ABSTRACT
My analysis draws on a broad band of conversations that I collectively call postmodern social and political theory.2 While I recognize that the word postmodem conjures up strong emotions and images to many readers, my purpose is not to celebrate the "challengers" but to read across disciplinary literatures to interrogate the arguments and politics of knowledge in the social and educational sciences. This type of inquiry, a "social epistemology," is to understand that the stakes of educational research are social and political as well as epistemological (Popkewitz 1991).
