Neoliberal Reforms Research Articles

A Class Analysis of Agrarian Capitalist Development in Haryana

The present study attempted to present an alternative paradigm to understand the agrarian changes in Haryana. The findings of the study highlighted that the introduction of neoliberal reforms during the 1990s gave way to the process of dispossession and proletarianization in Haryana's agriculture. The class analysis of agrarian changes highlighted the increase in the use of marketbased agro-inputs and the incidence of indebtedness among all the peasant classes. There was persistence and continuity of a high level of capitalisation and inequality among different peasantry classes. Hence, there is an urgent need for state intervention to regulate the uncontrolled development of capitalism in Haryana's agriculture, which was not only harmful to sustainable agricultural practices but also aggravated the problem of inequality among peasant classes

Neoliberal sermons: European Christian democracy and neoliberal governmentality

Responsibilization is a central theme in the literature on neoliberal governmentality. An underexplored element therein is the role of Christian democracy. The single most important source for Michel Foucault’s famous lectures on neoliberal governmentality were the writings of the German ordoliberals, who were allied with the West-German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and combined neoliberal economic doctrine with Christian social ethics. This paper discusses a similar crossover: the Dutch market-oriented reforms of the 1980s. The Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) defended these reforms quite literally as a strategy of responsibilization, an attempt to create a ‘responsible society’. While leading scholars have described neoliberal governmentality as economistic, individualistic and anti-moralistic, here we find that neoliberal reform can go hand in hand with a moralistic and communitarian discourse.

The Origins of the Syrian Conflicts

The Origins of the Syrian Conflicts

Building Out the Edges: Reading Racial Capitalism Into Jean Anyon’s Political Economy of Urban Education

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

Through Jean Anyon’s “Screen Door”: The Differentially Racialized Incursion of the Neoliberal State in Milwaukee and Detroit Schools

Background/Context: Research has documented educational neoliberalization as a disrupter of “failing” urban schools and a driver of the remaking of urban space for development interests, through the dislocation of low-income communities of color. Such research draws upon Jean Anyon’s work on cities, schools, race, and inequality, yet undertheorizes the nexus of race and political economy by positing their interplay as straightforward and unvariegated. Purpose/Objective: This article documents differential racialization in neoliberal education reform across two urban contexts—Milwaukee and Detroit—and therewith seeks to build theory aligned with Jean Anyon’s final wish to complicate her work in urban educational political economy with more rich accounts of the intersection of race and political economy. Research Design: This comparative study utilizes discourse analysis of key educational policy documents and ethnographic work with educational policy actors in both contexts. Findings/Results: Market-based educational reform agendas in the two cities’ school systems proceeded from differing assemblages of political actors and regional particularities, and had as primary demonstrative objective different neoliberal outcomes. While in Milwaukee neoliberals capitalized upon Black disaffection from public schools to demonstrate the political viability of diverting public educational funds to the private sector, the imposition of such reform in Detroit buttressed the spatial reorganization of a shrinking city for the purpose of accumulation by dispossession rooted in the real estate market. Conclusions/Recommendations: Drawing upon these findings, the study recommends a more refined critical racial lens to augment Jean Anyon’s political economy, arguing for a more nuanced and practicable understanding of racialized neoliberal urbanism and its contestation.

Opening Act: Neocolonial Urban Education Reform and the Detroit Public Schools

Background/Context: Urban educational systems have garnered focused examination as bastions of educational inequity, particularly along race and class cleavages. These systems are often cited as inefficient bureaucratic institutions plagued by financial mismanagement and political corruption that produce dismal achievement outcomes. Contemporary educational research demonstrates that neoliberal education reforms exacerbate racialized inequity, but we are less clear on the terms of this racialized inequity. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article explores how we may deepen our conception of ghettoization, as espoused by Jean Anyon and others, and expand what is termed the social context of education to include a broader colonial history of the underdevelopment and control of educational institutions. This article examines the 1999 state-legislated intervention of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district, also known as Michigan Public Act 10. The reform transformed the district’s governance structure, which dissolved local elected control over the school system and centralized educative power in the city’s mayor and state governor. The key research question animating this analysis centers understanding the political economic impetus and effects of this educational reform. Engaging an internal colonial analytical framework, this article is a theory-driven analysis of the underlying dynamics that made the state-legislated reform possible. This analysis of the Detroit reform motivates a critical engagement of the colonial logics that have shaped the ontological position of colonial subjects, while conducting research that examines neoliberal urban education reform.

