Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy within/in the Postmodern

In "Getting Smart", Patti Lather focuses on critical social science, liberatory education and how post-modernisms, neo-Marxisms and various feminisms make overt the ways in which power permeates the construction and legitimization of knowledge. Lather locates spaces for theorizing emancipatory practice necessitating a re-examination of those sites problematized by the postmodern, including subjectivity, agency, the production of knowledge and praxis. Lather creates a "multi-voiced" text weaving meanings that are more evocative than descriptive. She offers an example of her own research into women's studies students' resistance and demonstrates how meaning is constructed within different discourses of inquiry. She writes against the "authoritative voices" of foundational academic discourse while being aware that she is complicit in that which she critiques. Lather emphasizes that regardless of philosophical debates, the question is "What is to be done?". As a way to salvage emancipatory discourse and praxis she speaks in a "willful contradiction" of "theoretic fictions" (cultural Marxism and postmodernism) remaining committed to the open-endedness of the struggle over truth and reality. She refuses to accept the totality of the "radical negation of Enlightenment" and describes her refusal as a strategy of displacement which she grounds in her use of deconstructive theory. As Lather traces her way through the contradictory discourses of feminism, neo-Marxism and poststructuralism she identifies the hallmark of a liberatory praxis as the ability to act "within an uncertain framework" at a time "marked by the dissolution of authoritative foundations of knowledge". She suggests that above all, emancipatory action requires reflexivity and the ability to attend to the politics of what we do. She recommends a "Foucauldian awareness" of the oppressive role of ostensibly liberatory forms of discourse." Lather looks to pedagogy as a site for learning about strategies for a "postmodern praxis". She uses Lusted's definition of pedagogy that concludes that knowledge is produced at the intersection of three agencies, the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they produce. She concludes that it has been the practice of "transmissive" rather than "interactively productive" pedagogy that has been the "root of the failure of emancipatory objectives". I applaud Patti Lather's project as a feminist, a critical theorist and as someone who appreciates the postmodern turn to a consideration of reality as constructed rather than found. As a teacher, a researcher and an activist, Patti Lather has created a dense, rich text that expands our understanding of what and how we can know and how emancipatory practice might be conducted.