Edutopias
New Utopian Thinking in Education

Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

and

John Freeman-Moir
University of Canterbury, New Zealand


Education has always been part of the search for the ideal society and, therefore, an important part of the utopian tradition in Western culture, politics and literature. Education has often served to define the ideal society or to provide the principal means of creating it. This unique collection of essays by well known scholars from around the world examines the role of edutopias in the utopian tradition, examining...

Prophetically, almost thirty years ago Jean-Francois Lyotard forecast the end of the modern research university based on Enlightenment principles. He envisaged the emergence of technical institutes in the service of the information-rich global multinationals. This book reflects on the post-war Western university and its discourses charting the crisis of the concept of the modern university. First, it examines the university within a global networked economy; second, it adopts poststructuralist perspectives in epistemology, politics and ethics to appraise the role of the contemporary...

Knowledge is about cultural power. Considering that it is both resource and product within the brave new world of fast capitalism, this collection argues for knowledge cultures that are mutually engaged and hence more culturally inclusive and socially productive. Globalized intellectual property regimes, the privatization of information, and their counterpoint, the information and creative commons movements, constitute productive sites for the exploration of epistemologies that talk with each other rather than at and past each other. Global Knowledge Cultures provides a collection of...