Giving voice to the experience of minority or minoritized leaders in time of crisis, including war, protracted insecurity, economic deprivation, forced migration, natural disasters, and public health emergencies, this volume examines how leadership is enacted, negotiated, and transformed across diverse and often fragile educational contexts.

Positioning minority and minoritized leaders at the forefront of crisis response, this volume brings together empirically grounded studies from a wide range of geopolitical and cultural settings, including Finland, Israel, Poland, Georgia, South Africa, Ghana, Malaysia, the Thailand–Myanmar border, the United States, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria, Uganda, and Türkiye.

Across these contexts, contributors explore how leaders operate within conditions of resource scarcity, political tension, displacement, and infrastructural fragility, while sustaining educational continuity and community cohesion. This volume is structured around three major crisis domains: (1) economic and resource-based crises, including workforce shortages and marginalization in peripheral regions; (2) security tensions and wartime realities, where school leaders act as mediators of identity, discourse, and belonging; and (3) environmental, health and infrastructural crises, including pandemics, natural disasters, and ecological vulnerability. By foregrounding leadership practices emerging from the margins, this volume advances a nuanced understanding of crisis as a structural and recurring condition rather than an exceptional event. It highlights the adaptive, culturally embedded, and often under-recognized forms of leadership enacted by minoritized educators, offering both theoretical insights and practical implications for educational leadership, policy, and resilience in uncertain times.

This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of educational leadership, comparative education, multicultural education, and conflict and crisis studies.

Mary Gutman is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Educational Management and Organization at Michlalah Jerusalem College, Israel, where she has supervised dozens of graduate research projects. Her research focuses on educational leadership, minority and marginalized teachers, multiculturalism and educational resilience, and school leadership in times of crisis. She initiated and serves as co-convener of the World Education Research Association (WERA) International Research Network on Minority and Minoritised Teachers: Exploring Social Justice in Schools Around the World and has led several international collaborative research projects spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.