Non-immigrant Precarity and the Corporate University: Rethinking Limitations of Critical Research and Reimagining Decolonial Possibilities

Abstract

This paper explores the various ways in which organizational structures of the corporate university are imbricated in racial hierarchies underlying global immigration, with particular reference to non-immigrant precarity in US academia. Moving beyond critiques focused on curriculum and pedagogy, I argue that as an epitomizing product of capitalism, the corporate university must be dismantled to decenter global knowledge creation itself. We must view the generation of critical social science research in context of interactions between the colonizing structure of global immigration laws and Global North's academic institutional hierarchies. The paper begins by theoretically framing corporate university, its co-option of diversity and equality as the cornerstone of contemporary neoliberalism and its entanglements with contemporary immigration regimes such that it emerges as a site for non-immigrant precarity. I then discuss how seemingly critical fields of inquiry such as academic feminism are institutionally arranged within corporate universities to sustain racialized precarity for non-immigrants in academia, through hiring, research, and pedagogical practices. I conclude by drawing on two grassroots education models in India as means for (re)imagining decolonial possibilities with subversive philosophies of education and spatial alternatives, which are crucial for feminist research to be meaningful.