This book broadens the imagination within social studies education by highlighting current, cutting-edge scholarship incorporating critical discourses. Drawing on postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist theories often borrowed from cultural studies, curriculum theory, critical geography, women's studies, and queer studies, the scholars contributing to this volume ask new questions about social studies, use different methodologies to study the field, and report findings with new forms of textualization. This book is dialogic and even conversational, ending with provocative responses from established social studies scholars and the editors and disturbs the given and the taken for granted in social studies research. Following a preface, this book is divided into four parts. Part I, Introduction and Context, presents: (1) Researching Social Studies in the Postmodern: An Introduction (Cleo H. Cherryholmes); and (2) Social Studies Research in the Context of Intellectual Thought (Elizabeth E. Heilman and Avner Segall). Part II, Postmodern Propositions, continues with: (3) Social Studies in an Age of Image: Surveillance-Spectacle and the Imperatives of "Seeing'' Citizenship Education (Kevin D. Vinson); (4) Within and against Citizenship: Bad Girls in Deviant Subject Positions (Lisa J. Cary); (5) Gendering Social Studies, Queering Social Education (Lisa W. Loutzenheiser); (6) Citizenship and Belonging: Constructing "a Sense of Place and a Place that Makes Sense'' (Dawn Shinew); (7) The Public Museum and Identity: Or, the Question of Belonging (Brenda Trofanenko); (8) Space, Place, and Identity in the Teaching of History: Using Critical Geography to Teach Teachers in the American South (Robert J. Helfenbein, Jr.); (9) What's the Purpose of Teaching a Discipline, Anyway? The Case of History (Avner Segall); (10) The Tragic Knowledge of the Social (Gerda Wever Rabehl); (11) Representations of Family in Curriculum: A Poststructural Analysis (Tammy Turner-Vorbeck); (12) Adventures in Metropolis: Popular Culture in Social Studies (Trenia Walker); and (13) Critical, Liberal, and Poststructural Challenges for Global Education (Elizabeth E. Heilman). Part III, Responses, continues with: (14) Social Studies in Flux: In Pursuit of a New Rigor, Criticality, and Practicality (Joe L. Kincheloe); (15) Whose Worldview? Representation and Reality in the Social Studies (Merry M. Merryfield); (16) Two Cheers for Postmodernism: Some Caveats Regarding Postmodern Research in Social Education (William B. Stanley); (17) The Invisible Hand of Theory in Social Studies Education (Margaret Smith Crocco); (18) Deploying Foucault: Purposes and Consequences (Walter C. Parker); and (19) After the Essays Are Ripped Out, What? The Limits of a Reflexive Encounter (Keith C. Barton). Part IV, Afterwords, concludes with: (20) Critical Social Studies: Where Are We Now and Where Do We Go from Here? (Avner Segall); (21) The Problem with the Problem of Authority: Critical Postmodern Deconstruction as Democratic Practice (Elizabeth E. Heilman); and (22) Visions, Consequences, and the Construction of Social Studies Education (Cleo H. Cherryholmes). Notes, a list of references; and an index are also included.