Exploring alternative futures: Performative and affective thresholds and cuts in leadership education

Public-sector leaders navigate complex, paradoxical demands and are under the imperative to improve citizens’ lives. This article explores how arts-based, performative, and affective education can scaffold leaders’ imagining of utopian work futures (Levitas, 2013, 2017). Drawing on a teaching day in an 8-day leadership course, field notes, a conference paper, and a follow-up interview 1 year later, classroom events are analyzed as performative and affective thresholds and as enacted educational cuts that enable or hinder the imagination of alternative work futures. It builds on post-qualitative and posthuman methodologies and performative learning theory (Barad, 2007; Dahl et al., 2024; Østern et al., 2019; Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). This article offers insight into how educational thresholds and design cuts enable or hinder utopian imagination in leadership education (Levitas, 2013, 2017), and how educators and researchers can explore the threshold between actual and potential utopian futures through affective attunement and resonance.