ABSTRACT
This chapter explores life politics, a concept which encapsulates, and serves as a repository for, the constants of Ivor Goodson’s scholarship and his life. Ivor uses the concept of repositioning to articulate the way in which forces that operate on a macro level change the meaning of actions on the micro level, even when the action itself remains constant. In Ivor’s view the conditions of postmodernity and the loss of the mediating membrane of institutions created a particular historical moment. Accompanied by, and reflected in, a greater role for personal narrative as a vehicle for articulating the reflexive self, he saw the developments as both ‘peril and promise’. Ivor’s account of a meeting, many years later, with the teacher who had been so influential in the course of his life provided a fresh perspective. The catalyst for much of Ivor’s thinking on the implications of the failure of education reform was a research project in Canada and the United States.
