The essays in this volume explore the educational implications of unsettling shifts in contemporary culture associated with postmodernism. These shifts include the fragmentation of established power blocs, the emergence of a politics of identity, growing inequalities between the haves and the have-nots in a new global economy, and the rise in influence of popular culture in defining who we are. In the academy, postmodernism has been associated with the emergence of new theoretical perspectives that are unsettling the way we think about education. These shifts, the authors suggest, are deeply contradictory and may lead in divergent political directions?some of them quite dangerous. Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy examines these issues with regard to four broad domains of educational inquiry: state educational policy and curriculum reform, student identity formation, the curriculum as a text, and critical pedagogy. The book contributes to the dialogue on the forging of a new commonsense discourse on democratic educational renewal, attuned to the changing times in which we live.

Series Editors' Preface -- Introduction: Critical Educational Theory in Unsettling Times -- State Educational Policy and Curriculum Reform in Unsettling Times -- Education in Unsettling Times: Public Intellectuals and the Promise of Cultural Studies -- Pulp Fictions? Education, Markets, and the Information Superhighway -- Citizens or Consumers? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Education Policy -- Respondent: "Distressed Worlds"-Social Injustice Through Educational Transformations -- Education, Identity, and the Other -- Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements -- On Shaky Grounds: Constructing White Working-Class Masculinities in the Late Twentieth Century -- Self and Education: Reversals and Cycles -- Respondent: Self Education-Identity, Self, and the New Politics of Education -- Reading Curriculum Texts -- Danger in the Safety Zone: Notes on Race, Resentment, and the Discourse of Crime, Violence, and Suburban Security -- Fiction, Fantasy, and Femininities: Popular Texts and Young Women's Literacies -- Image Is Nothing: Struggling to Unsettle Basal Readers and More -- Respondent: Loose Change-The Production of Texts -- Pedagogy and Empowerment -- On the Limits to Empowerment Through Critical and Feminist Pedagogies -- Who Will Survive America? Pedagogy as Cultural Preservation -- Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility -- Respondent: Pedagogy for an Oppositional Community