Neoliberal Context Research Articles

Ali Smith’s <em>Companion Piece</em> and the Value of Close Reading

Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (2022) expands on the exploration of apathy and anomie undertaken in the Seasonal Quartet, further connecting these experiences to a pervasive sense of despair in contemporary society. Once again, Smith reflects on the role of the arts, seeing in them a vehicle for hope and change. In an interesting twist, Companion Piece focuses specifically on the effects of close reading, pointing to the way it opens opportunities for unexpected connections that can escape the divisive competitiveness of contemporary neoliberalism. I suggest that the novel’s preoccupation with close reading responds to the intense debates in literary studies about post-critical methods of reading, while entering a dialogue with I. A. Richards’s notion of practical criticism. Yet Companion Piece revises Richards's framework, extending the target of close reading to include a variety of artworks, material objects and natural phenomena. It also widens the focus from individuals to the relationships between them, depicting close reading as a catalyst for intersubjective bonding. The transposition of Richards’s argument to a contemporary neoliberal context broadens the role of close reading, granting it greater relevance and urgency. For Smith, the aimless attentiveness of close reading becomes an act of rebellion against the market imperatives of speed and efficiency. As it highlights the anomaly of close reading in the neoliberal milieu, Companion Piece implies that it can unsettle the neoliberal profit-maximizing paradigm, boost the imagination, and enable new ways of connecting with people, animals, and even the environment.

From Campus to Career

Students undertaking professional degrees are often expected to step into the workplace fully formed, with unrealistic expectations around their experience and capabilities. Universities, facing an increasingly competitive market in a neoliberal context, are focused the student experience, attraction and retention metrics, as students demand return on their investment of money and time. Alongside this, criticism of work readiness and employability comes from graduates and the industries that need them. It is in this space that technology and innovation can offer simple, albeit disruptive ways of increasing the possibility of connecting tertiary students with industry partners to facilitate authentic learning. Early workplace experience, undertaken while still studying, provides both students and employers an opportunity to understand their respective needs within a temporary low risk and low stakes environment. A platform for connecting students with industry for paid employment experiences that sit outside the ubiquitous and often unpaid internships and practicums, offers authentic ways of preparing graduates for the workforce. It also has the potential to improve the way industry connects with the university enabling a richer experience for all; students, universities and industry partners.

Limited self-enterprise: liminality, normativity, and commodity of Chinese game streamers

ABSTRACT This research delves into China’s digital gaming landscape, focusing on live game streamers and their transformation into “limited self-enterprise” figures within the country’s neoliberal context. The study utilizes in-depth interviews with 15 game streamers, illustrating the effects of neoliberal economic policies on the livestreaming industry and the challenges faced by streamers. “Limited self-enterprise” is introduced as a modification of Foucault’s discourse, contributing to subjectivity studies and neoliberalism’s understanding. This study broadens the theoretical lens applied to game streamers’ subjectivity, offering a more inclusive and diverse view.

Dressing the Future: The Bibliometric Interplay Between Sustainability and Fashion Studies Amidst the Neoliberal Era

The concept of sustainability has significantly influenced various industries, notably the fashion sector. This study conducts a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interplay between fashion studies and sustainability. Utilizing data from the Scopus database, 890 articles published between 2000 and 2023 were scrutinized through an integrated approach combining bibliometric and content analyses. The aim was to explore how sustainability, initially an economic notion, left its imprint on academic research in fashion studies. This research was accompanied by a critical assessment of the neoliberal context, which envisions a market-oriented political economy model in which the concept of sustainability emerged. Key findings include a steadily increasing emphasis on sustainability in fashion research. Notable journals leading the discourse include Sustainability, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, Fashion Practice, and International Journal of Fashion Design Technology and Education. Interestingly, while fashion is rooted in the arts, significant contributions emerged from researchers in diverse disciplines, reflecting the field’s interdisciplinary nature. The study identified five critical thematic clusters within: sustainable fashion design, sustainable fashion production, sustainable fashion marketing, sustainable fashion consumption, and the theoretical foundation in sustainable fashion. This research not only enriches the literature by mapping the trajectory of sustainability in fashion studies but also highlights the evolving nature of fashion research, bridging traditional boundaries and embracing a more holistic approach to sustainability.

