Neoliberal Privatization Research Articles

Reenvisioning Reproductive Labor

Reenvisioning Reproductive Labor Jeannie Ludlow (bio) Laura Briggs's How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017 Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017 As I read Laura Briggs's How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics and Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage in summer 2019, news stories of internment camps at the U.S.-Mexico border dominated the airwaves. It was disquieting, if unsurprising, to read histories of reproductive oppression and coercion while contemporary examples played out publicly, in ugly detail. These texts both provide historical contexts and analytical insights into the intersecting structures of racism, sexism, and classism that shape reproductive oppression historically and today. Both Briggs's and Owens's books powerfully reframe common discourse—not superficially but substantively—and have the potential to shift readers' vision completely. They refocus our gaze on the multiple, intersecting vectors of hegemonic discourse and the lives and experiences they elide. Briggs's How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics traces the influence of neoliberal privatization on child-bearing and childrearing, family and household maintenance, and care of the ill, the elderly, and other dependents—all aspects of "reproductive labor." As she explicates the political machinations behind various conservative "reforms" of reproductive policy (detailed below), Briggs challenges her readers to work toward a system of "comprehensive family rights for all kinds of people" in all types of relationships (2017, 151). In service of this challenge, Briggs elucidates a history of movements resistant to neoliberalism's impact on reproductive labor. Her critique of "welfare reform" ties it to the exploitation of mothers of color and those living in poverty. Having laid this foundation of critique, she presents specific examples of contemporary reproductive labor that demonstrate the ongoing systemic oppression created by neoliberal individualization and [End Page 122] privatization. These include the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic factors undergirding the exploitation of reproductive labor to control human movement and to punish those who do not comply through so-called immigration reform; the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic connections between access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and infant mortality, particularly in the black community; and the deployment of gay parenting as a normalizing discourse in the legalization of gay marriage, in contrast to the very real legal, financial, and social obstacles faced by lesbian and gay people providing care for partners and friends disabled by HIV/AIDS and other health challenges. These situations collectively demonstrate that dominant culture's (sporadic and selective) support for reproductive labor is always politically conservative. Briggs concludes with an examination of subprime mortgages as examples of conservative political exploitation of reproductive labor. Although this is not her primary focus, Briggs's careful vernacular explanation of predatory subprime lending is one of the clearest that I have read. Briggs's writing balances breadth of information with clarity of application. The book is carefully researched for an academic audience and clearly written for a general audience, inviting and accessible. Each chapter anchors to a specific narrative that readers will either recognize or be able to relate to other current political situations. Most impressively, Briggs deftly weaves together several threads of analysis: feminist, anti-racist, economic, and political. As happens so often, these strengths also engender challenges. Weaving multiple theoretical threads, for example, can make for a complex analysis. Typically, Briggs maneuvers through these challenges with skill. Occasionally, however, her vernacular writing style dips into sarcasm or ridicule aimed at conservative ideologies. While I agreed politically with every caustic comment she made, as someone who teaches in the middle of the United States, I would think carefully before assigning those passages in class; even students who agree with Briggs might find the sarcasm off-putting, since it likely refers to ideas shared by people they know and love. In a text so obviously written for a range of audiences, these moments were unexpected. Still, reading Briggs's book while hearing news reports of border camps foregrounded the ways topicality can date a text—here, to positive effect. At times, I had the uncanny feeling that the...

