Recent studies focus on the comparative reason of educational research as cartographies and architectures that produce phantasmagrams of societies, population and differences.
In 1978 Popkewitz was selected by the US State Department to organize an American delegation on teaching and learning for joint Soviet/American seminar at USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences Presidium, marking the beginning of a career that has been particularly defined by its international focus.
In the fall of 1988 he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala and from 1994 to 1999 acted as a visiting professor at Umeå University in Sweden.
In the post-Sputnik years, this procedural and instrumental mentality was recast as the development of scientifically oriented and efficient teaching methods (Pinar, et al.[4]).
In the 1960s a variety of social and academic movements recognized the role of the politics of knowledge, cultural differences and the limits of objectivity-based theories.
In this context, Pinar and colleagues (1995) consider that Popkewitz summarized the key elements of the new era already in 1988:Understanding research…requires thought about the intersection of biography, history, and social structure.
We take part in the routines of daily life, we use language that is socially created to make camaraderie with others possible, and we develop affiliation with the roles and institutions that give form to our identities.
It considers language and knowledge as cultural practices having significant material consequences, from a theoretical viewpoint far different from Marxist or Neo-Marxist critiques of functionalism and instrumentalism (Pereyra & Franklin, 2014).
His analysis problematizes reductionist, dualistic and what he calls “administrative conceptions” of being, agency, and change – a social epistemology of knowledge-production as non-monolithic and contingent.
Popkewitz explores historically and sociologically how a comparative style of thought enters into school reform to recognize difference.
The volume's thesis is that different ideological positions about school reform and concepts of equity and justice often maintain the same principles of ordering, classifying and dividing, keeping problematic and restricted notions of identity still in play.
Popkewitz has developed a number of new constructs to engage in empirical research related to education: double gestures, traveling libraries and the indigenous foreigner, cosmopolitanism as a cultural thesis, the alchemy of school subjects, and salvific themes in secular objects.
Through integrating a variety of postfoundationalist literatures, cultural histories, and accounts of American exceptionalism, Popkewitz has demonstrated how narratives that emerged through a particular Protestant reformism shaped dominant education discourse.
He is the first scholar in curriculum studies in the US to reference how religious discourses about salvation and redemption were inscribed in educational practices and research.
[7] A variety of “mixed methods” approaches that involve historical, policy, statistical, and ethnographic study illustrate a further innovation in the field.