Neoliberal Choice Research Articles

American Desi 1: Hybridity as Neoliberal Choice in Kavita Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills

American Desi 1: Hybridity as Neoliberal Choice in Kavita Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills

Black Support of Neoliberal School Choice and the Politics of Black Democratic Empowerment

AbstractIn Market Movements, Tom Pedroni argues that educational progressives often analyze neoliberal school choice policies by highlighting the negative impact such policies have upon Blacks. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that all Blacks should oppose neoliberalism. This assumption prevents scholars from investigating why African Americans increasingly do support neoliberal choice policies. Deep disagreements exist within the African American community over why Blacks are oppressed and how to understand their oppression, the nature of their disadvantages, and the remedies to such problems. And these disagreements affect why Blacks might support neoliberal school choice policies. In this paper, Quentin Wheeler‐Bell goes beyond explaining why deep disagreements exist within the Black public sphere and develops a critical theory of Black democratic empowerment. First, he provides a brief sociohistorical analysis of racial oppression, highlighting how domination has distorted and repressed debates within the Black public sphere, thus lending support to neoliberal choice policies. Second, he recovers and reconstructs four Black philosophical perspectives — (1) disillusioned Black liberals, (2) modern Black nationalists, (3) Black Marxists, and (4) Black egalitarians — and explains if and how they might be pulled into an alliance with neoliberal policies. Finally, he develops a critical theory of Black democratic empowerment that captures the reasonable insights from the abovementioned perspectives while avoiding the perils of neoliberal school choice.

“Pay for your choices”: Deconstructing neoliberal choice through free-to-play mobile interactive fiction games

This article studied the neoliberal ideas of choice and agency manifested in the structures of two interactive fiction or “choose-your-own-adventure” games, Choices: Stories you Play and Episode—Choose Your Story, and their free-to-play profit system to explore the hegemonic operation of neoliberalism and participatory resistances to it. Neoliberal choice was approached as a strategy that operates by encouraging an actualization of one’s best self yet inscribing what it should entail. Despite the rhetoric of agency and fictitious simulation, the “best” choices and endings in the games were visible and accessible only with cultural, economic, and temporal capitals. “Right” choices required legitimate taste which needs savviness in dominant readings or time investment, and the “right est” choices required monetary investment. However, players’ subversive choices such as intentionally choosing “(not) rightly” to pursue negotiated readings and collective participation hinted at the potential of tactical practices in creating new strategies.

Which “New Eugenics”? Expanding Access to ART, Respecting Procreative Liberty, and Protecting the Moral Equality of All Persons in an Era of Neoliberal Choice

In The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Technologies, Judith Daar (2017) advocates for increased access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and minimizes concerns about the potential “eugenic logic” of some procreative choices. Although Daar’s goal of expanded access is laudable, her argument suggests an unresolved tension between the moral equality of persons and individual reproductive freedom. Exploring that tension, this paper argues that efforts to expand access to ART must still grapple with the “eugenic mentality” of quality control that some forms of reproductive and genetic technologies enable.

You Still Can Have It All, But Just in Moderation: Neoliberal Gender and Post-Celtic Tiger ‘Recession Lit’

This essay reads ‘Chick Lit’ of the post-Celtic Tiger recession as a central cultural site contributing to the logics of neoliberalism and the gendering of Irish national identity. The economic boom known as the Celtic Tiger saw dramatic social and economic transformation in Ireland. Neoliberal principals resulted in rapid economic growth and the development of a new consumerism. This was reflected in Celtic Tiger ‘Chick Lit’, which foregrounded the woman as an icon of excess. In tandem with this, postfeminist values implied that these consumer-driven lifestyles were available to everyone. This centering of choice in postfeminism is a key site where the gendering of neoliberalism occurs. In ‘Chick Lit’, socio-political interests converge on the body of the woman to become stories of individual empowerment based on market-based choices. Centrally, this essay considers how a recent sub-genre of ‘Recession Lit’ adapts the generic trope of ‘having it all’ in the post-Celtic Tiger economic downturn. It explores three works from 2013: Cathy Kelly’s The Honey Queen , Sheila O’Flanagan’s The Things We Never Say and Cecelia Ahern’s How to Fall in Love . These books centralize individual adaptation in the boom to bust period. Their protagonists are resourceful women, who through their emotional strength and enterprising nature can still have it all, however, in moderation. To varying degrees, these works draw attention to the role of neoliberal policy in the current recession, as they reconcile it. Doing so, they serve to naturalize the structural causes of inequality and intensify the rhetoric of neoliberal choice.

