Why Postmodern Social Cartography Now?
In this essay we focus on the concerns of three academic practitioners, Val Rust in comparative education and J. B. Harley and Edward Soja in geographic cartography. These practitioners have called on colleagues in these areas to move toward a postmodernist integration in order to become more explicit, comparative, and open to heterogeneous orientations in their academic discourse. Postmodernism is not promoted here, but rather the possibilities for comparative fields to expand their knowledge bases through an appropriate, thoughtful, and skillful development and application of social maps. The postmodern turn opens the way to critical mapping exercises. Arguing that postmodernism should be a central concept in our comparative education discourse, Val Rust calls for the application of postmodernist theories to strengthen other representations of reality. Rust notes that Foucault believes in a need to move beyond determinism and universalism, and that Lyotard discerns in the postmodern
