Resisting the Neoliberal Academy: Justice-Oriented (Re)Imaginings Through Critical Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Even as educational institutions (re)produce inequitable forms of power and knowledge, critical qualitative inquiry often challenges these exclusionary, confining ways of being and knowing perpetuated within academic spaces. Drawing upon a conceptual framework that unites critical qualitative inquiry, poststructuralism, and intersectionality, this work interrogates how neoliberal academic spaces complicate detachment from and our un-learning of narrow ways of scholarly being and knowing, what and whose knowledge counts in these spaces, and our enactment of knowledge and power circulation more broadly. By framing our positions as critical public intellectuals, we utilize co-authorship between a practitioner and practitioner-oriented scholar to unpack narrow, whitewashed, neoliberal notions of expertise often entrenched and normalized within realms of pedagogy and scholarship. Finally, we seek to challenge and (re)envision such maintenance of singular perspectives, voices, and knowledge bases, arguing that critical qualitative inquiry can and should meet such a moment to upend existing structures.