Neoliberal Framework Research Articles

Beyond tick boxes: re-imagining education for sustainable development in higher education

ABSTRACT We are in an era of climate breakdown, mass extinction and global injustice. Through analysis of the new UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) for academics, this paper explores some global challenges of incorporating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the neoliberal university. The PSF is a globally recognised framework for professional development, yet its recent review concluded that ESD could not be included within it. The paper discusses the disconnect between the growing recognition of the need for education that responds to our planetary predicament and the particular logics and rationalities of a neoliberal framework. In its critique of the underpinning assumptions of the PSF and its wider context, it discusses (im)possibilities of values and unlearning in a performativity driven setting. Next, it provides generative provocations to those using such frameworks for their own professional development or to support the development of peers. It invites academics to find new ways of using the limits of these narrow professional development practices as prefigurative for a less disconnected university where other possibilities for responding to our planetary predicament can be imagined.

Liminalities: Social Vulnerabilities Between Participatory Processes and Digital Space in the Neoliberal Era

This article explores the development directions of liminal spaces and cities as a whole within the broader framework of neoliberalism in the Italian metropolitan context. First, neoliberalism was defined and considered in the context of liminal spaces and urban development, according to the international literature perspective. Then, with specific reference to the Italian case, through semi-structured interviews, it was found that liminal spaces, despite facing marginalisation, translocalisation and defamiliarisation, acted as antagonists and nuclei of resistance to the encroaching framework of neoliberalism. The article also explores the role of digital ecosystems as tools for empowerment; it also emphasizes the role of liminal spaces in fostering communitarianism while resisting the change experienced and brought about by the surrounding urban spaces.

Access to Labour and “Differential Inclusion” for Young Venezuelan Migrants in Ecuador

Young migrants and refugees provide important inputs concerning production and social reproduction mechanisms (care work) that reproduce unequal but highly profitable patterns of accumulation around the world. The expansion of globalisation and neoliberalism has deepened such social dynamics, leading to a “multiplication of labour.” The diversification and heterogenization of migrant labour within neoliberal frameworks raise ethical and human rights concerns, including issues related to fair wages, working conditions, and access to social protections. After a neoliberal era in Latin America, the emergence of post‐development politics in the region led to increased efforts to address the needs of these populations. This article seeks to contribute to debates about “differential inclusion” in South–South migration and access to labour and social protection by analysing a specific case study of young Venezuelans, a recently growing phenomenon that has a great impact on the region. Ecuador is noteworthy because it hosts one of the largest populations of Venezuelan migrants and refugees and has adopted a human rights perspective in conjunction with public investments in social policy, health, and education. Despite efforts to legalize the work status of Venezuelan migrants, a more restrictive policy began to be implemented in 2019 that limited their access to formal labour and social protection. Within these complex dynamics of differential inclusion, instead of seeing these young migrants and refugees as victims, we analyse their resilience strategies of accessing social provisions while coping with informality and irregular status, as well as conditions of multiplication of labour. Using four real‐life stories as examples taken from a larger ethnographic study, we illustrate how dynamics of differential inclusion intersect with the gender, age, and legal status of young Venezuelans in Ecuador. The case studies are complemented with structural explanations from 6,000 household surveys collected between 2017 and 2020.

From Coubertin’s Olympism to neoliberal sports spectacle: narratives of Brazilian Olympic athletes

ABSTRACT This study aimed to examine how Brazilian athletes, who participated in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, perceive Olympism and its values within the context of their sports training, particularly considering the prevalent neoliberal elements in their high-performance sports environment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight athletes from a region with a strong emphasis on competitive sports. The analysis revealed that athletes primarily associate Olympism with their personal experiences in sports. Their representations align with an Olympic and neoliberal framework, emphasizing performance and professionalism, while also recognizing them as moral exemplars. Athletes develop their understanding of sports values within the discourse of high-performance sports and daily routines. These findings highlight the integration of Olympism into athletes’ perceptions, shaped by the demands of neoliberal ideologies that prioritize competitiveness and commercialization within the sports domain. The study provides a critical perspective on the influence of neoliberalism on the formation of Olympic athletes’ subjectivity.

Perpetuating neoliberal pathologies: what teacher candidates believe students with disabilities should learn

Teachers’ beliefs impact student outcomes. Yet, regulatory agencies look to standardized accountability measures to establish a base for student improvement. This study examines other qualitative factors that impact student success by exploring teacher candidates’ beliefs about what students should learn. Specifically, it examines the beliefs of teacher candidates who were enrolled in a course on teaching students with disabilities. Education Journey Maps and interview data were conducted with 24 teacher candidates. Analyzed through a conceptual framework of Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and neoliberalism, results indicate that teacher candidates possess an economic habitus that seeks standardization, commodifiable skills, and individualism. Teacher candidates implicitly understand that human capacity and diversity are multifaceted but believe that holding the same standards for everyone will rid our education system of discrimination against people with disabilities. This work has implications for wider debates on the impacts of standardization and neoliberalism in teacher education.

Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

Abstract Critical work theorizing the nature of immigration imprisonment in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy. Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, this essay argues that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. This essay develops an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between land enclosures and rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. The essay places Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

Metrics as Pseudo Goals of Reforms

The article emphasizes the significance of numerical indicators in economic policy and explains the widespread use of metrics as a tool for regulation and control. It highlights the correlation between metrics and the competitive ideology within the neoliberal framework of public administration. Metrics serve as pseudo-goals for the state, and the article delves into the distinctions between actual state goals and these pseudo-goals of regulation. The author provides examples demonstrating the disparities between the outcomes of metric-based management and the missions of public sector organizations, particularly in the realms of science and higher education. Furthermore, the text elucidates the reasons why Key Performance Indicator (KPI) analogues are not fully suitable for the non-profit sector and how they can contribute to an increase in transaction costs. It also explores how metrics can trigger an institutional mechanism of adverse selection, impacting the behavioral strategies of government employees. The article discusses how metrics may lead to the economic decline of the public sector and affect the broader social relations system. Moreover, it outlines a foundational set of axioms embraced by proponents of metrics-based management and outlines the essential conditions for its effective implementation. The article argues that oversimplified interpretations of the role of metrics are misguided and presents arguments regarding their adverse effects on the quality of public services. Finally, the article advocates for accountability in the unwarranted adoption of vertical metrics and a reduction in the number of measurements within the state regulatory system.

Practicing wujud: A Constellation of sumud in the Fragmented Palestinian Present

The Zionist conception of history and its material project of expansion and land annexation produce a temporality of catastrophe (Nakba) that constantly reiterates violence, dispossession, and displacement in Palestinian lives and experiences. The linear temporality of the colonial process, including the neo-liberal framework of one of its crucial phases—the Oslo Accords (1993), has fragmented Palestinian existence throughout the past decades on multiple levels—economic, political, social, and geographic. Reflecting on Palestinian sumud as a constellation—within an epistemological and methodological relational perspective that aims to counter colonial linear epistemologies and temporalities, this article looks at how three significant Palestinian embodied, material and symbolic practices of wujud (presence) function within collective sumud. On the one hand, such experiences resist colonial annihilation by re-integrating the physical and cultural Palestinian presence in the face of catastrophe. On the other, they embody the diversity of Palestinian ontologies and the multi-vocality of Palestinian epistemologies. Practicing and asserting wujud and reclaiming relationships with the land are refractory Palestinian spaces, in the here and now of a fragmented present, to the Zionist colonial temporality, material and epistemic order. They enable the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people and alternative understandings and imaginations of time, meaning, and presence.

The Faults of Neoliberal Education: Examining International Students’ Experiences within Korean Higher Education

The overwhelming negativity towards neoliberalism has focused on policies that have reduced academic life to strictly corporate terms and how the customer education model has led to the demise of civic and democratic values. Following Western universities' models, Korean education has adopted the same values and policies, inheriting the subsequent issues and problems that lie therein. This paper continues the call for resisting neoliberalism by exposing its negative impact on the acculturation experiences of international students in Korea. The study participants used transactional language to describe their feelings of marginalization and invisibility and the impoverished ways their host university treated them. Utilizing a qualitative case study methodology set within the framework of neoliberalism, this paper documents how neoliberal policies have been ideologically ingrained in Korean higher education. It highlights the necessity of reforming current policies to deter acculturative stress. It is hoped that the findings inspire resistance to the neoliberal ideology that Korean policymakers have subconsciously followed.
 
 Received: 23 December 2023 / Accepted: 19 February 2024 / Published: 5 March 2024

The Significance of International Cooperation on Climate Change Mitigation in Afghanistan

Afghanistan confronts significant issues as a result of climate change, as the nation is susceptible to landslides, floods, droughts, and rising temperatures. Studying how international cooperation influences Afghanistan's attempts to mitigate climate change becomes crucial in light of these challenges. This study delves into the significance of such cooperation and its influence on Afghanistan's climate change policies and governance. To explore this topic, we employed a qualitative research approach along with content analysis, framed within a neoliberal framework. By adopting this approach, we aim to identify and analyze international cooperation on climate change in Afghanistan. The study reveals that international cooperation significantly impacts Afghanistan's climate change policy and governance, aligning with neoliberal institutionalism theory's emphasis on global challenges. Important conclusions from our research can help development partners, policymakers, and groups addressing climate change in Afghanistan. The results highlight the necessity of funding, technical support, and capacity building for the creation of successful policies and initiatives. Afghanistan can improve its resilience to climate change and sustainable development by placing a high priority on international cooperation. Financing, technical support, and opportunities for knowledge sharing would all be necessary for this. In addition to investments in sustainable agriculture, disaster risk reduction, facility training, foreign aid, and renewable energy, Afghanistan needs international funding currently. This article emphasizes the need for international cooperation in Afghanistan's struggle against climate change and the possibility for sustainable development through the exchange of information, operational help, and funding.

