School Leadership in the Borderlands: From Epistemicide to Cognitive Justice?

This study emerges from the borderlands—zones of epistemic marginalization where both knowledge and subjectivities are rendered peripheral. It positions itself against the epistemological imperialism of mainstream, positivist educational leadership research, which continues to colonize scholarly discourse through managerialist logics and methodological monism. At the same time, it draws from a literal and symbolic borderland: public schools in Türkiye's southern provinces where refugee students from Syria experience profound epistemic exclusion within national education systems. These schools are not only geographical peripheries, but also sites where hybrid identities and knowledge forms struggle for recognition. Framed through the lens of cognitive justice, the study interrogates how school leaders engage—or fail to engage—with the cultural and epistemological presence of refugee students. Drawing on a qualitative case study in Mersin, it employs critical realist thematic analysis to examine leadership responses to these borderland conditions. Three thematic strata are identified: (1) experiential practices shaped by institutional constraints, (2) inferential patterns that align with assimilationist discourses and perpetuate epistemicide, and (3) dispositional logics embedded in neoliberal and neoconservative governance regimes. Despite structural limitations, moments of critical reflexivity surface, revealing a nascent epistemic sensitivity among some school leaders. These moments suggest the possibility of reimagining school leadership as dialogical, decolonial, and grounded in epistemological plurality. By voicing from within the margins, this study challenges dominant paradigms and calls for an educational leadership that not only accommodates diversity but affirms the epistemic agency of those long positioned at the edges of knowing.