This article reinterprets Lyotard's argument in "The Postmodern Condition" as a basis for a radical political economy approach to knowledge capitalism focusing on post-industrialism in order to put the case that education and knowledge are increasingly becoming part of a globally integrated world capitalism (IWC) that is structured through…

This reproduces, for fun, a conversation between three professors at the University of Illinois, that originated at a dinner party over a couple of bottles of good red wine.

This article argues for the adoption of a new language in critical educational studies through the "narrative turn", a turn that politicizes knowledge by drawing attention to questions concerning the meaning, construction and authorship of narratives. In the authors' interpretation going back to the poetics of early narrative forms they…

This is a dialogue or conversation between Michael Baker (MB) and Michael A. Peters (MP) on the concept of modernity and its significance for educational theory. The dialogue took place originally as a conversation about a symposium on modernity held at the American Educational Studies Association meeting 2010. It was later developed for…

This is an experiment in conversation on the topic of "a post-occidental globe". It emerges from a moderated discussion group where members of a class--master's and PhD students--reflected upon a set of resources provided as part of a course in Global Studies in Education at the University of Illinois. The conversation threads were moderated and…

The term "postmodernism" has recently been used to describe President Barack Obama, and not by just one commentator. Jonah Goldberg in a recent USA Today column, the author of "Liberal Fascism," advanced the notion that Obama is a postmodernist. Webster Griffin Tarpley, Bruce Marshall & Jonathon Mowat (2008) have written a book entitled "Obama:…

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces--extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions--so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Michael A. Peters has…

This paper argues that Wittgenstein considered himself an exile and indeed was a self-imposed exile from his native Vienna; that this condition of exile is important for understanding Wittgenstein the man and his philosophy; and that exile as a condition has become both a central characteristic condition of late modernity (as much as alienation…

This article presents the author's critique on Paul G. Woodford's positions with regard to music education and the notion of liberal democracy. The author seeks to broaden the contextual/historical scholarship around John Dewey and makes it clear that liberalism is a contested concept, as is democracy. He calls for contemporary responses to…

This paper argues the Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is to be interpreted as a response to nihilism, especially in relation to the question of the legitimation of knowledge and the so-called crisis of narratives, and that, therefore, it provides an appropriate response to the question of nihilism in educational philosophy. The paper begins…

This paper examines the neoconservative critique of the university and particularly the attack on multiculturalism and postmodernism that initiated the culture wars. It seeks to explain these developments by an analysis of the thought of Leo Strauss. The paper begins by providing an introduction to US neoconservatism and latest challenges to it…

It is one of the uninvestigated central ironies of the new critical science driven by French theory that one of its major sources of theoretical inspiration is British analytic philosophy and especially the "linguistic" philosophy of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both Lyotard (1984) and Foucault (1978), for example, use and adapt…

This article examines the "politics of difference," a phrase now almost synonymous with postmodernism and the critique of the Enlightenment. The article provides a post-structuralist take on this critique arguing that a critique of Enlightenment values can lead to a deepening of democracy and using Foucault's notion of governmentality to elucidate…

Fast knowledge can be considered part of fast capitalism, especially an emergent new generic form of capitalism based increasingly on forms of symbolic capital associated with the rise of global finance and associated with new information and communication technologies. In this essay, the authors first theorise fast knowledge in relation to fast…