Patti Lather’s work in critical education has revolved around the intersections, fissures and distinctions characterizing the relationship between feminist and critical pedagogy, feminist ethnography, and poststructualism. Over the last fifteen years, the disjunction between critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy has become a source of interest and tension that profoundly affects the future of the discipline in the twenty-first century. Lather in the 1990s focused masculinized articulations of critical pedagogy and their tendency to marginalize issues of gender in the field. In this context Lather maintains that the “return to Marxism”articulated by some advocates of critical pedagogy in recent years reinforces her thesis that critical pedagogy has operated as a masculinized space, a venue in which male leftist academics could claim praxis. Lather posits that this “return to Marxism”has come to view the postdiscourses as a form of accommodation to dominant sociopolitical and educational powers. The critique of postmodernism and poststructuralism coming from the returnto-Marxism camp of critical pedagogy, she contends, has focused on feminist poststructuralism. This has created yet another layer of gendered trackings in the work of critical and feminist theory and practice. Central to the importance of Lather’s work in critical pedagogy have been her compelling exposes of the ways the postdiscourses, neo-Marxist modes of seeing, and different articulations of feminism can help critical pedagogists locate the fingerprints of power on research methods and modes of knowledge production. In this context, Lather has provided numerous insights into the ways critical researchers can reconceptualize the research act. Laying the foundation for this reconceptualization in Getting Smart in 1991, Lather followed up in 1998 with Troubling the Angels. In this book, Lather created a “multivoiced”work that experimented with interweaving concurrent multiple meanings and interpretations on the same page. The book successfully demonstrated ways of representing the complexity of the interpretive process and new directions in conveying that complexity to the reader. The subversive quality of Lather’s work is omnipresent, as she consistently labors to undermine the validated expert status of mainstream academic practice. Indeed, some of her most creative work has involved the development of new forms of research validity that explode the hegemonic dynamics of positivist internal and external validity. In this context, she has moved critical pedagogy to a more contingent epistemological stance, as she problematizes any facile closure in relation to questions of truth and the effort to represent reality. The critical theoretical notion of emancipation, Lather contends, is a dangerous terrain that can contain within it tacit forms of oppression. In an educational context this oppressive dynamic of emancipatory action becomes profoundly dangerous, as its transmission-based pedagogies can work to disempower and marginalize in the name of justice and equality. Reference: Kincheloe, J. Critical Pedagogy, Peter Lang Primer Link