Global education policy and the postmodern challenge

This chapter explores the contours of a postmodern heuristic and considers how this manifests in education policy research, especially in relation to the question of space. I consider how the concepts of de- and reterritorialization, and the analytical strategies of assemblage and network, provide fresh entry points for theorizing space in global education policy, but how they are being interpreted through the lens of modernist concerns. I outline some limitations in these analytical strategies before illustrating how I have drawn on postmodern themes in my own work on global education reform in order to explore processes of reconfiguration, rupture, and indeterminacy as important forces shaping the present phase of modernity. After outlining some of the critiques leveled against this approach I sketch out elements of a possible postmodern “science”