Criticism
Kincheloe's work is criticized for its use of a variety of methods and theories that serve to make issues more complicated than necessary. His work on the failures of positivism and mainstream Western research methods have been characterized by conservatives as an attack on viable modes of inquiry and accepted forms of reason. Some reviewers have labelled his multiperspectival bricolage as a form of anti-rationality. For example, educational researcher, Peter Smagorinsky (2007) argues in a review of Kincheloe's and Kenneth Tobin's Doing Educational Research: A Handbook that Kincheloe uses positivism as a inappropriate bogeyman in a misguided effort to resurrect this long-discredited way of knowing to justify radical perspectives on knowledge production. In Smagorinsky's opinion Kincheloe's work is misleading and dangerous for those legitimate scholars who would seek to engage in scholarship that produces assured answers to specific questions. Detractors also critique Kincheloe's frequent attacks on U.S. educational, social, and foreign policy. Such attacks, it is maintained, are often unfair and reflect a one-dimensional biased point of view. His analysis of "whiteness" and Caucasian racism have often drawn fire from more moderate and conservative analysts.
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