Postmodern Research,Postmodern Practice: Studying the Barriers to Cyberliteracy Among Mentally Disabled Women

The conversation about the postmodern challenge to sociological practice is just beginning. Harding advocates a positive tension between the postmodern vision of an antiessentialist, antiepistemological future and the postmodern vision of successor science projects grounded in the epistemologies of marginalized communities. In this paper, I describe my study of barriers to cyberliteracy among mentally disabled women and how it has been informed by these two contrasting postmodern visions represented, respectively, by the work of Newman and Holzman (The End of Knowing: A New Developmental Way of Learning, Routledge, London, 1997) and Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, London, 1999).