Revisiting Green Neoliberalism in India through the Lens of Market-Based Restoration and Reforestation Projects

This introduction to the special issue revisits the idea of ‘green neoliberalism’ through the lens of market-based restoration and reforestation projects in India. Addressing the strategic role of forests as ‘carbon sinks’ and ‘service providers’ in today’s neoliberal reform projects, it contributes to a renewed attention to the material production of such (un)desired natures and their variegated realities. It argues that empirical accounts of how the reorganisation of forests is imagined, how it is implemented through specific programmes, and how it gets entangled into the multi-layered histories of people and places, are critical to understand the tensions but also the openings that neoliberal restructuring at the forested frontier entails. First, the article builds on sustained critiques of ‘green neoliberalism’ to retrace changes in global environmental politics over the last 30 years, stamped by the extended reach of the market both outward —through a performative discursive shift and quantification drives— and inward, as it now aims at subjecting practices, habits and emotions to relentless rounds of improving and enhancing. Second, it considers these developments against the background of India’s forest governance since the 1990s, which saw the emergence of the judiciary as a key institution to enforce environmental laws and countertrends to democratizing forest governance. In light of empirical data collected in the special issue, it asks to what degree instruments such as compensatory afforestation or carbon forestry constitute a departure from older forestry projects, and, in fine, the heuristics of neoliberalism as a category, taking issue with the all-powerfulness of India’s State Forest Departments, the long-standing exclusion of local communities, the use of forests as capital for elite bureaucracies, but also the currency and power of the developmental state in India.

Pipes, profits and peace: toward a feminist political economy of gas during war

Neoliberal reforms instituted at the behest of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) during conflict are both unchallenged and commonplace. In Ukraine, the IFIs have prescribed radical economic restructuring amid the war in Donbas. One of the most notable reform programs has been the liberalization of the gas market. This article offers a critical, global feminist political economy framework that seeks to understand the gendered impact of radical energy liberalization on Ukrainians during the war in Donbas. The aim of this article is to highlight the fundamentally gendered aspects of such economic restructuring and demonstrate how it has catalyzed further insecurity, inequality, and instability during war. The article argues that more critical, feminist political economy research is needed to understand and critique both economic reforms during war and orthodox energy policy.

Paramilitary violence in key economic sectors in Honduras: the violent arm of «development»

Classified as one of the countries with the highest incidence of homicide and femicide in the world, Honduras has been revealed as a flashpoint for violence perpetrated by the drug cartels and gangs. However, to reduce the problem of violence to simply «criminality» is inexact because it focuses upon the symptoms, to the detriment of the core causes, and which drives increasing involvement in the Armed Forces and the Police, bodies that are responsible for grave violations of human rights. At its core lies a foundation of political violence —that is, the violence and repression against the defenders of the earth, environment, and human rights— those who search for alternatives to agro-industrial, mining and infrastructure projects. Over the past decade, state and non-state actors, such as paramilitaries, have perpetrated violence in the service of capital. Paramilitary violence is functional for the large-scale accumulation of capital in agro-industry, tourism, mining and energy; it also drives the imposition of neoliberal reforms in land management, education and health. Paramilitary violence in the service of local and international corporations has occurred within a militarized context that extends state violence to repress and criminalize social movements. Honduras stands out as one of the four countries in Latin America with the highest levels of violence and criminalization, interrelated phenomena.

