International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 21, No. 2, March–April 2008, 123–136 ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518390701470669 http://www.informaworld.com Re-presenting women and leadership: a methodological journey Jane Wilkinson a * and Jill Blackmore b a Charles Sturt University, Australia; b Deakin University, Australia Taylor and Francis TQSE_A_246945.sgm 10.1080/09518390701470669 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 0951-8398 (print)/1366-5898 (online) Original Article 2007 Taylor & Francis 00 0000002007 JaneWilkinson jawilkinson@csu.edu.au Research on women’s leadership has tended to focus upon detailed micro studies of individual women’s identity formation or, alternatively, to conduct macro studies of its broader discursive constructions within society. Both approaches, although providing helpful understandings of the issues surrounding constructions of women’s leadership, are inadequate. They fail to deal with the ongoing dilemma raised in both Cultural Studies and studies of discourse and identity, in relation to the negotiation of subjectivity and representation, that is, how broader societal discourses and media representations of women’s leadership both inform, and are informed by, the lived experiences of individual women. In this article, a range of methodological approaches are outlined that were drawn upon in a study of a small group of senior women academics from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse origins. The authors examine how the women negotiated the frequent mismatch that arose between, on the one hand, societal discourses and media representations which often reproduced narrow and highly stereotypical accounts of women’s leadership, and on the other hand, the individual women’s subjective experiences of leadership which challenged such representations. It is contended that it is necessary to draw on a number of methodological perspectives in ways which trouble and unsettle homogenized versions of women’s leadership in order to fully explicate more nuanced and complex ways of understanding how women’s leadership identity is formed. Introduction Much of the research on women and leadership in education and other organizations addresses the macro or broader societal dimensions of gendered discursive constructions of women. Alternatively, it does a fine-grained analysis of the micropolitics of organizational life focusing on individual women leaders and/or individual organizational cultures and structures. While both approaches are useful ways of constructing the problem of women’s positioning as leaders, each of the perspectives is, in itself, methodologically inadequate in that they limit and constrain understandings of women’s leadership formation to institutional contexts. Moreover, they over- look how women’s leadership is situated by broader social, cultural and political discourses including those circulating within the fields of education and, in particular, the media (Thomas 2002;Wilkinson 2005). In this article, we draw on notions of field, habitus and symbolic violence (Wacquant 1989; Bourdieu 1990a) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995a, 1995b) in order to explore the discursive articulations between the micro (the identity formation of individ- ual women leaders in specific organizations) and the macro (how women leaders as a group are discursively represented in the media and society). This is done through a study, which examined * Corresponding author. Dr. Jane Wilkinson, Charles Sturt University, School of Education, Locked Bag S88, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia, 2678. Email: jawilkinson@csu.edu.au This manuscript was accepted for publication by Bromuyn Davies, QSE’s regional editor for Australia and New Zealand in March 2007.