Sight and Site of Belonging: How Leaders Can Adopt Roles as Placemakers

Abstract

School leadership has long relied on sight as control—an act of looking that disciplines, sorts, and contains. In US schools, seeing is never neutral. It is shaped by histories of surveillance, racialized oversight, and the quiet machinery of exclusion. Yet, young people refuse invisibility. Through small, embodied acts, they claim presence. They insist on being seen. This chapter invites a different way of seeing and a different way of leading. Drawing on placemaking, abolition geography, and the work of the Hunter College Collaborative for Social Emotional Learning & Leading, leadership is reimagined not as oversight, but as care—not as control, but as cultivation. Through a mirror–window–door framework, leaders turn inward, look outward, and step forward. They examine their stories, notice inequities, and co-create spaces of belonging. Here, belonging is not a feeling we carry alone. It is a place we make together. Leadership becomes the sacred work of shaping environments where freedom can be felt, held, and practiced again and again.