The genesis of a book project comes about in various ways – sometimes from reading, from conversations with colleagues and students, thoughts about a news story, and personal observations of or even inclusion in events. But this project came about in an odd and circuitous way. For another project, I was browsing through humanistic psychologies and thought of Erich Fromm, whose work I read years ago, primarily Escape from Freedom (1983, published in the UK originally as Fear of Freedom) and which shaped some of my thinking about educational administration. In fact, it was one of many required texts that Christopher Hodgkinson included in his doctoral seminars, along with many other classics in the primary disciplines of psychology, sociology, political science, and philosophy that shape the educational administration field. And, then I wondered if anyone in the field was still referencing Fromm. I found in a google search a recent piece by Ken Saltman in which he discussed the importance of Fromm's work. In the way, than Ken wrote the paragraphs, an image I hadn’t thought of for some time popped into my mind's eye – Munch's painting The Scream. Perhaps it was the topics I was writing about, probably a chapter on the conditions of education in war-torn countries like Syria and Yemen, but the image stuck, and I began wondering why it resonated so strongly.

I sent out an email that I had never sent before – I attached a copy of The Scream and wrote to colleagues I had worked with on projects before, asking them what they would write for a book with this image on the cover. I was overloaded with work at the time and wasn’t sure that this would become anything concrete, and after sending the email returned to a long list of work to do. Within 72 hours, I had received enough replies, including suggested chapter titles, to fill a Routledge collection.

Because of the image, the topics that came in were of personal significance. And, because of this, the collection used various styles of writing, from a more conventional academic paper to a more literary essay style. Because Munch's work expresses existential Angst, I decided as an editor to allow for the greatest freedom in style and approach. For my part, I returned to a metaphor that had been significant for me in my earlier life when I read many existential authors in my undergraduate philosophy years such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Buber, along with existential novels, short stories and dramas from Kafka, Dostoevsky, Beckett, Camus (2013), and Hesse, and Kundera (see Aho 2020). I also watched films with existential themes in film studies that were popular among university students and professors during the 1960s and 1970s like the original Solaris (1972) by Tarkovsky, Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Kubrick's 2001 (1968). I then checked a few major databases for recent academic publications and found that the abyss was back in vogue. The increased interest in existential topics in a number of fields recently indicates that socio-political conditions are such again that existential problems have returned.

Existentialism is an approach that is relevant in many ways, communicated through popular culture and used in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other fields to address fundamental qualities of our human condition and the threats it encounters to existence. Existentialism was a commonplace perspective in the mid-twentieth century, found in many fields in the university curriculum of the 1960s and 1970s including education. Disorder and destruction of meaning on social, cultural, political, and other levels of personal and societal construction as critiques of fundamental meaning on an existential level were threatened in the mid-twentieth century. This was regarded by the Frankfurt School, having grappled with fascism, as one form of existential abyss, which led to members developing a critique based upon a political economy descent of many countries into mass consumerist capitalism that augured ill for humanity on many levels and expressing itself in the arts, popular culture, and social institutions (Jeffries 2017).

However, existentialism was eclipsed by structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and the more objectified forms of behaviourism and later reductionistic neoliberalism. Himmelfarb (1994) examined a number of intellectual movements that had disengaged themselves from a value-based foundation (e.g., postmodernism) resulting in them not being able to substantively critique political ideologies that lead to mass or pervasive violence and meaninglessness.

Although the legacies of existentialism were incorporated into critical race theory and many postcolonial critiques like that of Fanon (1965), interest in it waned for at least twenty years. But existentialism is having a renaissance in many disciplines and fields, evident in searches in databases like Google Scholar and book vendors like Amazon in reaction to many levels of existential threat (detailed below). Sadly, existentialism becomes popular when the being and welfare of humanity is at stake, acting much like a canary in a mine, presaging destruction – in this case of social institutions. In other words, literature from many fields is again emitting a scream against meaninglessness. The field of educational administration and leadership has yet to fully tackle the extremism in economics and politics, in culture and social norms and structures, and the encroachment of the digital world, all threatening traditions and structures of meaning.

The purpose of this volume is to explore approaches, problems, and issues that have arisen over the last few decades involving existential crises and threats arising from these causes internationally. These include a disparate range such as neoliberalism and the market model, globalisation, the decline or erosion of democratic systems of government, replaced with populism or other forms of authoritarianism (e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), cultural and social shifts, forced migration, geopolitical tensions (including state actor hacking and disinformation to destabilise target countries), and digitalisation of the socio-cultural sphere. This is a topical area of growing concern in the general management and leadership literature, a number of professional fields like social work, and some areas of education (detailed discussion below), but little discussed in education. These same tensions and problems arise in education but are generally not characterised as existential – rather dealt with as a legal, political, cultural, social, or religious problem or from neoliberal managerialism as a technical issue. As other fields find the existential dimensions of these forces meaningful to analyse, this volume explores on an existential level the effects these forces have on education.

Already, titles like Peter Fleming's (2021) Dark Academia: How Universities Die, are appearing signalling the destructive influences of neoliberalism over the last few decades (despite decades of critique and warnings) on the psychological welfare of staff and students, alienating them from intellectual autonomy, the art and craft of scholarship, and meaningful values of an academic life and pursuits, or John Smyth's (2017) The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology examining the destructive effects of market models on university administration, collegial culture, intellectual standards of knowledge, and produced inequalities. Essentially, in existential terms, neoliberalism and many other socio-political movements that undermine the value of knowledge (e.g., ‘alternative facts’) destroy fundamental values and activities that make us human, according to McMullin (2019), those experiential parts of our human activity that allow us to make the normative claims of intersubjective answerability, self-fulfilment, and moral responsibility.

This chapter first describes existentialism, identifying its major figures, key concepts and questions as well as existential threats we face in the contemporary world, its value and use in a number of disciplines and fields that are foundational to educational administration and leadership, and how it has been used in education. The chapter concludes with an overview of the chapters in this collection.

While existentialism is associated with thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its origins go back historically a long way. Aho (2020) traces key concepts in Hebraic and classical Greek texts, but even earlier ideas associated with existentialism appeared in the earliest narrative text that has survived, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, dating to approximately 3000 BCE that grappled with topics like death, the search for meaning, anxiety, absurdism, authenticity, and meaninglessness in much the same way that Kierkegaard, Buber, and Heidegger have (Sadigh 2010). As Sadigh (2010) explains, these topics being encountered in a self-aware and philosophical way are as old as human civilisation and the emergence of self-reflection. Reflection on the most fundamental level of the human condition has been with us as long as homo sapiens, and recent indications show that Neanderthal, one of our ancestors, also grappled with meaning construction (e.g., Finlayson 2019; Sykes 2020).

Existentialism is most associated with key concepts that it explores from our experiential life that present problems for the nature of our being (Dasein): the absurd, death, alienation, nothingness, meaninglessness, absurdities, authenticity, the nausea of utter existence without human meaning formation attached, individual freedom and the responsibilities that incur, and deep anxiety about our existence referred to as existential ‘Angst’ (Crowell 2012a). Out of this confrontation arise authenticity and commitment, and a deep sense of being and self-understanding that inform meaning construction, the formation of values, and an intense moral sensibility, as well as an emphasis on our individual choices in these expressing a free will, courage and the responsibilities we assume as individuals for all thoughts and actions (Hanaway 2019, 2020). This requires a focus on subjectivity and a constant self-awareness not only of usual conscious activity, but learning to read deeper into oneself for rationalisations, denials, projection, and other self-defence mechanisms that motivate us when we feel or imagine be...