A Critical Primer on Postmodernism: Lessons from Educational Scholarship for Librarianship

Postmodernism is still the subject of vigorous ongoing debate in a variety of fields like education and anthropology and has now arrived in the literature of librarianship. Prior conflicts generated over postmodernism remain—including academic areas where it has been declared passé. This paper summarizes postmodernism and its intellectual contributions, and then highlights its shortcomings via critical educational scholarship utilizing that field as a framework of analysis for librarianship. This is undertaken to relate both strengths of and problems with postmodernist theories for current work among scholars in librarianship. We do so to learn from the course of debate in another field and to challenge postmodern research trends in librarianship that do not account for the cultural and economic effects of capitalism.