ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to revisit the general criteria that distinguish educational ethnography, curriculum, and pedagogy as a critical enterprise. The temporary and situated asymmetries in these new classrooms reflect the necessary social and pedagogical relationships upon which an emancipatory pedagogy is grounded. Emancipatory pedagogies require that our practice as researchers and as pedagogues needs to be identified as transpiring within a systemic entity known as global capitalism. One also needs to view multiculturalism in terms of the larger picture, that is, from the reference point of the new world system. As Stanley Aronowitz and DiFazio argue, active citizenship in the form of self-governance and autonomous agency is impossible without material preconditions, and that means the creation of economic equality on a national level. The postmodern state also goes beyond the modern state's production of commodities through the exploitation of labor and through economic planning and regulation.