Persistence and Success of Student Mobilization in a Post-Dictatorship and Neoliberal Context in Chile (1990-2020)

Persistence and Success of Student Mobilization in a Post-Dictatorship and Neoliberal Context in Chile (1990-2020)

Hide and seek: A game reimagined

We live in a culture that teaches us to value being seen and heard above all else. In early childhood classrooms teachers are encouraged to create individual spaces for every child and to artfully display their work as it is created. Especially in Euro-Western, neoliberal contexts, policy and curricula commonly call for early childhood professionals to pay special attention to children and families who come from immigrant or otherwise marginalized backgrounds. We are urged to acknowledge and elevate children's and families’ differences for all to see. But does everyone—child, teacher, and caregiver—want to be seen and heard all the time? What are the affordances and constraints of the visibility injunction under which we live? In this article we set out to reimagine the classic hide-and-seek paradigm in order to shed fresh light on the place of hiddenness and withdrawal from public view in the formation of positive self-regard. Is the joy of hiding always defined by the anticipation of being found? Are the pleasures of seeking only realized by the possibility of finding something/someone or is seeking an activity with its own rich rewards? Our stories and responses to each other are set out in a call-and-response pattern that echoes the six semi-structured hour-long conversations on which this article is built. Musical interludes are provided between each story/response couplet offering readers moments to pause, reflect, and argue with us as they move through the article.

‘Finally, it's all in vain’: A Chinese as an additional language teacher's agency in navigating the teaching-research nexus in a neoliberal Chinese university

The neoliberal emphasis on performance metrics, such as research outputs and citations, has weakened the symbiotic relationship between teaching and research in language education. However, language teachers' experiences of navigating the challenge that neoliberalism creates for the teaching-research nexus have been largely absent, with the existing literature predominantly focusing on documenting the impact of neoliberalism on research and teaching. This narrative case study aims to address this gap by tracing a Chinese as an additional language (CAL) teacher's agency in navigating the teaching-research nexus in a neoliberal Chinese university. Based on data from three rounds of interviews, informal conversations, notes, and policy documents, this study identified a noticeable shift in the participant's narrated experiences, progressing from active engagement with research to enhance teaching practices, to pragmatic engagement in research for scholarly publication, and eventually to disenchanted retreat from the academic battlefield. This trajectory highlights the escalating challenges faced by the participant in navigating the teaching-research nexus. Practical implications are discussed to strengthen the link between teaching and research in language education in the neoliberal context.

Reseña de «Estados mórbidos. Desgaste corporal en la vida contemporánea»

Estados Mórbidos. Desgaste Corporal en la Vida Contemporánea (Morbid States. Corporal Wear and Tear in Contemporary Life) is a feminist ethnography on the Central Sensitization Syndrome (CSS) −a disruption of nerve centres which causes chronic diseases such as fibromyalgia and chronic-fatigue. Méndez de la Brena takes distance from the hegemonic medical approach, and embraces an anthropological and a gender perspective to investigate the handling of the diseases and unravels new forms of resistance. The book can be briefly defined as a necro-political analysis of the disease in its material existence and of the production of knowledge and practices of resistance of women in a neoliberal context.

Transformations in the sanitation sector in the State of Rio de Janeiro: neoliberalism and regulatory changes

This article analyzes the reconfiguration of water supply services provided to municipalities across the State of Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to examines how advancements in the neoliberalization of Brazil's basic sanitation sector have contributed to a fragmentation in the provision of services and to the emergence of uneven geographies on a regional scale. This will be conducted through the lens of policy experimentation, particularly after the approval of Law 14.026/2020. The study is based on an approach concerning the commodification of public services within the context of neoliberalism, marked by a complex reformulation of regulatory mechanisms. The methodology combines an analysis of secondary data, documentary research, and thematic mapping. The results reveal that the management of sanitation services is increasingly guided by market logic, with the experimentation of controversial regulatory mechanisms that have exacerbated fragmentation and deepened territorial inequality.

