Neoliberal Context Research Articles

Introduction to Special Issue: Gender and Rural Development: Sustainable Livelihoods in a Neoliberal Context

This editorial introduces the articles that are part of the Special Issue on ‘Gender and Rural Development: Sustainable Livelihoods in a Neoliberal Context.’

Neoliberal feminisms, late-night comedy, and the public sphere, or: Samantha Bee takes on Ivanka Trump

ABSTRACT The article analyzes the humor of a 2017 Full Frontal skit concerned with the publication of Ivanka Trump’s “feminist” self-help book Women Who Work. In the skit, Full Frontal’s host Samantha Bee takes issue with how the book misrepresents feminist (labor) politics, and calls out as politically dangerous the alignment of Ivanka’s neoliberal rhetoric of empowerment with the neoconservative or “retrotopian” politics of the Trump administration. The article suggests that the skit performs its critical intervention in two ways: on the one hand, by humorously appropriating Ivanka’s language in order to criticize her neoliberal resignification of feminist politics, and on the other hand, by highlighting the contrast between Ivanka’s composed, traditionally feminine behavior and Bee’s unruly comic bodily comportment. As the article shows, the skit creates humor around this contrast to call attention to the gendered mechanisms that have prevented women’s bodies from appearing both as comedians and as public speakers. The article closes with a caveat, pointing to the recent commodification of humor itself in neoliberal news media contexts, a development that severely curtails the transgressive feminist potential of Bee’s skit.

Values-led governance and parental and community engagement in the Co-operative Academies Trust: An alternative in the neoliberal context of education?

This article examines the nature of governance in the Co-operative Academies Trust which comprises academy schools in England sponsored by the Co-operative Group. The historical and political context for the study is summarised, the research methodology is explained, and data are drawn upon from one case study academy. Structural, organisational and operational deviations of the Co-operative Academies Trust are outlined. The findings illustrate a values-led, branding message and strategic identity, and the placement of senior Co-operative Group employees in the Local Governing Body to ensure the strategic direction is focused upon co-operative values and community. Operationally, the engagement with stakeholders privileges a rational-goal approach, but signs of cultural shift are occurring concurrently with parent forum members demanding deliberation and voice in decision-making.

This hashtag is just my style: popular feminism & digital fashion activism

ABSTRACT The emergence of digital fashion activism in the second decade of the twenty-first century coincides with ‘popular feminism’. As trend forecasting site, Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) noted in 2014 ‘the idea of feminism in itself has become almost fashionable’. In this paper we explore how the appropriation of feminism as a fashionable slogan relates to the framing of fashion as a feminist issue, via digital campaigns such as Fashion Revolution’s, ‘Who Made My Clothes?’ (WWMC). We argue that digital fashion activism performed in the name of feminism raises uncomfortable tensions. The imperative to care about the conditions under which our garments are made is based on twentieth-century concepts of gendered solidarity; ‘we should all be feminists’ in order to identify with female garment workers. At the same time, campaigns such as Who Made My Clothes? reflect a neoliberal context that favours women with the economic resources to shop consciously. In this paper we explore how the WWMC campaign constructs the female body both as a site of injustice in the global South, and of ethical fashionability in the global North.

"Everyone is becoming a forester": From state monopoly to participatory forest management in Sao Hill Forest, Tanzania, c.1990-2015

In 2000, Sao Hill Forest, the biggest state-owned plantation in Tanzania, was forced to adopt "community forest management" - a paradigm usually adopted in protecting only natural forests. We hope to contribute to the scholarship on forest management by using this unusual case study - taken from plantation forests. Research on community or participatory forest management has focused on natural forests - but plantations offer different issues to consider. We argue that the state was compelled to adopt, but also adapt to the model of community management in order to fit a neo-liberal donor context while, on a practical level, protecting it from local environmental hazards. To contextualise this historical case-study, we explain why Sao Hill stagnated and then examine the survival strategies adopted by the managers at the plantation. We then explore the relationship of the forest project with the surrounding communities, highlighting different local and vernacular responses to what came to be understood as "community forest management". We use this case study to examine this idiographic application of community resource management, in order to demonstrate the real-world use of environmental history in informing current policy decisions.

Being a female academic under neoliberal evaluation: A systematic review

AbstractThe current academic assessment system is drawing a scenario based on neoliberal values. It has contributed to the perpetuation of gender inequalities. This systematic literature review aims to synthesize the most relevant research on the impact of neoliberalism on the professional identity of female academics. For this purpose, a systematized bibliographic search was carried out in four different databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Education Resources Information Center, and Google Scholar), which yielded a total of 26 articles published in international journals. The results illustrate a research field dominated by the USA and the UK and a trajectory of growth in the literature in recent years. The emerging themes reveal some of the challenges faced by women academics in a neoliberal context. These obstacles may be external and even unconsciously imposed by women academics themselves. Motherhood emerges as one of the most influential aspects of their professional development. Furthermore, our findings explore various ways in which women academics reconstruct their identity in the face of systemic challenges. This manuscript culminates with a discussion of the impact that neoliberal values and their general consequences in the performance evaluation processes of academics have on women. Therefore, we provide a number of implications for professional practice and future lines of research.

