Some quick notes on the paradigm of research:

Crisis: The scientific world and the modernist paradigm have brought technology and material benefits for many but it is also important to recognise its shortcomings. Beyond the manicured (media-controlled) facade, the modern era has also witnessed catastrophic mechanised conflict, needless poverty and famine, inequality and scientific failure on an unprecedented scale. Post-Modernism (PM) then represents a critique of modernist precepts and its assumed pre-eminence as the only authentic source of truth. PM can be described in terms of the skeptic point of view or the more pragmatic affirmative stance. The latter is where I would put myself. A less hard line stance that doesnt negate all of modernism but attempts to place is in a different light.

Abandoning the Author: Within the modern paradigm, the position of truth and authenticity has been allocated to the priveleged position of the author, supported by hard, science-based evidence. However within the PM paradigm, authority is given to the reader and the notion of a text (which is effect is a representation of reality). Its the readers judgement and interpretation that is important rather than the authors opinions.

Subverting the Subject. Though described as an individual with their own subjective opionions, the modern subject is in effect defined by prescriptions of rational modernity; organised, efficient, hard working, aspirational etc. The post-modern paradigm attempts to understand the subject in a genuinely individualistic sense.

History: Similar to the Foucault/Said perpective, history is seen as fragmented and inauthentic representation used as a tool of dominance and oppression. Rather than an esssentialist, unifying and supposedly coherent definition of history Foucault proposes a geneological approach to the understanding of context. Like wise time and space are reinterpreted as fragmented, decentred, dislocated concept that lack the continiuty presumed by modernism. The idea of fragmented space and geography has changed political discourse in terms of international relations and borders in view of modern phenomena such as rural migration and displacment