I'm having some pretty big affective-intellectual anxiety right now around (re)writing the theoretical chapter of my dissertation, in my eyes -- I feel like I'm a postmodernism novice who's blindly babbling about this (not true, but... impostor syndrome!)
So I split it into short essays targeted at specific topics. It was supposed to be around 10 pages; it's actually around 25. (Oops. Turns out I know more about this than I thought.) If you're (1) a technical-ish person interested in seeing whether my explanations of postmodern concepts work for you, or (2) someone familiar with what postmodernism is (at a really basic level) and would tell me if you think I'm translating the ideas accurately, I would LOVE writing feedback.
You can read and comment on individual sections in the posts listed below, or read the full version on Google Docs (and comment there)  -- feel free to comment! Edits will be made to this version, so don't be surprised if it is slightly different (and hopefully better) than the blog post sectionings listed below. Thanks to Mark Hoemmen, Suzanne Loughry Nellis, Julia Thompson, and Todd Fernandez for some awesome feedback thus far.
The blog posts in this series include:
  1. What's postmodernism (and how do I explain it to engineers)?
  2. Okay, fine, you can't define postmodernism, so I'll provide a history of how it came to be. (Followed immediately by section 2.5, or: by the way, a postmodernist reading of the historical I just provided basically demands that I go "but that narrative isn't a single clear explanation either!"
  3. Comparison with other (probably more familiar) paradigms, including positivism aka "this is probably what you think science is."
  4. Parts 4-6 present some key ideas in postmodern thought, and how they relate to ideas familiar to engineers. The first one is power and agency (otherwise known as commit access)
  5. Then there's truth and meaning... (otherwise known as design reviews)
  6. ...and finally slicing and separations (otherwise known as black-boxing)
  7. Bringing it home: postmodernism as a language to describe aspects of engineering practice
  8. Finally, looking at educational studies as a place where the "postmodern turn" has already happened, and what engineering might learn from that.

Ignore my (horrible and inconsistent) citation practices. And yes, there are obvious "I wanted to keep writing so I stuck NOTES IN ALL CAPS HERE and moved on" markers. Look, I'm just... trying to... get this out, ok? It's taken me... a couple years, and I finally wrote all this in about 2 days.