Neoliberal frames and genres of inequality: Recession-era chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodrama

Media forms play a vital role in making cultural and political sense of the complex economic developments and profound ideological uncertainties which have accompanied the global recession. This article analyses how popular genre cinema tackles the inequalities – in particular, gender inequalities – that follow from the financial crisis, situating Hollywood’s representational strategies in the context of recessionary media culture. It posits and analyses two sub-genres which demonstrate different approaches to an altered socio-economic climate: the recessionary ‘chick flick’ and the corporate melodrama. Amid the financial crisis these sub-genres shift emphasis to respond to changing circumstances, notably in relation to the once-ubiquitous trope of choice central to post-feminist media culture; neoliberal choice rhetoric is now considerably harder to maintain. The two case studies contrast the different ways in which female-centred chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodramas address unemployment, downward mobility and the challenges of work–life balance.

Educational markets in space: gamekeeping professionals across Australian communities

This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle-class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle-class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian Government’s My School website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offer insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities.

Teachers’ Work in Curricular Markets: Conditions of Design and Relations Between the International Baccalaureate Diploma and the Local Curriculum

School‐level strategy enabled by neoliberal choice policies can produce internal curricular markets whereby branded curricula such as the International Baccalaureate are offered alongside the local government curriculum in the same school. This project investigated how such curricular markets operating in Australian schools impacted on teachers’ work. This article reports on teachers work in three case study schools that offered both the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) program and the local senior schooling curriculum, then draws on an online survey of 225 teachers in 26 such schools across Australia. The analysis reveals the impact of curricular markets along two dimensions: the curriculum’s internal design, and the relational aspects of how schools manage to deliver tandem offerings within institutional constraints. Teachers working in the IBD program were shown to relish its design, despite additional demands, while teachers working in just the local curriculum reported more relational issues. The article argues that these trends suggest that there are winners and losers emerging in the work conditions produced by curricular markets.

EDUCATING WOMEN FOR DEVELOPMENT: THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2005 AND THE PROBLEM WITH WOMEN'S CHOICES

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

Consuming bodies: Mall walking and the possibilities of consumption

In popular, academic and policy discourses it is taken for granted that consumption plays a vital role in the obesity epidemic. Mass consumption, associated changes to ‘lifestyle’ and the emergence of ‘obesogenic’ environments are viewed as underpinning the dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity. As a result, excess body weight has transitioned from risk factor to ‘disease’ status, with overconsumption identified as the principal culprit. Using mall walking as a case study, this paper aims to critique the way in which consumption is understood within the obesity literature. Rather than view consumption within a dualist framework of either ‘neoliberal choice’ or ‘modern evil’, we seek to establish a theoretical foundation for consumption in obesity literature. Mall walking provides a unique opportunity to examine the multiple, complex and contradictory facets of consumption, of how bodies and spaces are reappropriated and transformed by people who are located in an environment that is characterised as ‘obesogenic’. In addition to the generation of identities and social relations, mall walking highlights the inherent paradoxes of consumption: of how consumption is positioned as the problem, and at the same time, as the solution to excess. It is via the ethnographic examination of bodies engaged in consumer spaces that new possibilities for thinking about the analytical relationship between obesity and consumption are opened up.

Cultural complicities: elitism, heteronormativity and violence in the education marketplace

Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in the public sector. Amid rhetorics of excellence and accountability that pervade discourses of private schooling, however, recent high‐profile incidents of violence involving students at elite private schools provide a powerful provocation to these dominant discourses, and call into question a range of cultural practices associated with elite schooling. In this paper, the author draws on data generated from a three‐year study of sexually violent incidents that took place at an elite boys’ school in Sydney, Australia and their representation in the public domain, to consider how discourses of elitism, heteronormativity and violence circulate in dialogue. Through analysis of school‐ and media‐generated texts, and interviews with a former student and parents of the school, it is argued that the education marketplace is a site of disjuncture and contradiction, in which the privileges of private school consumption are simultaneously upheld and revoked in a complex interplay of school, media and social discourse. In so doing, the author considers how a range of cultural and institutional practices are complicit in the production of violence.