Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0415905842, Paperback)

To understand contemporary times, we must appreciate the extent to which our lives are affected by the cultural and political struggle between "official" narratives and the counternarratives which emerge as oppositional responses. Counternarratives develops a concept of "postmodern counternarratives" as a frame for exploring the politics of media, technology and education within everyday struggles for human identities and loyalties.

The authors identify two forms of counternarratives. One functions as a critique of the modernist propensity for grand narratives. The second concept, which is the focus of the book, builds on the first; the idea of "little stories" addressing cultural and political opposition to the "official" narratives used to manipulate public consciousness.

Successive chapters explore a diverse range of "little stories." Each marks an important point of contestation within contemporary education and culture: curriculum, pedagogy, literacy, media representations and applications of new technologies. Specific case studies look at the potential for cultural studies as a tool for teachers to confront the official narrative of classroom education; the "slacker" subculture as a response to official accounts of what youth should be; media accounts of the Gulf War; Paulo Freire's counternarrative of pedagogy and education and the role of the university within contemporary metropolitan and post-colonial cultures; and the possibilities for critical pedagogy in cyberspace.