Our concern in this essay is with how Michel Foucault’s methodologies for the study of power are related to a more general reexamining and re-visioning of the “foundations” of critical traditions inherited from nineteenth century European forebears. Through his wide-ranging studies of knowledge, madness, prisons, sexuality, and governmentality, Foucault’s historical philosophy interrogates the conditions under which modern societies operate. His concern with how the subject is constituted in power relations forms an important contribution to recent social theory, providing both methodological and substantive challenges to the social sciences. These have been taken up in various projects across multiple settings, with particular implications for interdisciplinary work. The politics of “identity,” as witnessed in the theoretical and historical work within the feminist movement, is one such example, crossing nation-state barriers of European and Anglo-American intellectual work. Our essay moves between the particular contribution of Foucault and the more general intellectual movements to which he has contributed. The attention given to Foucault in the English-speaking world is part of a larger sea-migration of critical traditions of social science since the World War I1 period. By sea-migration, we mean the post-World War I1 mixing of European continental social theories that integrate historical and philosophical discourses with the more pragmatic (and philosophical/ analytic) traditions in the United States, Britain, and Australia.’ The translation and incorporation of European Marxist social philosophy such as that of the Frankfurt School of critical theory from Germany, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and more recently, French “postmodern” and French and Italian feminist theories are important to the production of a “critical” space in the education arena. Social theories since World War I1 have been important grounds on which educational debates, policies, and scholarship have focused. Our use of the term