Technologies of (in)security: Masculinity and the complexity of neoliberalism

Although there is much feminist work that has examined the intersection of gender and neoliberalism, critical work on men and masculinities remains underdeveloped in this area. This article suggests that complexity theory is a crucial resource for a critical analysis of the ways in which masculinities contribute to the ongoing maintenance of neoliberal socio-economic systems. Critical work on neoliberalism and capitalist economics has recently been drawn to complex systems theory, as evidenced by the work of scholars such as Sylvia Walby, William Connolly and Brian Massumi. Their work produces important insights into neoliberalism, but does not develop a sustained reflection on the place of men and masculinities in this domain. In order to develop a critical account of the relation of masculinity to complexity, the article draws on the work of Judith Butler and Bonnie Mann. It suggests that Butler’s theorising on precariousness contains important resources for understanding how hegemonic masculinities are positioned in relation to the complexity of neoliberal systems, as illustrated in Mann’s concept of ‘sovereign masculinity’. Finally, drawing on two different examples of the enactment of masculinities in neoliberal contexts, the article argues that hegemonic forms of masculinity can be understood as technologies for the amelioration of the complexities and insecurities generated by neoliberal markets.

Beyond empowerment: student self-assessment as a form of resistance

Student self-assessment is commonly promoted as a formative assessment practice that boosts learning and self-regulation. On the other hand, it is suggested that self-assessment fosters students’ reflexivity and empowerment. Despite both arguments, student self-assessment plays a rather minor role in modern educational systems that value test results over critical reflection. amidst the neoliberal context of education, self-assessment might even discipline rather than ‘empower’: the high achieving, self-regulated learner reflects the values of individualisation, competition and marketisation. How could self-assessment be used to resist the prevalent structures of power? In this study, self-assessment, is reconceptualised as a form of resistance. This endeavour is guided by four frameworks for power and resistance: sovereign, epistemological, disciplinary, and biopower. The concept of transformative self-assessment is formulated in order to reframe self-assessment as a socio-political practice. This study considers the role of self-assessment not as a tool to foster performance, but as a disruptive practice that promises to reveal and resist the structures of power in assessment.

Problem-Based Service Learning (PB-SL): Constructing a pedagogy of poverty based on Ignacio Ellacuría

This text aims to rethink educational activity inspired by the thought of the philosopher Ignacio Ellacuría, in what we have synthesised as a pedagogy of poverty. This should be understood as a pedagogy that, in the neoliberal context of Western societies, takes poverty as its motor—its efficient cause—and as its essence or fundamental structure—its formal cause –, in the duality of dimensions of its genitive. It is concretised in what is presented as Problem-Based Service-Learning (PB-SL). Through specific pedagogical guidelines for implementing this methodology, this study indicates how the teaching action can show the learner what is immediate, what is not constructed, what consciousness does not establish but rather encounters: reality—weak, limited, imperfect, needy; in short, poor—as a problem and, in its deficiency and insufficiency, as a task towards which the subject has a responsibility. This reveals the fundamental anthropological structure to the learner: its intrinsic relational character—its reality as a being-in-a-suffering-world, who lives-with and lives-to save the needy who share its humanity. It is then possible to perceive the scale of the ultimate aim of PB-SL: the need to create the social conditions for a praxis that enables a dignification of reality.

Hormonal Health: Period Tracking Apps, Wellness, and Self-Management in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism.

Period tracking is an increasingly widespread practice, and its emphasis is changing from monitoring fertility to encompassing a more broad-based picture of users' health. Delving into the data of one's menstrual cycle, and the hormones that are presumed to be intimately linked with it, is a practice that is reshaping ideas about health and wellness, while also shaping subjects and subjectivities that succeed under conditions of surveillance capitalism. Through close examination of six extended interviews, this article elaborates a version of period tracking that sidesteps fertility and, in doing so, participates in the "queering" of menstrual technologies. Apps can facilitate the integration of institutional medical expertise and quotidian embodied experience within a broader approach to the self as a management project. We introduce the concept of "hormonal health" to describe a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, one that weaves together mental and physical health, correlates subjective and objective information, and calls into question the boundary between illness and wellness. For those we spoke with, menstrual cycles are understood to affect selfhood across any simplistic body-mind division or reproductive imperative, engendering complex techniques of self-management, including monitoring, hypothesizing, intervening in medical appointments, adjusting schedules, and interpreting social interactions. Such techniques empower their proponents, but not within conditions of their choosing. In addition to problems with data privacy and profit, these techniques perpetuate individualized solutions and the internalization of pressures in a gender-stratified, neoliberal context, facilitating success within flawed structures.

