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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 philosophysuch as that of the Frankfurt

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Social Realism (SR), as a movement that argues for 'bringing knowledge back in' to curriculum (Young 2008), is significant globally, especially in South Africa. This article examines arguments from SR proponents that curriculum selection should privilege specialised disciplinary knowledge-as 'powerful knowledge'-over 'everyday knowledge', and how this is warranted through Durkheim's distinction between 'sacred' and 'profane' social bases for knowledge. The article asks how adequately curriculum based on SR warrants can do social justice. This inquiry stages debates between SR and three alternative approaches. The first is standpoint theories that knowledge-including that of scientific disciplines-is always positional and 'partially objective'. The next is Vygotskian arguments for curriculum that, dialectically, joins systematising powers of scientific knowledge with rich funds of knowledge from learners' everyday life-worlds. Third, SR's philosophical framing is contrasted with Nancy Fraser's (2009) framework for robust social justice in globalising contexts. It is argued that SR's grounds for curriculum knowledge selection emphasise cognitive purposes for schooling in ways that marginalise ethical purposes. In consequence, SR conceptions of what constitutes social-educational 'justice' are too thin, we argue, to meet substantive needs and aspirations among power-marginalised South African groups seeking better lives through schooling.