in criminal proceedings. But still the claims that they did appear to have succeeded.

This research proposes that change in attitudes and outcomes is needed at every stage of the CJS, and, with the UK Government proposing to keep the criminal law on this ‘under review’, identifying where further provision in law or in practice may be needed.

During the four years of preliminary meetings that led to the 1977 Protocols Additional I and II governing internal armed conflict, the prohibitions against superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering – two concepts that gird the regulation and moderation of war and limit the use of certain means and methods of warfare – were invoked as a means of calling into account the actions of imperial states. These meetings took place in the context of the conflicts in Southeast Asia, following the wars of decolonization and national liberation in the 1950s and 1960s. The participants in these meetings were freedom fighters and liberation movements who used this forum, which was open to them for the first time, to push for a wider understanding of the concepts of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. Their intention was to hold imperialism and imperial states accountable for suffering and injury beyond that of physical death or wounding and to recognize the violence of colonization and the social and cultural devastation it brought. These interventions were a critical attempt to broaden and deepen the meaning of the laws of war, to make them responsive to more than established sovereign state violence, and to ensure that they reflected the experience of colonization/decolonization. This episode matters because the prohibitions against unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury are two elements that detail the general prohibition first codified in 1907 Hague Convention IV, Article 22, namely that the “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” However, the history and formulation of these two concepts has yet to be fully explored, the meaning of each is debated, and taken together the two are among “the most unclear and controversial rules of warfare.”