Negotiating and Contesting Confucian Workplace Culture in South Korea

ABSTRACT The South Korean workforce faces conflicting pressures arising from intensified global competition, neoliberal policy reforms and contending cultural norms concerning appropriate workplace behaviours. Demographic, policy and economic changes have destabilised steeply hierarchical norms understood as ‘Confucian’ or ‘traditional’, with calls for flexibility, informality and reduced reciprocal loyalty between employers and employees. Nonetheless, this study suggests that some South Korean firms are attempting to maintain hierarchical practices and strategically deploy traditional cultural norms, many of which are embedded in linguistic practices. Based on intensive observation within three workplaces, we find that firms can sometimes actively construct an alignment between Confucian-based culture and workplace practices that induce significant commitment from employees. Furthermore, practices and expectations anchored in understandings of what is traditional exert a surprising influence in the workplaces we studied. However, many employees wrestle with the contradictions between traditional cultural norms and demands for greater individual autonomy.

The impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico\u2019s health system: post-disaster perceptions and experiences of health care providers and administrators

BackgroundAfter its landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, Hurricane Maria caused the longest blackout in United States history, producing cascading effects on a health care system that had already been weakened by decades of public sector austerity and neoliberal health reforms. This article addresses how health care professionals and administrators experienced the health care system’s collapse and the strategies used by them to meet their communities' health needs.MethodsData were collected between September 2018 and February 2020. Ethnographic observations in health care facilities and semi-structured qualitative interviews with representatives of the health care system were conducted. This paper focuses on data from interviews with health care providers (n = 10) and administrators (n = 10), and an ethnographic visit to a pop-up community clinic. The analysis consisted of systematic thematic coding of the interview transcripts and ethnographic field notes.ResultsResults provide insight on how participants, who witnessed first-hand the collapse of Puerto Rico’s health care system, responded to the crisis after Maria. The prolonged power outage and lack of a disaster management plan were partly responsible for the death of 3,052 individuals who experienced extended interruptions in access to medical care. Participants reported a sense of abandonment by the government and feelings of mistrust. They also described the health sector as chaotic and lacking clear guidelines on how to provide services or cope with personal crises while working under extreme conditions. In such circumstances, they developed resilient responses to meet communities’ health needs (e.g., itinerant acupuncture services, re-locating physicians to local pharmacies).ConclusionsParticipants’ narratives emphasize that the management of Hurricane Maria was fraught with political and economic constraints affecting Puerto Rico. Ineffective planning and post-Maria responses of the local and federal governments were determinants of the disaster’s impact. The findings contribute to a growing scientific literature indicating that Hurricane Maria revealed ‘the collapse before the collapse,’ alluding to the structural deficiencies that presaged the catastrophic event. In the context of governmental abandonment, the authors argue for the importance of developing alternative strategies in post-disaster health care provision among health professionals and administrators who work at the front lines of recovery.

Educating Latinx and African American Students in Charter Schools: A Comparative Study from Chicago

The public school system in U.S. has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Institutionally, neo-liberal reform has created a new educational apparatus known as charter schools. As they admit students without school boundaries, these schools promise to offer great opportunities for disadvantaged students. The enrollment in charter schools is mainly Latinx and Black students, especially in large urban areas. That demographic shift is not reflected in the literature because previous studies have predominately focused on comparisons between Whites and minorities. Using Chicago as a case, this study compares the association between the enrollment of Black and Latinx students with educational resources and academic performance in charter schools. Using Illinois Report Card data representing 119 public schools during the 2016 to 2017 academic year, we aimed to understand which group could more systemically benefit from charter schools. We found that although the enrollment of Black students might be associated with better educational resources (i.e., total number of school days per academic year, and class size), the enrollment of Latinx students predicted stronger school academic performance on the SAT and PARCC. Those findings can contribute to the debate about institutionalized racial inequality in education and the effects of charter schools.

Genealogies of Ghana’s housing crisis: the role of colonial interventions and neoliberal reforms

The urgent need to develop and increase housing units has always featured prominently in electioneering campaigns in Ghana. Successive governments have developed countless programmes to deal with the housing deficit, but there has not been a significant improvement. As we write, the government of Ghana is grappling with a housing deficit of over two million units. But why has this problem remained intractable despite what seems like concerted efforts by various administrations to provide affordable housing for Ghana’s more vulnerable populations? Focusing on the 2015 National Housing Policy, this article critically reviews Ghana’s various housing policies and reforms, exploring how colonial policies and neoliberal reforms are separately and jointly implicated, in fundamental ways, in Ghana’s currently engulfing housing crisis. Our findings reveal that the yawning gap noticeable in Ghana’s overall effort at housing provision for the populace, is rooted in the colonial logic of piecemeal intervention. This same logic has continued to traverse successive Ghanaian housing policies through the immediate postcolonial era, the adjustment years, and the current period.