Strata of the state: Resource nationalism and vertical territory in Bolivia

This paper examines the relationship between resource nationalism, state territorialization, and geological knowledge production in Bolivia. Focusing on two historical moments of post-revolutionary state-building – post-Independence (1825) and post-National Revolution (1952) - I show how the subterranean was produced as vertical state territory not only in law but also through science. By charting this history, I argue that anti-Indigenous racism was historically built into resource nationalism through ongoing collaborations between earth scientists and various iterations of the Bolivian state. In the post-Independence era, French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny was hired by the nascent Bolivian state to produce the country's first geological map. His writings, which ranged from the geological to the ethnological, conceptually grafted Indigenous peoples to the surface of the earth while representing the subterranean as empty save for natural resources. In the post-National Revolution era, d’Orbigny's work reemerged as influential when it was taken up by both political theorists and geologists. Through a close examination of works from these two eras, I show how the subsoil became the rationalized realm of the state. I further suggest that the contemporary tension between state-led resource extraction and Bolivia's “plurinational” constitution, which pluralizes the nation and ostensibly supports Indigenous autonomy, can be understood as a spatial tension between the subterranean, which is held in perpetuity by the state, and the surface, which can be owned privately or communally and imbued with place-specific meanings. Although resource nationalism might appear to be a progressive effort to redistribute resource wealth, capable of countering the neoliberal privatization of decades prior, such extractive projects threaten Indigenous territorial rights, compromising the purportedly decolonial goals of the Plurinational State.

There's an App for That: Telecom, Children's Rights, and Conflicting Logics of Corporate Social Responsibility

ABSTRACTThis article examines how a Spanish telecom giant legitimizes its market expansion through a corporate social responsibility (CSR) narrative that links generic notions of technological innovation and children's rights to projects of development and democracy. At a broad level, I explore how the neoliberal privatization of the telecommunications industry has involved a reconfiguration of corporate‐state relations rather than an erasure of the state in corporate discourse. I trace how Telefónica accrues currency as a digital pioneer and provider of a social good by incorporating consumers, state actors, and other corporations into its moral apparatus. My point of entry is a smartphone application that the company's Colombian subsidiary developed and subsequently gamified to empower consumer‐citizens to end street‐based child labor. Within a digital economy of “instant gratification” and national context of securitization, the process whereby consumers are interpellated as citizen‐activists highlights the thin line between profiling techniques and humanitarian action, and between surveillance and activism, while disguising the limits of the state bureaucracy and the company's own distance from its purported beneficiaries. Ultimately, I show how the company maintained its narrative about its innovative and sustainable commitment to children even when explaining the failures of its CSR strategy. [digital activism, corporate social responsibility, children's rights, corporate–state relations, urban Latin America]

The Ohaka (Grave) Project: Post-secular social service delivery and resistant necropolitics in San’ya, Tokyo

This is an ethnography of a Buddhist, Catholic, and secular collaboration tending to the souls of marginalized men in San’ya, Tokyo’s former day labor ghetto. How does this post-secular project focused on death and the afterlife reshape relationships that bond the living and the dead? How does it relate to neoliberal biopolitics of urban poverty management? This paper demonstrates how the project subverts traditional Japanese patrilineal necrosociality in ways that enhance ontological security and social ties among participants. Additionally, project developers’ post-secular notion of rapprochement through acknowledging and accepting differences between communities bridged long-time rifts among faith, social service, and activist groups. While in some ways the project enables neoliberal privatization of social services, it is also a potent form of resistant necropolitics from below that reconfigures social relations around death to connect diverse groups, highlighting and addressing the limitations of a familial model of welfare amid neoliberal capitalism.

Impact of Rapid Urbanization and Changing Housing Patterns on Urban Open Public Spaces of Amman, Jordan: A GIS and RS Perspective

Rapid urbanization and population growth of the Amman Area were combined with land resource degradation when the city was heading for mounting urbanization from the early 1950s. The deterioration of natural resources and green areas, was coupled with the creation of different urban public open spaces in the city. The transformation from large single-family houses to dense residential apartments was associated with social and behavioral changes among the inhabitants living in the dense apartments. Consequently, a large private sector has been developed to provide public and social spaces. Photo-interpretation and satellite images were used to map and characterize land use/cover changes have been occurred in the Amman area between 1953 and 2017. Maximum Likelihood Classification method was employed to identify land use/cover changes between 1986 and 20017, and GIS was utilized also to map examples of the recently emerged socio-economic open spaces. Excessive urban development in the last two decades, and the adoption of neo-liberal privatization policies by the government, enhanced social stratification and residential segregation. So, instead of encouraging outdoor activity and social interaction among all groups of Amman residents, the freedom of accessibility to major open spaces has been restricted within the same urban fabric, thus, the “two Ammans” paradigm, a “tale of two cities”, has been recently acknowledged.