Solidarity and social esteem: the case of unpaid carers during COVID-19 in Northern Ireland

This article examines the connections between solidarity and social esteem for unpaid care. Focusing on the moral emotions experienced by unpaid carers during the UK’s COVID-19 pandemic, the implications for the social value accorded to care are considered. Analysis focuses on 32 qualitative interviews with 25 family carers in Northern Ireland during 2020 and 2021. Conceiving of solidarity as a norm whose strength and reach can be gauged through emotional experience, the article argues that unpaid carers’ perceptions of general indifference to caregiving indicate the weakness of democratic solidarity in this neoliberal context, with significant consequences for access to social esteem.

Relations of care and affirmative disruptions in academia: A conversation with Katie Strom

This article features an intra-view with critical posthumanist Professor Kathryn (Katie) Strom and the co-editors of the intra-view section of this journal Jacky Barreiro and Magali Forte. Throughout their conversation, Strom shares her determination to co-create relations of care and affirmative disruptions in the neoliberal context of academia while giving concrete examples and explaining how her feminist praxis evolved. The three authors discuss several initiatives Strom and others have implemented, inspired by Braidotti’s (2019) notion and praxis of affirmative ethics among other feminist scholarship, to create spaces of support for graduate students and early career scholars. This piece encourages readers to view and understand feminist processes as affirmative disruptions to foster affective flows, challenge conventions, and inspire innovative scholarly pursuits.

Navigating neoliberal waters: Building capacities and skills for effective instructional leadership in higher education.

In the current era, leadership in higher education faces unprecedented challenges as a result of neoliberalism's influence. To effectively provide instructional leadership, higher education leaders and administrators need to acquire new skills and strategies. The issues of inadequate funding, increased workload, massification, and marketization in universities necessitate skillful navigation to uphold educational quality. This integrated literature review examines the impact of neoliberalism on teaching and learning and explores the specific skills and capacities required by university leaders to deliver effective instructional leadership. Through a comprehensive review, we shed light on the essential leadership skills necessary within the context of neoliberalism. By addressing these challenges head-on, leaders can navigate the neoliberal waters and build the capacities needed for successful instructional leadership in higher education.

Timescapes when everything happens all at once

This paper focuses on aspects of time and educators’ timescapes during the Covid-19 pandemic. It contributes to a larger discussion about changing discourses and practices of temporality both during and after a crisis, especially those enabled by technology and neoliberal contexts. Situated within the unequal and diverse South African landscape where the pandemic overturned traditional educational timescapes, the paper explores the experiences of educators from different education settings - rural, urban, school, higher education and provincial education departments and considers three interrelated questions: What did educators' timescapes look like during the crisis of the pandemic? What was the role of technology in changing educators’ timescapes? How were educational inequities manifest in the timescapes which emerged? To analyse the educators’ experiences of time, teaching with technology and networked learning during the pandemic, the paper draws on Adam’s (1998, 2004, 2021) theorisation of time. Adam argues that time is relational and composed of irreducible elements that are not always easily visible. Experiences of how time is represented or visualised include temporality, tempo and timing, as well as the past, present and future. None of the elements of time operate in isolation; they mutually implicate one another highlighting the ways in which we perceive and interpret time in our lives and the world around us. The paper discussion highlights the use of technology and networked learning linked to pedagogical changed routines and organisation that made educators readily available to their students when face-to-face interaction was not possible. While this was beneficial to students (and parents), this resulted in a blurring or conflation of educators’ work and personal lives. Educators describe experiencing time and space as scrambled, compressed and/or porous, having to negotiate new rhythms and patterns of work that require reorganising and managing their lives differently. In addition, educators reported experiencing an intensification of time and work during this period, as they struggled with the pace and tempo of teaching and learning in varied education contexts. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the unique historical circumstances of the pandemic created particular conditions for online learning with some of the technologies rapidly inserted into the education system during this period remaining uncritically in place, further highlighting the need for ongoing research in areas of time, technology and networked learning, especially in diverse and varied educational settings.