Critical pedagogy: an emancipatory alternative in the neoliberal context

At present, neoliberalism has a predominance over society, generating a crisis of all kinds. The objective of this work was to analyze education in the neoliberal context and study the alternative of critical pedagogy as a way out of the current educational crisis. For the analysis, the qualitative method was used with a documentary-type design, for which a review of scientific literature related to education, neoliberalism and critical pedagogy was made. The review of the scientific literature allowed us to understand the political and educational crisis of the neoliberal model, likewise, it allowed us to know a proposal called critical pedagogy that makes it possible to emancipate the academic, cultural, ecological and social context, fostering critical thinking and exercising citizenship.

Precarising Formality: Understanding Current Labour Developments in Chile

More than forty years ago, the Chilean economy led the way in a process of flexibilising and privatising a wide range of areas: finance, pensions, education, work and so on. In 1990, with the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile continued to pursue neo-liberal economic policies and maintained the liberal conception of collective labour rights (imposed in 1979). By 2017, labour informality in Chile was among the lowest in South America. Taking these two factors into account (labour regulation that benefited business spending cuts and only “moderate” informality), this article explores the following questions: What are the features of current forms of labour formality in a paradigmatic neo-liberal context like Chile’s, and what space does informality occupy? Is labour formality far removed from the kind of vulnerability usually associated with informality? How have formality and informality related to each other in Chile in recent years? We address these questions with mixed methods: a literature review, development of a conceptual proposal, processing of statistical data and case studies. We conclude that a particular kind of labour formality currently prevails in Chile, which we call precarising formality. This concept disputes the traditional idea of labour formality, both because labour regulations lack substance and because they are ineffective, which is, of course, politically produced. We consider it precarising based on an analysis of multiple dimensions of precarity in contexts of theoretical labour formality. The article also describes forms of struggle and resistance by workers’ organisations that protest against capitalist action from within this new configuration of labour. KEYWORDS: formality; informality; labour precarity; Chile

Changing Winds

Abstract By exploring the case of Oman TV’s broadcasting of Indian films in the 1970s and 1980s, I uncover the gulf between historiographies of national cinema and television that are framed by histories of production, on the one hand, and accounts of (new) media distribution that are framed by neoliberal contexts of globalization since the late 1990s, on the other. From archival sources, including Indian government documents and trade journals, three intriguing patterns emerge: (1) In lists of countries to which Indian films were being exported in the 1980s, the importer is mentioned, specifically and uniquely, as ‘Oman TV’ instead of ‘Oman’. (2) By the 1980s, Oman TV was a crucial conduit through which Indian films were readily and easily available to audiences in Pakistan, among other locations across the Middle East and South Asia, regardless of national import/export policies. (3) Weekly broadcasts of Indian films on Oman TV fueled demand for both VHS tapes of Indian films and the local exhibition of Indian films in cinema halls. Together, these strands reveal a key moment of infrastructure development in the Gulf, a period of burgeoning labor migrations and major shifts in transregional media distribution and viewing practices.

Coloniality and Psychology: From Silencing to Re-Centering Marginalized Voices in Postcolonial Times

We adopt a decolonizing framework in this article to examine how legacies of colonialism and coloniality continue to manifest in Euro-American psychology. The population of India is now over 1.2 billion people with over 356 million youth they make up the world’s largest youth population, but their stories remain largely invisible in Euro-American psychology. For this article, we draw on a growing body of research by decolonial theorists and our ethnographic research. We argue that Euro-American psychological science now reworks the old forms of imperialism and domination in neoliberal contexts of globalization. In particular, we analyze (a) how mainstream psychological knowledge of “culture” and “diversity” have reinforced a neoliberal self in postcolonial India; (b) the varied ways in which identities, values, and mental health experiences of marginalized communities have been silenced and ignored through the application of Euro-American psychiatric and colonial psychological knowledge; and (c) how persistent caste-based violence and exploitation in contemporary times reflects the “internal coloniality” of Indian society.

Beyond anti-welfarism and feminist social media mud-slinging: Jo Littler interviews Angela McRobbie

In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It moves on to discuss different forms and experiences of feminism: including the neoliberal Anglo-German academic context; the legacies of queer theory and radical feminism; the ‘mud-slinging’ of social media which ‘does not allow us the time and space to rehearse what is really going on’; the need to engage with social policy alongside cultural theory; and the ongoing intersectional work of rewriting the curriculum.

