Recent emphases on prospects for difference-sensitive virtual communities rely implicity or explicity on some optimist accounts of cyberspace and globalization. It is expected that hybridity, diaspora and fluidity, marking new understandings of spatiality and temporality in a globalized postmodern era, will create new forms of belonging that will…

Comparative education, as an eclectic field, contains flexible boundaries whose contours are often difficult to discern. Are the boundaries of comparative education wide enough (or, perhaps better said, narrow enough) to make it a "science"? Should it be largely a policy-driven field, or should it focus mainly on theory? How…

This article concerns the usefulness of postmodernity for illuminating change in higher education associated with the new millennium. Overarching is the notion that history is not a smooth, rational, progressive unfolding of events but a series of ruptures and fragmenting disjunctures. This article asserts that when viewed in epochal terms, the…

At the same time as the postmodern call to reexamine traditional notions of scholarship blazed new paths through many disciplines, art museum education was a field in transition. From the 1970s through the mid 1990s, the writings of art museum educators revealed changing and contested beliefs regarding their pedagogical purposes. This study…

The purpose of this article is to attempt to reclaim the concept of foundations of power as a framework of analysis and as an approach to influencing policy. The first section briefly re-examines the policy area that developed in the late 20th century United States and suggests that it was an illusion based on a small area of consensus and a large…

Researchers on creativity and psychology have long been fascinated with the high incidence of psychotic behavior amongst geniuses and individuals of exceptional creativity. The aims of this paper are first, to review the existing findings for a better insight into the socio-contextual factors underpinning the mad genius conundrum, and secondly, to…

In preparation for this lecture, the author read, among other studies, previous Sargent, Homans, and Hannah lectures. These papers read well, and, they continue to inform people today. Importantly, these lecturers addressed timely issues that confronted physical education in higher education and to some extent shaped the field as one now knows it.…

For a generation or more, environmental education discourses have been constructed around persistent Cartesian dualisms of modernist thought that divide an "othered" category of being from that of a constituted homogeneous human identity. During the same period, both feminist and poststructuralist theorizing has acted to destabilize the…

Postmodernism, by whatever label, is intellectually bankrupt. It cannot be reconciled with a scientific view. If taken seriously, it leads to catastrophic consequences for any field of study, including special education. It also leads to malpractice in special education. Whole language instruction, radical multicultural education, and facilitated…

We review the research on intimate partner abuse and, in particular, the articles in this issue, from within a feminist and postmodern framework. Research on women's use of violence is reviewed in terms of how researchers have constructed and measured violence and have conceptualized intimate partner violence (IPV) and gender. What and how we…

This article suggests utilizing dialectical imagery, as understood by German social philosopher Walter Benjamin, as an additional qualitative data analysis strategy for research into the postmodern condition. The use of images mined from research data may offer epistemological transformative possibilities that will assist in the demystification of…

Through a case study of a key Canadian early childhood education program, The Kindergarten Program (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 1998a), we explore the relationship between curricular paradigms and early childhood education (ECE) models, and the opportunities that each creates for enacting ethical teaching and learning…

Within the sphere of contemporary social sciences, the terms "modernity," "post-modernity" and "globalization" have penetrated, as the core concepts, into various fields of social sciences in a logical way. In constituting the concept of "modernity," sociology of education develops the educational theory, as sociological theory does, into a "grand…

This article examines the ethical conundrum of educational decision makers when faced with a plethora of conflicting value-based decisions. It offers an analysis of a well-known fable as the foil to demonstrate the problematic nature of ethical relativism and postmodern ethics in resolving that conundrum, while advocating the use of five core…

The National Research Council report "Scientific Research in Education" claims to present an inclusive view of science as it responds to federal government attempts to legislate educational research. This author argues, however, that the report in fact narrowly defines "science" as positivism and "methodology" as quantitative. These definitions…