Campaigning for digital equality: the role of digital access attitudes in neoliberal context

ABSTRACT Covid-19 has thrust social services into the work of meeting digital needs, and some practitioners are mooting the need for more universal digital access. Yet little is known of societal attitudes towards digital equality and the means to achieving it. This article discusses the sociodemographic origins of digital and digital access attitudes in the context of a neoliberal state. Applying multiple regression of participants’ answers to a campaign poll and content analysis of their comments, we found that: (i) digital access attitudes do not follow from the more widely known attitudes towards technology adoption; (ii) while public and social service professionals have greater sympathy towards digitally vulnerable populations, they also hold more neoliberal views towards how digital resources are to be distributed; and (iii) neoliberal ideology undergirds digital access attitudes. These findings have implications on digital services for social development.

The Commodification of Feminism — A Critical Analysis of Neoliberal Feminist Discourse

This paper critically examines the commodification of feminism within the framework of neoliberal feminism, a discourse that has gained significant traction in recent years. Neoliberal feminism emphasizes individual empowerment, personal success, and market-driven solutions to gender inequality. While this approach has succeeded in making feminist ideas more mainstream and accessible, it also poses substantial challenges by overlooking systemic and structural barriers that many women face. This paper explores the historical emergence of neoliberal feminism, its key characteristics, and the role of media and corporations in promoting commodified feminist ideals. It further analyzes the positive and negative impacts of neoliberal feminism on broader feminist movements, highlighting the shift from collective action to individual empowerment. Through critical perspectives from radical, intersectional, and socialist feminists, this paper underscores the limitations of neoliberal feminism and calls for a renewed focus on collective action, intersectionality, and systemic change to achieve true gender equality. By resisting the commodification of feminist ideals and advocating for more inclusive strategies, the feminist movement can better address the root causes of gender inequality in a neoliberal context.

On the surface and below: a genealogical look at the waves of evaluation in early childhood education and care

ABSTRACT The rise of evaluation and data in education and education policy is a trend manifesting across a wide variety of policy contexts, holding in its grip national and global policies, with impacts that reach the level of individual children, teachers, and their subjectivities. Earlier research has mainly focused on the phenomenon in neoliberal contexts. This article presents a case study of Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy discourse built on a tradition of social democratic political rationality and egalitarian values. By utilizing Evert Vedung’s metaphor of evaluation waves, we examine how the evaluation trend has influenced the Finnish ECEC policy, which has traditionally been skeptical toward the assessment of individual children’s learning and skills and the production and use of data for accountability purposes. In the genealogical reading of ECEC curricula and policy documents from 2002–2021 as data, we identify three discursive practices – partnership, pedagogization, and evidence wave – that have socio-historically contributed to the formation of the present conception of evaluation in the Finnish ECEC policy discourse. Our genealogical reading also reveals a movement toward international trends – evaluating the individual child’s skills – especially through the evidence wave.

Housing Vulnerability Reconsidered: Applications and Implications for Housing Research, Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT Social housing policies in neoliberal contexts have become residualized. The notions of housing vulnerability and vulnerable populations emerged as a new organizing principle for the housing policy agenda and interventions in many countries. However, there is no cohesive and shared understanding of the characteristics and types of vulnerable households and housing situations, nor the drivers and consequences of different forms of vulnerability. This leads to questions about how to apply the concept to address people’s right to housing. This special issue presents research into what housing vulnerability means in different world regions, what structures and systems may be driving it, and the variety of experiences of housing vulnerability. These studies use different theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and empirical contexts to examine factors and initiatives that drive or counter housing vulnerability, fostering a dialogue towards critical housing research and policy agendas that meet our expectations of housing as a human right.