Decolonising globalised curriculum landscapes: The identity and agency of academics

This article explores how academics in a higher education institution (HEI) make sense of the challenges that they encounter in a neoliberal context typified by an increasingly globalised curriculum landscape. Two key questions are explored: What are the contours of the shifting boundaries which define the ‘global curriculum’ in HEI contexts? How do academics navigate and make sense of this fluidity in an uncertain and disputed landscape? Using reflections on practice emanating from the redesign of educational courses to respond to a rapidly changing student cohort, this inquiry takes an auto-ethnographic approach, offering the perspectives of five academic staff from a UK-based HEI through the lens of their lived experiences, and acknowledging the emerging shifts in identities that they experience and the need to confront tensions in this curriculum space. We conclude that our own scrutiny of, and critical reflections on, our identity and positionality as teachers and education practitioners represent a form of decoloniality, enabling us to find ways to share what we know without excluding knowledge outside it and to welcome contributions and possibilities beyond our own experiences. In terms of how we should act, we recognise that it must be through a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty.

In praise of urban walking: Towards understanding of walking as a subversive bodily practice in neoliberal space

Focusing on the steps that literally and metaphorically guide us today, this paper takes walking as its main subject and establishes it theoretically as a form of subversive bodily movement. If contemporary sociological and humanistic treatments of walking show that this everyday practice has not been completely overlooked, the gap opens at the level of thinking it in relation to the dominant social order and its spatial and temporal manifestations. As we argue, in the hegemonic neoliberal context, walking has the potential to manifest itself as a practice that breaks with the existing logic of both space and time. Through the methodological application of the cat’s cradle game, we develop a theoretical argumentation to ground walking as a bodily practice that requires different space and different time. Emanating from the body, it opens to the space and time of enjoyment – a heterotopia erected in relation to the current neoliberal hegemony, but in the manner of a crack, a path that carries the projection of a possible alternative.

Sobreviviendo Sin Sacrificando (Surviving without Sacrificing)– An intersectional DisCrit Testimonio from a tired mother-scholar of color

ABSTRACT This paper is my testimonio of being a Latina mother-scholar trying to complete a doctorate while managing a chronic condition. I draw on intersectionality and DisCrit to share how my social identities influence my experiences with marginalization and oppression within a neoliberal university context. I highlight the ways in which my impairment was invisibilized and minimized as the normal fatigue associated with motherhood. I note the role Latino communities play in the marginalization of disabled Latinas via disability avoidance and the gendered socialization process that makes Latinas feel obligated to sacrifice for their families and others. This socially constructed narrative of sacrificio, when combined with ableism and the neoliberal university’s focus on productivity, makes it difficult to reveal and embrace an intersectional disability identity. I encourage scholars to consider the implications of this narrative, discussing how intersectionality and DisCrit can help them to (re)imagine knowledge production in the academy.

An orderly curriculum for a messy field? Classroom-field tensions in community organization in India

The large-scale reverse migration from cities to villages at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and again during the second wave in 2021 highlighted the persistence of poverty in India. Civil society responses pointed to the pressure that it was under in the absence of adequate outreach by the state for meeting food, livelihood, and other insecurities of urban and rural populations. Against this backdrop, the article outlines some of the challenges facing Social Work and Community Development in addressing poverty and marginalization. An examination of the relationship between Social Work with the state, and the contemporary complex neoliberal context for practice, highlights classroom-field tensions in community organization (CD). In preparing graduates for what appears to be a messy field, an orderly curriculum, irrespective of how well thought out it may be, struggles to retain convergence between principles of CD and certain elements of contemporary practice. It emerges that education for CD needs to build systematically on critical community practice and align with an anti- oppressive framework, in order to contribute substantively to addressing poverty and marginalization.

Community development as a key element in social work education and practice in Spain

Abstract Social work has always recognized the importance of community development as a key element in intervention and social change. Even so, the neoliberal context currently affecting the reality of most of the countries in the Global North is directly influencing the weakening of community actions and is reinforcing more individualistic positions. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the extent to which neoliberal policies are impacting on the teaching of community development content on social work programs in Spain and to study the impact of this reality on the implementation of community plans and projects in Catalonia. The methodology used was qualitative and was based on a systematic review of institutional documentation, community programs and specialized literature. Likewise, the study plans of the 32 universities currently teaching the social work degree in Spain were carefully reviewed to identify and analyze the subjects that focus their primary content on community development. We highlight the purpose of public and private institutions to maintain and promote community development plans and programs and the need to broaden and promote the community development approach in social work study plans. Finally, we present recommendations on how to promote social intervention and community development as key elements in both the training and practice of the social work profession.