Beavers as commoners? Invitations to river restoration work in a beavery mode

Community development is related to ecological restoration in several ways. Degraded ecosystems have driven economic decline in communities. Developing institutions for managing and restoring community land bases has long been a strategy in community development. More recently, ecological restoration has been pitched to extraction-dependent communities as part of a ‘just transition’ to a low carbon economy. In this paper, I think across literatures in geography, ecological restoration and environmental politics to theorize a politics of ecological restoration that resists neoliberal co-optation while supporting Indigenous resurgence. I probe resonance and dissonance among three concepts that have been recently employed to theorize more-than-human relations in the face of extraction, climate change, neoliberal privatization and other Anthropocene phenomena. These concepts are: (1) the commons, one institution for managing land bases as well as an insurgent imaginary of post-capitalist governance; (2) precarity, an idea usually applied in urban settings to describe the late capitalist position of people, usually workers and (3) the more-than-human, an ecologically rooted theoretical perspective that thinks through social dynamics as imbricated with relations among species and entities living together. In my earlier work with a rural settler community trying to restore salmon stream habitats and runs, the idea of a multispecies commons emerged in interviews with residents and restoration workers, and inspired new watershed stewardship practices. Dené scholar Glen Coulthard’s critique that commons discourse often erases Indigenous land claims and relations inspired me to think more-than-human commons more deeply, drawing on interviews from beaver-assisted river restoration sites.

World Citizens: Pathways for the Development of Eco-Citizenship in Higher Education

It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary scholars in the humanities, such as Peter Critchley, Noam Chomsky, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Eisenstein, David Orr, Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein, Lynn Margulis, Mustafa Tolba, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Giroux, Carolyn Merchant, Paulo Freire, Fritjof Capra, and Pier Luigi Luisi have aptly redefined the concept of “world” as a biological and cultural ecosystem. This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments steered by World Languages and Cultures programs. It vests universities with a mission to engage themselves both as places of resistance against the neoliberal privatization of the commons and as the interactive, practical, analytical, and creative grounds needed for a healthy rebuilding of our global community. Through an assertive commitment in favour of eco-citizenship, universities will help clarify and resolve the strong conflict we are witnessing today between neoliberal orientations and an ecological exigency clearly delineated by scientific and humanistic scholarship.

Fifty Years of Drama on Israeli Children’s Television

This article analyzes the changes in drama series in the first five decades (1966–2016) of Israeli children’s television. Based on interviews with 27 central producers, this cultural-historical study seeks to explain the significance attributed to children’s drama over the years. Early children’s drama series in Israel were instructional or educational, but they also sought to control the representation of childhood under the direct supervision of the state. The neo-liberal privatization process in Israeli society led to the creation of locally produced, Hebrew-speaking daily dramas on private channels for children. In the multiscreen environment created by the age of multichannel television and digital media, original Israeli daily drama shows functioned as a central branding tool for children’s channels. The article contends that these shows became one of the producers’ key answers to the changes in children’s viewing habits and, more particularly, linear television’s strategy for success in a world of multiple online screens.

From World to Globe: The Transformation of Israeli Cultural Production in the Time of Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract This essay examines recent developments in Israeli cultural production. To do so, it argues, we must think of new cultural forms as responses to the neoliberal privatization reforms that accompany globalization. These reforms have altered Israeli social life to the degree that the once peripheral literature and cinema that conformed to Fredric Jameson's definition of Third World national allegories can now be read as symptoms of First World cultural production. This historical and aesthetic shift has made itself felt at the heart of Israeli daily life in the rearticulation of the relation between private and public spheres. Recent Israeli literature and film consequently invite us to rethink the stylistic preoccupation of contemporary theories of world literature by asking how these media use aesthetic figures to give form to the concepts of freedom, necessity, and knowledge. To look at this aesthetic and political shift, I offer a comparative reading of Yeshayahu Koren's 1967 novella, Funeral at Noon, and Adam Sanderson's 2014 cinematic adaptation of that novella.