Emotional labor of a Brazilian public school teacher: domination and resistance in a neoliberal context

Abstract There have been many studies on teachers’ emotional labor and on the ethics of caring affect teachers’ emotional labor. Yet, little research has examined teacher emotional labor under current neoliberal discourses in the education systems in Brazil. Using interviews and diaries, this study investigated the emotional labor a Brazilian school teacher of English when teaching according to critical literacy studies. The findings indicated that her emotional labor was related to the political situation in Brazil, neoliberalism discourses and emotional rules, as well as clashes between teacher roles and her desire to teach critically. She felt torn between acting according to what she believed was good for her students and her critical literacy practice versus obeying the emotional rules for teachers’ and students’ roles at her school. As she did that, she experienced both domination and resistance. The study concludes with implications about neoliberalism as related to teacher emotional labor.

Is Managerial Homeworking New? Assessing strategic, technological and political influences before, during and after coronavirus

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is often assumed that working at home represents a fundamental transformation in the way managers work. But is managerial homeworking that new? To answer this question, we draw on labour process theory and three empirical studies to place post-pandemic homeworking in historical sociological perspective. Overall, we find that homeworking is not a novel phenomenon, but has been driven by various logics. Explaining these, we contend initially that recent studies of managers working at home have focused on the mandated temporal present of the practice under Covid-19, which has resulted in homeworking being portrayed idiosyncratically. In contrast, and to attain a more comprehensive understanding of what homeworking means for managers, we argue that it is necessary also to understand both the underappreciated past of the phenomenon as well as options for its projected future. A comparative – past, present, future – inquiry therefore portrays how a range of explicit (e.g. corporate restructuring, digital technology, government legislation) and implicit (e.g. responsible autonomy, cultural resistance, work–life balance) factors have influenced and affected the practice of managers working at home in recent times. Through content analysis, these factors are related to broader forces of strategic change, technological innovation and political regulation in describing the ‘contested terrain’ of modern managerial work. Amid a context of economic neoliberalism, work extensification and shifting spatio-temporal (home/work) boundaries, the paradoxical nature of homeworking – symptomatic of managers’ contemporary ‘struggle for a normal working day’ – is documented through a series of interview-based narrative investigations (conducted in 2002–2006, 2015–2019 and 2020–2021). Ultimately, the paper makes a case not only for greater historical retrospection, but also for deeper critical reflection, in studies of managerial homeworking, and notably when considering whether the practice will likely be extended, ended or otherwise in the coming decades.

Focusing on Actors, Scaling-Up, and Networks to Understand Co-Production Practices: Reporting From Berlin and Santiago

In different policy agendas, such as the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, co-production is introduced as a desirable urban planning practice to validate the engagement and inclusion of diverse actors/networks. Nevertheless, some scholars argue (e.g., Watson, Robinson) that the Western planning approach faces difficulties incorporating rationalities beyond the Global North–South division. In this context based on the research project DFG-KOPRO Int for the German Research Foundation on Chilean and German cases and the local context, this article seeks to explore how local groups are undertaking co-production, which means of legitimacy are used, and which socio-spatial results develop. In doing so, the research focuses firstly on the negotiation processes (governance) between stakeholders by undertaking network analysis and, secondly, on understanding the impulse for urban development by analysing the project’s socio-spatial material patterns. Chile’s neoliberal context and the case studies showcase diverse cooperative forms that try to close governance gaps within strong political struggles. In the German context, actors from different areas, such as cultural institutions, universities, and private actors undertake diverse mandates for testing regulatory, persuasive, or financial instruments. As different as local realities are, the overall results show that co-production occurs mostly in highly contested fields such as housing projects and highlights a three-part constellation of actors—state, private, and civil society—in urban development. However, negotiation processes take place, ranging from conflictive to cooperative. Hence, co-production challenges prevailing social and political structures by providing an arena for new forms of collective and pluralistic governance.