ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the movement of qualitative inquiry across the field of educational research. It focuses on the reconfiguration of educational research, and also the contributions of the transdisciplinary movements of feminism and post-structuralism in the development of critical frames in educational research. The chapter sketches the parameters of feminist research and addresses the vexed questions of a distinct feminist research method and feminist contributions to what calls "the objectivity debates". The empirical work being done by feminists in education spans the gamut. Post-structuralism's focus is on the remainder, all that is left over after the systematic categorizations have been made. For such French post-structuralists as Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, structuralism's basic thesis of the universal and unconscious laws of human society and of the human mind was part of the bureaucratic and technocratic systems they opposed.