Explaining divergent National Responses to Covid-19: An Enhanced State Capacity Framework

ABSTRACT We develop a state capacity framework to account for different national responses to Covid-19. Our starting point is the influential idea that neoliberalism has a major role to play in state failure to control the pandemic. By implementing neoliberal reforms, states have ostensibly rendered themselves incapable of preventing or mitigating the viral outbreak. A focus on the British experience lends weight to this perspective. But when viewed in a comparative light, the picture is less straightforward. By comparing the British and Australian cases, we see a similar embrace of neoliberal reforms across the whole of government, yet with strikingly divergent outcomes. How can we account for this dramatic difference? To answer this question, we offer an enhanced state capacity framework to improve our understanding of diverse national responses to Covid-19. Our larger objective is to enrich the existing state capacity literature in two ways. First, we extend the existing state capacity framework by introducing a new category – salutary capacity – to encapsulate a state's ability to correct and counteract the course of a national health emergency. Second, we introduce the idea of political choice to emphasise the importance of agency in offsetting the institutional weaknesses associated with neoliberal reform.

Shifting Teacher Evaluation Systems to Community Answerability Systems: (Re)Imagining How We Assess Black Women Teachers

Using a chronicle, this paper examines teacher evaluation systems to highlight how neoliberal reforms produce unjust conditions for both teachers and students of color. I specifically center Black women and their ways of knowing to provide a (re)imagining around what is possible when educational leaders move beyond reforms to create a system that holds teachers answerable to students and is rooted in love.

Destructive domains: rethinking teacher evaluation in the age of Charlotte Danielson

In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as The Framework for Teaching, a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that The Framework for Teaching illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measurable results in ways that hurt teachers while advancing political agendas and profiting private corporations. Next, we rely on storytelling methodology to critique the framework and offer alternative ways of thinking about teacher evaluation. Ultimately, our critique intends to prompt more humane understandings of teacher evaluation, thereby permitting and engendering improvisational pedagogies.,

Kamen Rider

Kamen Rider

Manufacturing Consent? U.S. Influence in Latin America’s Media

In March 2019, when Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador questioned the neoliberal reforms keeping half the country’s population impoverished, Bloomberg published the headline: “Lopez Obr...

Generation Left after Corbynism

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has allowed age to emerge as a dramatic new axis of political division. This article treats the political generation gap as, in part, a transformation in class composition. Most notably, starting with the political age divide makes recognition of a shift toward an asset-based economy hard to avoid. The economic crisis of 2008, and the British government responses to it, have provoked a contradiction between the two main avenues through which neoliberal subjectivities are trained. While neoliberal institutional reform and the styles of management that accompany it continue to train the young in line with theories of human capital, the specific nature of their entrainment in bonds of debt increasingly undermine the notions of meritocracy on which the human capital metaphor implicitly depends. This contradiction opens up possibilities for constructing more open conceptions of the future which can, in turn, be embedded within institutions yet to be created.

Building a One-Dimensional Teacher: Technocratic Transformations in Teacher Education Policy Discourses

In the context of neoliberal reforms, teacher education policy discourses have shifted away from social justice imperatives toward technocratic approaches. I examine these shifts by applying the tools of critical policy and discourse analysis to accreditation standards and other policy texts of the last decade. Using Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensional subjects, I analyze how teacher education policy discourses position teachers as agents of social control whose work is to preserve the status quo and to legitimize the current structures of domination. This positioning is accomplished through the technocratization of teacher knowledge and depoliticization of diversity and equity in teacher preparation. The significance of this analysis lies in establishing connections between the technocratization of teaching pursued by the recent wave of teacher education policy discourses and the maintenance of inequality that teacher education redesign is expected to support.