After postmodernism in educational theory? A collective writing experiment and thought survey

Abstract

<p>Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Indeed, various publications such as those that we utilise below suggest that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. In its place, an age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism and the fragmentary self has given way to something else, as yet undefined. Brian McHale (2015) describes the lifecycle of postmodernism in terms of the ‘big bang’ in 1966 with Derrida’s seminal paper ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ at the Johns Hopkins conference ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ symposium; identifying its peak years as 1973–1989; followed by an uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond after 2001, which we are currently experiencing.<br></p>