Global Capitalism and the Neoliberal Privatization of Energy Reserves: A Mexico Case Study

Abstract In 2013 state officials operating through the three federal government branches of Mexico mutilated the country’s constitution, privatizing upwards of seventy-five percent of the country’s hydrocarbon reserves. This article suggests that this neoliberal strategy, carried out by transnationally oriented elites operating through state apparatuses in Mexico (and promoted by officials in Washington and within the International Financial Institutions), is meant to benefit transnational capital. Such drastic change to Mexico’s legal order, we argue, in fact violated the country’s constitution and symbolized a break with the country’s earlier model of development. The federal government’s anti-constitutional behavior, specifically its violation of Article 136 of the constitution, provides a legal basis for dismissing top officials from their posts and moving toward a constitutional assembly.

Review of Wubbena et al.'s News media and the neoliberal privatization of education

Review of Wubbena et al.'s News media and the neoliberal privatization of education

The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa: The Relationship Between Funding, Capacity and Research Community in a Nascent Field

The emergence of vibrant research communities of computer scientists in Kenya and Uganda has occurred in the context of neoliberal privatization, commercialization, and transnational capital flows from donors and corporations. We explore how this funding environment configures research culture and research practices, which are conceptualized as two main components of a research community. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study utilizing interview, ethnographic and survey data collected in Nairobi and Kampala. We document how administrators shape research culture by building academic programs and training growing numbers of PhDs, and analyze how this is linked to complicated interactions between political economy, the epistemic nature of computer science and sociocultural factors like entrepreneurial leadership of key actors and distinctive cultures of innovation. In a donor-driven funding environment, research practice involves scientists constructing their own localized research priorities by adopting distinctive professional identities and creatively structuring projects. The neoliberal political economic context thus clearly influenced research communities, but did not debilitate computing research capacity nor leave researchers without any agency to carry out research programs. The cases illustrate how sites of knowledge production in Africa can gain some measure of research autonomy, some degree of global competency in a central arena of scientific and technological activity, and some expression of their regional cultural priorities and aspirations. Furthermore, the cases suggest that social analysts must balance structure with culture, place and agency in their approaches to understanding how funding and political economy shape scientific knowledge.

The Impact of Chinese Anti-Corruption Policies in Costa Rica: Emerging Entrepreneurialisms

While corruption is an age-old practice, it was in the 1990s that Western financial institutions identified corruption as an urgent problem for economic development in the Global South. In the case of China and Latin America specifically, deep traditions of informality, personal connections, and bribery in both regions heightened worries about corruption's potential role within burgeoning trans-Pacific relations, despite active anti-corruption policies within each country. Rather than evaluating the instrumental effects of these measures, this article highlights the generative potential of anti-corruption policies for Chinese state employees working in Latin America. Specifically, I use an ethnographic lens to explore how Chinese anti-corruption policies have shaped the entrepreneurial imagination and initiatives of Chinese development agents in Costa Rica. In doing so, I highlight how anti-corruption measures proliferate certain kinds of entrepreneurial ventures and subjects while foreclosing the possibility of others, effectively restructuring how business can be done. As such, I argue that anti-corruption policies cannot be understood as simply extending neoliberal privatization or consolidating authoritarian state control; instead, I show how these policies produce a complex assemblage of public-private enterprise that has become central to Chinese post-reform governance as it has gone global.

The ‘poisoned chalice’ of state ownership of water infrastructure in contemporary Blantyre, Malawi

ABSTRACTThe remunicipalisation of water in the global south has heightened a sense of optimism among left-leaning scholars and activists. This is widely heralded as a triumph over neo-liberal privatisation and therefore seen as putting water back into public hands. This article takes a critical view of this trend. It contends that insofar as remunicipalisation is conflated with state ownership, it may in other contexts not necessarily lead to water going back into public hands. An empirical account is presented of how state ownership in Malawi has been imbricated in commercialisation rationalities that have in turn undermined the establishment of an egalitarian public water network in Blantyre City. The article uncovers the extent to which the dominance of private capitalist interests in Malawi’s economy, lack of public financing and over-reliance on debt from global-local financial markets have systemically compromised the efficacy of the state in mediating the politics of water production and distribution.

