Using a theoretical and historical investigation, this study presents a poststructuralist critique of subject-centred reason against the background of the modernity/postmodernity and "information society" debates.

What does poststructuralism mean for authors such as Foucault, Lyotard, Cixous, Derrida, and Haraway, to name a few, and what significance does it have for educational inquiry? This book takes on these central questions and explores the impact of postructuralism in language that makes the basic issues at stake accessible for a broad readership. Michael A. Peters and Nicholas C. Burbules highlight the implications of a postructuralist stance for the conception of the research subject and examine its standards of validity and methods of investigation.

Offering an introduction to the major poststructuralist thinkers, this text shows how Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek expose the depoliticization found in conventional international relations theory. poststructuralists are concerned with the big questions of international politics: it is precisely their work that analyzes the political and explains the processes of depoliticization and technologization.

Poststructuralism—as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing—has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers.

This book has been quite long in the making. In its original format, but with some different chapters, and with the then publisher, it foundered (as did other volumes in the planned series). At the in press stage, when we obviously thought it was going ahead, it was suddenly canned. Quite distraught I closed it away in a desk drawer for a year or so. But then Joy Carp of Kluwer Academic Publishers expressed an interest in it, and we were in business again. Most of the contributors to the original volume have stayed with it, only to be delayed by myself, for a variety of reasons (but see the dedication). I had been writing on Michel Foucault for a number of years but had become concerned about mis-appropriations of his ideas and works in educational literature. I was also concerned about the increasingly intemperate babble in that literature of the notion of postmodernism. Indeed at one major educational conference in North America I listened to a person expounding postmodernism in terms of ‘Destroy, Destroy, Destroy’. Like Michel Foucault I am not quite sure what postmodernism is, but following Mark Poster’s account of poststructuralism - as merely a collective term to catch a number of French thinkers – I thought that what we had to do in education was to look at what particular thinkers had said, and not become involved in vapid discussion at an abstract level on ‘-isms’. Thus the book was conceived.

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Poststructuralism, Citizenship and Social Policy shows how poststructuralist ideas can be usefully applied in the areas of welfare, health, education and science and technology policy, making particular reference to the theme of citizenship. The impact of poststructuralism on thinking in the social sciences and humanities over the last decade has been profound. However, to date, there has been little systematic analysis of the implications of poststructuralism for the critical analysis of social policy. Poststructuralism, Citizenship and Social Policy will provide essential reading for students and researchers working in the areas of welfare studies, the sociology of health and medicine, political studies, social work, social administration and education.