Cognition and Intelligence After the Post-Human Turn Insights from the Brain-Gut Axis

This article discusses how the post‑human turn in science and society is framing cognition, mind and intelligence taking as empirical case the gut‑brain axis developed within microbiome science. The article brings into dialogue authors from different disciplines that deal with the relationship between cognition and posthumanism, with the aim to indicate posthumanism’s potential but also to warn about the risk of its – more or less conscious – engulfment into a neoliberal framework. Bringing into dialogue an ontoepistemic and a sociopolitical analysis – debates that are too often kept separated – the article indicates that the ‘becoming environmental’ of cognition, mind and intelligence, far from simply being a dehumanizing gesture that causes anthropocentrism to crumble, is still a very human endeavour, deeply rooted in human history and its varied desires and political aspirations.

Pushing through the pandemic portal with care ethics: Possibilities for change

AbstractThis paper begins with specific articulations of ‘care’ by three prominent care theorists - Eva Kittay (1999), Joan Tronto (2013), and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) - to analyze aspects of the Covid-19 reality in the US and in India. The central concern is to explore whether a care analysis of the pandemic can initiate radically different imaginings of ‘living with’ in a post-Covid world. After examining some roadblocks to adopting the deeply relational nature of life that Covid-19 foregrounded, I explore whether our response to the crises contains an implicit self-refutation of entrenched neoliberal frameworks based on atomized selfhood, individualized responsibility, and the values of market fundamentalism.

Wrestling with Ethical Issues in Studying Illiberalism: Some Remarks from the U.S. Context

Knowledge production has always been intrinsically correlated to politics and power hierarchy. In the U.S. academic system, producing scholarship on highly polarizing topics such as illiberalism faces specific challenges. Classic ethical and epistemological issues are more difficult to address in a neoliberal framework that pushes for interaction with the policy world and for external fundraising. Moreover, both institutionalized and peer pressures on a normative definition of “liberalism” and its “enemies,” which often does not allow for both conservative and leftist interpretations of liberalism, reduces the space for discussion and may push for some spirals of silence to take form. This paper reflects on these challenges on the basis of more than a decade spent at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Study on the Economic and Social Impacts of Using Mega-events for Urban Regeneration

The article focuses on the significant economic and social impacts that large-scale events such as the Olympic Games have on the host city. They involve large financial investments, affect millions of people and can strategically transform cities. While these events often improve physical infrastructure, they can also exacerbate inequality and displacement. Disadvantaged communities are often forced to relocate to make way for urban redevelopment projects associated with large-scale activities. Employment and income inequalities may also emerge, with employment opportunities benefiting mainly the middle and upper classes. Legacies such as infrastructure improvements are often unevenly distributed, further marginalising low-income groups. They may also lead to suburbanisation and higher costs of living, resulting in the displacement of residents and the exclusion of disadvantaged groups. In addition, mega-events can place a huge financial burden on taxpayers and are prone to corruption. In short, the neoliberal framework behind mega-events can contribute to the economic, social and geographical polarisation of urban areas.

From Looking to Learning: Working with and for Young Black Women in Systems of Whiteness

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore both the need and possibility for liberatory work with and in service of young Black women within two systems of Whiteness. First, I discuss a process of exclusion experienced by a group of young women in their inner-London 6th form college: namely being constructed as hypervisible and hypersexual, and subsequently being erased from sight within spaces connected to the college’s public image. I discuss this with reference to a neoliberal framework that insidiously sustains norms of Whiteness in increasingly marketised school settings. I also extend critical analysis to the research process itself, uncovering parallel processes of silencing and stereotyping, with reference to understandings of Whiteness as structurally violent yet invisiblised acts of looking. Crucially, however, I also explore the potential for resistance within these systems. Drawing on Black feminist pedagogical frameworks, I discuss the possibility for co-created spaces in which young Black women’s cultural practices and forms of knowledge take centre-stage. I ultimately find how forms of ‘dancing with’ and ‘listening to’ can serve as important practices of (un)learning for White teachers and/or researchers, specifically within UK schools and education research.

