ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author develops a set of readings and arguments with a view to rethinking what has been called the representation problem in and for curriculum inquiry. This is done with a twofold concerns, firstly to reassess the relationship between curriculum and politics, or the assertion of curriculum as a specific form of socially critical engagement and political praxis, and secondly as a contribution to curriculum theory and history. The chapter begins by asserting that curriculum inquiry as a distinctive field, emerging and consolidating over the past century, has from the outset been a modernist enterprise par excellence. The chapter claims that both Stephen Kemmis and Ulf Lundgren, and therefore the Deakin School more generally, were working with a quintessentially modernist notion of representation; moreover, that this was an only partially reconstructed modernism—one relatively untouched by the postmodernist challenge or indeed by poststructuralism; finally, that this is why the argument came up against a fundamental impasse.