Navigating the Postmodern Condition: The Discontinuities of Everyday Life

Drawing on poststructuralist frameworks, this book examines the way to a radical acceptance of daily discontinuities and difference as it allows us to embrace life in the postmodern world.

With each chapter exploring the human relationship with a disjunction in daily life, such as sleeping, forgetting, and multitasking, the author examines overlooked aspects of daily living as fresh data from which to analyze our condition. A phenomenological study of postmodern life, the book provides anecdotes of what it is like to live through these gaps and theorizes how we use these gaps. Using an arts-based methodology, the author also allows the work to mirror the discontinuities which it describes, interrupting the assumption of our lives as continuous and unitary in both form and content. Addressing the vast jumble of contradictions that is our daily experience in this contemporary world, it offers explanation through theory and anecdote and illustrates the path toward radical acceptance, which allows us to see ourselves as beautifully composed of fractures, gaps, and overflow.

It will appeal to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students with interests in poststructuralism, curriculum theory, and art-based research methods.

Wade A.Tillett is Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA.