This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education…

We live in an age in which the destruction of the environment has become a major concern. However, until recently, environmental problems have not become a major issue for the philosophy of education. The reason for this is that for a very long time the philosophy of education was intimately related to the concept of nature as the foundation and…

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 conversation is the first systemic attempt to capture Peter McLaren's ideas about the relationships between critical revolutionary pedagogy and virtuality. It introduces the main problems with educational postmodernism, explains Peter's return towards the Marxist-humanist trajectory, and addresses contemporary challenges to…

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…

This article considers the relationship between technology, utopia and scholarly life in Hermann Hesse's novel, "The Glass Bead Game." In the first part of Hesse's book, the Glass Bead Game and the society of which it is a part, Castalia, are portrayed in idealistic terms. The second part of the novel chronicles the educational life of Joseph…

In this article, the author merges biographical notes, autoethnography and experimental writing to situate his migrant self as a self that "performs through writing," i.e. planned, experimental writing that subverts the centrality of the monolingual heterosexual identity. He explores the intersections of time, desire, and power across…

The modern university developed as an institution legitimated by external referents, including national culture and its emancipatory potential. Today's university, however, has been largely destabilized as these referents have become, at the very least, significantly less compelling relative to larger concerns about economic competitiveness 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:…

Edward Said the refugee could not easily allow himself to join in the celebration of demythologizing nationalism. His Palestinianism had to coexist, uncomfortably, with his universalism. Time made this necessary coexistence an asset, not a liability, and this in fact was his political legacy for the future: Jews and Palestinians would have to…

Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of loss, exile, and the deceiving "home-returning" projects accepts that no positive Utopia awaits us as "truth", "genuine life", "worthy struggle", "pleasure" or worthy self-annihilation. Loss is not to be recovered or compensated; not for the individual nor for any kind of "we". And yet,…

This research presents traditional cultural heritage (CH) as a dynamic social process--a positive feedback loop enhancing cultural identity and institutional authority through a contested authoritative inclusion of the "objects" it comprises. It then focuses on one part of that process, the individuals' construction of their CH, and…