ABSTRACT
Postmodernism is a counter-Enlightenment discourse against the subject-centered reason of the Enlightenment, i.e. the rationality based on ‘the belief that there is objective truth and that appropriate methods of inquiry [employed by the autonomous subject] can bring us accurate and certain knowledge of that truth’ (Crotty, 2003, p. 42). The subject is considered sovereign and capable of finding objective truth through ‘scientific’ methods. This subject-centered epistemological paradigm prevalent in the age of the Enlightenment is what postmodernism was critical of and deconstructed. While it is difficult to find an agreed-upon meaning of postmodernism, it is usually characterized as ‘contingent, pluralistic, ambiguous, freed (or jettisoned) from the certainties of yesterday, decentered, [and] noisy with previously unheard voices’ (Lincoln & Denzin, 2003, p. 632). The postmodernist thought is employed to challenge claims to absolutism and universalism. Therefore, the long-taken-for-granted authorities and metanarratives are called into question.
