This book opens the door to the effects of intellectual, educational, and economic colonization of young children throughout the world. Using a postcolonial lens on current educational practices, the authors hope to lift those practices out of reproducing traditional power structures and push our thinking beyond the adult/child dichotomy into new possibilities for the lives that are created with children.

From the theory of ‘deliberative democracy’ to the politics of the ‘third way’, the present Zeitgeist is characterized by attempts to deny what Chantal Mouffe contends is the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Far from being signs of progress, such ideas constitute a serious threat to democratic institutions. Taking issue with John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on one side, and the political tenets of Blair, Clinton and Schröder on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of (...) modern liberal democracy in which the category of the ‘adversary’ plays a central role. She draws on the work of Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, to propose a new understanding of democracy which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism in its workings. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present (...) and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

With places at nursery school promised for every child above the age of four, this book raises the stakes by looking at the quality of what is provided, and how that compares to what should be provided. Beyond Quality In Early Childhood Education and Care challenges received wisdom and the tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical issues of measurement and management. In its place, it offers alternative ways of understanding early childhood, early childhood institutions and pedagogical (...) work. The book places issues of early childhood into a global context and relates them to writers from many fields. Drawing on work with aboriginal peoples in Canada, on the experience of Reggio-Emilia in Italy and on a project in Stockholm inspired by Reggio, the book considers the implications of these alternative ways of understanding, for practice and a reconceptualization of early childhood education and care. (shrink)

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its ...

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Considering the paradigm of modernity's three key concepts --law, power, and science--Santos argues for extensive epistemological shifts in the field of critical social thought. He traces the historical process by which both modern science and modern law lost the balance between social regulation and social emancipation inscribed originally in the paradigm of modernity. Pleading for a new dialogic rhetoric and moving back and forth between solid empirical work and highly innovative and far reaching theorizing, he deals with diverse topics.

A 1999 review of governmentality literature, derived from Foucault, which broke new ground in ethics and politics.

In this uplifting book, David Halpin suggests ways of putting the hope back into education, exploring the value of and need for utopian thinking in discussions of the purpose of education and school policy.

More than any other figure, Friedrich Nietzsche is cited as the philosopher who anticipates and previews the philosophical themes that have dominated French theory since structuralism. Informed by the latest developments in both contemporary French philosophy and Nietzsche scholarship, Alan Schrift's Nietzsche's French Legacy provides a detailed examination and analysis of the way the French have appropriated Nietzsche in developing their own critical projects. Using Nietzsche's thought as a springboard, this study makes accessible the ideas of some of the most (...) important and difficult of contemporary French poststructuralist theorists including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Helene Cixous. Through a careful analysis and close reading of the texts of Nietzsche and French poststructuralism, Schrift illuminates the ways in which Nietzsche's thought prefigures certain poststructuralist motifs. He demonstrates how several dominant themes in contemporary Frenchphilosophy emerge out of Nietzsche's own thinking. As one of the first books to critically examine the work of the new French anti-Nietzschean's, Schrift defends the value of poststructuralism and Nietzsche as critical resources for confronting the present. (shrink)

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Examines the implications of recent continental epistemology challenging the relationship between traditional, analytic, continental and postmodern understandings of science, showing that the challenging circumstances of the scientific project are transforming the role and meaning of science in the modern/postmodern world.

Discusses how cultural and economic changes around the world have caused a shift in the concepts that shape modern politics and defined the new global order.

This book marks a new and significant contribution to the debates surrounding the whole nature of care and citizenship. A new political concept of an ethics of care that will integrate themes from feminist ethics and gender theories is proposed.

This book offers some suggestions as to ways forward from this dilemma. Drawing on the new intellectual frameworks of critical pedagogy, feminism and postmodernism and their impact upon educational theory, practice and research, the book focuses on the changing contexts of adult education. By building on the notion of going beyond the limits of certain current adult education orthodoxies, the authors try to provide alternatives for practice. The final three chapters deal with research, focusing on a critical macro-analysis of mainstream (...) paradigms, a review of alternative approaches, and a more micro-analysis centering on the role of the socially-located self in the research process. (shrink)