Expanding the public space through art. A conversation with Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, The School of Panamerican Unrest (2003–2006), a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the American continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art. The contribution, in the form of a conversation, will retrace Helguera’s work to focus on questions of publicness, art and participation in a moment in which socially engaged practices are increasingly established in the contemporary art realm. By articulating the artist’s strategies and operating methodologies, the aim is to shed light on ways in which art can contribute to widen the public discourse on the social and political life and create accessible spaces of meeting, confrontation and dialogue, in which a counter- narrative to the dominant neoliberal frame work can take place.

The idea of a democratic university

This article sets the current crisis of universities in the UK in its recent historical, post–1960s context. It argues that an expansionary and initially broadly progressive phase of development from the 1960s onwards, lasting for twenty-five or so years, has come in the recent neoliberal decades to be seen as a threat to the dominant social order, in the context of a broader resistance to the egalitarian and democratic trends of post-war British society. Since the 1980s this now large sector of social and cultural production and reproduction has been subject to a purposeful restructuring, to render it consistent with the norms of a society dominated by capital. This restructuring can be broadly understood as taking place within a neoliberal framework of assumptions. Unless this wider situation, and the changes which have led to them, is understood, in historically and theoretically coherent terms, resistance to what is happening is unlikely to succeed. The article first discusses the phase of university expansion, the forces which brought it about, and the social and cultural changes and opportunities to which it gave rise. It then discusses the counter-reaction, and the attempts to remodel the practices and institutions of higher education that constitute its active elements. Finally it explores what might be involved in resetting this path of development in a more positive direction, and considers the many theoretical and political difficulties involved in imagining this and making it possible. Here it argues the need for a dismantling of the graduate meritocracy over society, and for bringing into being an educated democracy. It is crucial to create the conditions for a broad debate on the place and function of universities in our society, in which these larger issues of direction and purpose can be debated. The author notes, however, that only in a society that becomes less grossly unequal than ours is it possible to imagine education being designed or indeed allowed to serve these generally democratic and enabling purposes.

From colonial tea to postcolonial rubber plantations: tracking the Plantationocene in Lugela district, Mozambique

ABSTRACT This research conducted between June 2016 and April 2018 employs ethnographic research, archival sources, and observations to reveal the emergence of the Plantationocene in Mozambique's Lugela district. It explores how historical exploitation and governance of land and people by colonial companies, specifically Société du Madal, have influenced the current plantation regime. By focusing on a MHL rubber plantation in the postcolonial era, the article exposes how the plantation revitalizes colonial methods of racist capital accumulation. The study highlights the detrimental effects of large-scale plantations on rural communities, including marginalization, dispossession, displacement, and the objectification of people and landscapes as mere commodities for capital accumulation. Additionally, it emphasizes how these projects impose new labour relations, racialized identities, and geographies, perpetuating the remnants of colonialism while endorsing a neoliberal framework that further deepens existing inequalities.

Политика акселерации как трансформационный драйвер политических процессов в позднем капитализме

In the presented article, the author's team attempts to consider the acceleration policy as a transformational driver of political processes in the conditions of late capitalism. Based on the systematization of conceptual approaches within the framework of the new political theory of acceleration and critical theories of the modern capitalist system, the authors analyze the global crisis of modernity through the prism of neoliberal political processes that generate certain barriers to socio-political and techno-economic development. Based on the works of well–known accelerationists, a conclusion is formulated about two main vectors of accelerationist policy – in fact, the vector of "acceleration" and the vector of "linear velocity". The acceleration policy appears to be the driver only in the first case. The authors formulate a hypothesis that acceleration can transform the political process to overcome the neoliberal framework, firstly, by forcing the formation of global acceleration discourses by "left" political forces and, secondly, through the creation and implementation of blockchain platforms and AI in political management for proactive planning and forecasting of macro-economic changes. With the correct implementation of acceleration vectors, the transformation of the political process can help smoothly bring society, based on the Marxist paradigm, to a new socio-economic formation – post-capitalism.

BRAC’s (ব্র্যাক) Adoption of Community-Based Primary Education for Socially Disadvantaged Children in Bangladesh

This article provides a critical-historical analysis of BRAC’s adoption of non-formal primary education (NFPE) while de-emphasizing ‘conscientizing’ functional education in Bangladesh during 1980s. The central question of this paper is why did BRAC´s adopt NFPE in 1985 within the framework of its needs. In this study, I analyze BRAC’s education program from 1973 to 1985, with particular attention to the international neoliberal context of 1980s, policy shift of the western aid industry, and relationship that BRAC and its founder had with local power structures and consecutive Bangladeshi regimes (Fateh, 2020). I examine BRAC’s curriculum documents, project proposals, evaluation reports, and statements made by BRAC’s founder Fazle Hasan Abed. My findings suggest that beside supporting the disadvantaged children, BRAC’s adoption of NFPE is for the sake of its organizational growth associated to its submission to local power structure, and dominant neoliberal framework of the international aid industry.