Five children from the same family, did not show up in school today…their classmates, and teachers are devastated… The Migration Authority kept the mother after a meeting at their office...and her small children were sent home in a taxi to the father. And this morning the whole family were … by the police /…/ think they were sent to Germany… it will affect the budget… I need to sack teachers… (Principal A). 

And this is my passion. I love working in this environment, where diversity is everywhere… we do not talk about the… passion, the gratefulness, and the joy in these schools. And that is a pity (Principal B). 

The quotations, from interviews with principals leading schools in structurally disadvantaged areas in Sweden, reflect principals’ sense of “what is right and wrong” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 5) and the emotional knowledge that are part of contemporary educational practices. In this presentation attention is directed towards various forms of knowledge needed in educational leading practices to foster a socially just school. A particular emphasis is placed on emotions, which according to our understanding “do not belong to individuals but – in the form of knowledge - to practices” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 254). The aim in the presentation is to explore and discuss principals’ everyday work in Swedish schools, in nationally and globally volatile times. We are taking a site-ontological practice approach on leadership by using the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) to study principals’ work and how emotions come into play in the daily leading practices. Leadership is here understood as a practice comprised by sayings-doing-relatings (Langelotz, 2017, p. 25) hold in place by its architectures; the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2014).