Postmodern Philosophy and My Scholarship
*last updated on January 26, 2026
My work aligns most closely with postmodern and poststructuralist approaches to knowledge, language, and power. I use these labels in a practical sense: a family of traditions that question how we produce truth, how language shapes what we can say (and think), how categories organize perception, and how power travels through knowledge, institutions, and everyday life.
This influence is visible in two places at once:
Nonlinearity and the Rhizome
A major reason these traditions fit my scholarship is that they make room for forms of inquiry that do not behave like a straight line. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome is especially useful to me as a metaphor for how ideas develop in lived experience and in knowledge-making: not from a single trunk to smaller branches, but through networks, crossings, detours, and multiple entry points.
That is close to how my projects work. Instead of treating a “main argument” as the only valid form, I often build understanding through linked pages and recurring concepts, allowing the reader to enter from different places and still find coherence.
Truth and Reality
In everyday life we often assume that conflict is a matter of locating who is right—who has access to “what really happened.” Postmodern and poststructuralist thought complicates that assumption.
A basic starting point is simple: human beings do not access the world directly. We access it through senses, brains, and interpretive habits, all shaped by prior experience and by culture. Overlap is real—we share environments, languages, and institutions—but full convergence on one final, neutral description is not guaranteed.
In my work, this becomes a practical stance rather than a slogan. I treat claims about reality as situated: produced by particular perspectives, incentives, vocabularies, and constraints. That does not mean “anything goes.” It means that truth-claims can be evaluated more carefully when we ask about the conditions that make them persuasive, repeatable, and authoritative.
Language, Meaning, and Constructed Worlds
These traditions are often described as “skeptical,” but what I find more useful is their focus on construction: how meanings are made, circulated, and stabilized.
Language is not just a tool for describing the world; it is also a tool for sorting the world. Words carve experience into named objects, categories, and relations. Narratives do similar work at a larger scale: they link events into plots, assign motives, create villains and heroes, and tell us what counts as “the point.”
This is central to my scholarship. I study meaning-making not as decoration on top of reality, but as one of the main ways human reality becomes livable, shareable, and contested. Meanings can connect people—and they can also govern people. They can feel natural even when they are historically and socially produced.
Binaries and Paradox
Another contribution I rely on is the critique of binary thinking. Binaries are cognitively efficient: they compress complexity into a choice between two poles (true/false, real/fake, victim/perpetrator, us/them). They are often necessary for action. But they also distort.
These traditions make room for a more uncomfortable idea: many of the categories we treat as opposites are better understood as entangled. A person can be both sincere and self-protective; a story can be both revealing and misleading; a solution can create new problems; a label can explain and erase at the same time.
My work returns to this repeatedly because it helps explain why moral and political life so often feels like a struggle between clarity and accuracy. We want clean categories. We live in messy systems.
Power, Knowledge, and Perspective
If I had to name one influence that most directly shapes my scholarship, it would be Foucault’s insistence that power is not only something people “have.” It also moves through networks of power relations and through the practices by which knowledge is produced, validated, and applied. Power travels through institutions, definitions, norms, and expertise—through the ways some descriptions become common sense while others become unthinkable.
This matters for my work on power because it shifts the focus away from treating power as a stable thing some people possess and others lack. I approach power as relational and situational—something that operates at multiple levels at once, and often takes paradoxical forms. Individuals can exercise influence in one context while being constrained in another. People participate in creating meanings, norms, and institutions, even as those same meanings, norms, and institutions shape what they can see, want, and do.
This approach does not erase agency or responsibility. It makes the environment of agency visible—the background systems that shape what choices look like in the first place.
Where This Leaves Me
So when I say my scholarship is aligned with postmodern and poststructuralist traditions, I mean:
About this project: Start page
This influence is visible in two places at once:
- In method and structure: I write in a nonlinear, hypertext-like way, moving through themes by association, contrast, and return rather than by a single linear argument.
- In concepts and assumptions: I treat meanings, narratives, and categories as made (and remade) rather than simply found.
Nonlinearity and the Rhizome
A major reason these traditions fit my scholarship is that they make room for forms of inquiry that do not behave like a straight line. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome is especially useful to me as a metaphor for how ideas develop in lived experience and in knowledge-making: not from a single trunk to smaller branches, but through networks, crossings, detours, and multiple entry points.
That is close to how my projects work. Instead of treating a “main argument” as the only valid form, I often build understanding through linked pages and recurring concepts, allowing the reader to enter from different places and still find coherence.
Truth and Reality
In everyday life we often assume that conflict is a matter of locating who is right—who has access to “what really happened.” Postmodern and poststructuralist thought complicates that assumption.
A basic starting point is simple: human beings do not access the world directly. We access it through senses, brains, and interpretive habits, all shaped by prior experience and by culture. Overlap is real—we share environments, languages, and institutions—but full convergence on one final, neutral description is not guaranteed.
In my work, this becomes a practical stance rather than a slogan. I treat claims about reality as situated: produced by particular perspectives, incentives, vocabularies, and constraints. That does not mean “anything goes.” It means that truth-claims can be evaluated more carefully when we ask about the conditions that make them persuasive, repeatable, and authoritative.
Language, Meaning, and Constructed Worlds
These traditions are often described as “skeptical,” but what I find more useful is their focus on construction: how meanings are made, circulated, and stabilized.
Language is not just a tool for describing the world; it is also a tool for sorting the world. Words carve experience into named objects, categories, and relations. Narratives do similar work at a larger scale: they link events into plots, assign motives, create villains and heroes, and tell us what counts as “the point.”
This is central to my scholarship. I study meaning-making not as decoration on top of reality, but as one of the main ways human reality becomes livable, shareable, and contested. Meanings can connect people—and they can also govern people. They can feel natural even when they are historically and socially produced.
Binaries and Paradox
Another contribution I rely on is the critique of binary thinking. Binaries are cognitively efficient: they compress complexity into a choice between two poles (true/false, real/fake, victim/perpetrator, us/them). They are often necessary for action. But they also distort.
These traditions make room for a more uncomfortable idea: many of the categories we treat as opposites are better understood as entangled. A person can be both sincere and self-protective; a story can be both revealing and misleading; a solution can create new problems; a label can explain and erase at the same time.
My work returns to this repeatedly because it helps explain why moral and political life so often feels like a struggle between clarity and accuracy. We want clean categories. We live in messy systems.
Power, Knowledge, and Perspective
If I had to name one influence that most directly shapes my scholarship, it would be Foucault’s insistence that power is not only something people “have.” It also moves through networks of power relations and through the practices by which knowledge is produced, validated, and applied. Power travels through institutions, definitions, norms, and expertise—through the ways some descriptions become common sense while others become unthinkable.
This matters for my work on power because it shifts the focus away from treating power as a stable thing some people possess and others lack. I approach power as relational and situational—something that operates at multiple levels at once, and often takes paradoxical forms. Individuals can exercise influence in one context while being constrained in another. People participate in creating meanings, norms, and institutions, even as those same meanings, norms, and institutions shape what they can see, want, and do.
This approach does not erase agency or responsibility. It makes the environment of agency visible—the background systems that shape what choices look like in the first place.
Where This Leaves Me
So when I say my scholarship is aligned with postmodern and poststructuralist traditions, I mean:
- I treat knowledge as situated and mediated, not as a view from nowhere.
- I treat meanings and narratives as constructed and consequential.
- I resist binary shortcuts when they conceal the structure of a situation.
- I trace how power moves through meanings, norms, and everyday interactions—not just through formal authority.
- I use a nonlinear structure because it fits the subject matter: meaning, interpretation, and power rarely move in straight lines.
About this project: Start page