Cash not care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare state

Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition of the UK Welfare State is an impassioned appeal against the encroachment of neoliberal privatization and the dismantlement of the United Kingdom’s welfare sys...

Challenging Neoliberalism and Multicultural Love in Art Therapy

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the ties between neoliberalism and multiculturalism in art therapy in the United States. I explore the neoliberal privatization of society as an influence of individualistic norms in the profession. I explain my analysis of multiculturalism using the 1954 film Magnificent Obsession and introduce the concept of a culturally situated love without ethical limits. This type of ideal love functions in art therapy as an expression of white privilege and multicultural color-blindness. I also describe the project Divisive, a collaborative live radio talk show, as an example of how I use my artist practice to engage in self-reflexive dialogue about ethics in art therapy.

The World Bank Improving Environmental and Natural Resource Policies: Power, Deregulation, and Privatization in (Post-Soviet) Armenia

Summary Over the past decades, development projects by international organizations like the World Bank use concepts such as “joint forest management”, “community-based natural resource management”, and “participatory conservation” as integrated approaches to poverty alleviation and conservation. These Integrated Conservation and Development Projects primarily promote the intensification of natural resource production. Currently, a research program on the pathways and politics through which international organizations influence related domestic policy and cause changes is being developed. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence the World Bank had on environmental and natural resources policies aiming at poverty alleviation in Armenia. We use Armenia for analyzing how this neoliberal approach of the World Bank echoes in a post-Soviet system. Empirically, we use a qualitative case-study design building on content analysis of key policy documents from World Bank interventions and subsequent domestic policy changes. Our results show that the World Bank interventions in Armenia, formally aiming to reduce rural poverty by means of improving natural resources management, de facto promoted policy and administrative changes. These changes, however, largely benefit transnational private companies, while at the same time restricting the access of poor local users to natural resources. By employing a discourse of illegal logging and by framing local actors as the main drivers of deforestation, the World Bank achieved considerable deregulation of the forest sector. This in turn promoted privatization of the forestland as well as a reform of the state forest administration. We conclude that interventions by international organizations, such as the World Bank, may formally claim to enhance the common good e.g. through strengthening ecological goals in natural resources management. Informally, however, quite the opposite might happen: Neoliberal privatization and deregulation will further weaken state actors and their capacities, while at the same time strongly and quickly incentivizing the increase in extractive natural resource production, as observed with increased timber harvests and exports.

The politics of law in a post-conflict UN protectorate: privatisation and property rights in Kosovo (1999–2008)

This paper investigates the design and implementation of Kosovo’s post-war privatisation regime with reference to the policy ideas developed and negotiated within the bounds of Kosovo’s international transitional administration (UNMIK). Drawing on constructivist analyses of institutional change, we rely on semi-structured interviews with international officials and a review of legal documents to argue that the process of institutional change was driven largely by a contest between conflicting legal norms, rather than a contest between politically organised interest-based groups. International legal experts mobilised various competing normative paradigms residing in the background of policy debates to persuade domestic political actors that privatisation was in their interest, and to legitimise or disqualify the proposed neoliberal privatisation programme. However, the lack of consensus on the background paradigm ushered in a protracted period of ideational contestation. Privatisation in post-war Kosovo was essentially about the ‘politics of law’, as the legalisation of privatisation policy led inevitably to the contentious politicisation of legal norms.

Social justice beyond neoliberal welfare nationalism: challenges of increasing immigration to Sweden and Norway

This article critically examines the socio-political responses of Sweden and Norway to the increasing of immigration and refugees in 2015/16. Based on a review of governmental and municipal authorities’ responses to the increasing immigration to the two countries, the results show that the increasing of immigration and refugees in a time of neoliberal reorganisation in society creates new conceptual, ethical and practical challenges for the practices of social work in the two countries. It is argued that the neoliberal privatisation of the reception of newcomers deteriorates the possibilities of social work to play its effective role in promoting social justice and social cohesion. Social work as a global and human rights profession should move beyond national boundaries and care nationalism in order to realise solidary goals and the international commitments of social work and social workers.

News Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education

<i>News Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education</i>