ABSTRACT Academic literature identifies two hegemonic discourses regarding aging women sexuality: the decline discourse, a traditional discourse which portrays the aging body as fragile and lacking sexual vitality; and the anti-decline discourse, a neoliberal discourse that encourages resisting the aging process to maintain sexual function. Feminist scholars have identified an alternative affirmative sexuality discourse, which challenges these perspectives by acknowledging bodily diversity and focusing on sexual self-awareness and exploration. This research examines how women engage with these discourses, drawing on 62 interviews with women born in the former Soviet Union and Israel, aged 50 to 76, currently living in Russia, Finland, and Israel. A Foucauldian discourse analysis identified five discourses. While the hegemonic decline and anti-decline discourses remain dominant, we identified three alternative discourses that function as nuanced variations of the affirmative sexuality framework: acceptance, which allows women to embrace natural changes; progress, which frames sexuality as improving over time through the accumulation of knowledge, skills, and agency; and critical, which employs a feminist lens to challenge structural inequalities. These findings highlight how different discourses shape the possibilities for constructing sexual desire and agency in later life. Findings highlight specific cultural manifestations of universal discourses about aging sexuality.

ABSTRACT This article examines Vezeeta, a leading Egyptian medical aggregator app, as a platformized site in which healthcare is reorganised through neoliberal discourse and interface governance. Drawing on Chouliaraki and Fairclough's dialectical-relational (DR) approach to critical discourse analysis, the study foregrounds the principle of non-discreteness, treating discourse as different from – yet inseparable from – material practice and institutional change. Conceptually, the article mobilizes orders of discourse to show how Vezeeta patterns and reorganizes discourses, genres, and styles in healthcare by mixing clinical and commercial genres, including menu-based ‘services,' discount banners, loyalty points, and swipeable ‘Featured Doctors' carousels. It then traces operationalization as the key mechanism through which dominant discourses are ‘put to work' in routines, identities, time-space coordination, and interactional norms, recasting patients as consumer-evaluators and doctors as competitive, reputation-managed service providers. The analysis demonstrates how market logics become institutionalized through metricized reputation (stars, visitor counts, tags), technologized evaluation templates, and synthetic personalization that frames platform monitoring as friendly support. Situated within Egypt's fragmented, largely out-of-pocket health economy and contemporary UHC reform discourse, the article argues that Vezeeta actively contributes to their materialization, producing stratified access, new norms of ‘good care,’ and platform-dependent forms of medical visibility and authority.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), since coming to power in 2014 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has redefined the ‘symbolic repertoires’ of India’s official nationalism using the visual iconography of postage stamps issued by the Department of Posts. Stamps are excellent primary data for analysis since they are the official product of a state and its agencies. The 2014 election marked a paradigm shift in Indian politics, alongside a radical transformation in the sights, sounds, and vocabularies of everyday life, particularly in relation to the discourse on national identity and nation-building. A content analysis of postage stamps issued from 2014 to 2020 reveals a statist push towards consolidating visual iconography centred on India’s civilisational past, with recurring themes of Hindu national identity and a neoliberal discourse on development.

The commentary documents the emergence of an autonomous feminist space in the context of the economic crisis in Sri Lanka – in the backdrop of a foreign debt default and the pressures of austerity politics by powerful global financial actors, including the International Monetary Fund. Through collective research, analysis, movement building, and mobilizing, feminist voices can challenge powerful neoliberal discourses and bring in a left feminist economics voice. It takes the form of reflective and critical writing in the hope of motivating conversations with other movements in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

This article uses an autotheoretical approach to examine epistemic injustice in postsecondary early childhood education and care (ECEC). Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice and my personal narratives, I explore how dominant developmentalist and neoliberal discourses marginalize alternative knowledges and lived experiences in ECEC programs. Through reflective vignettes centered on affirmative experiences of being listened to by my grandmother, I analyze testimonial and hermeneutical injustices faced by educators and students whose identities and epistemologies fall outside of normative developmental frameworks. This article argues that hierarchical knowledge structures and accreditation standards perpetuate exclusion and proposes listening as an ethical and political practice to advance epistemic justice. It concludes by envisioning democratic ECEC spaces that embrace multiplicity, challenge developmentalist hegemony, and create openings for diverse ways of knowing and being.

Neoliberalism attempts to erase class and associated inequalities from educational discourses, framing individuals as self-interested and solely responsible for their own success or failure. English language education, closely tied to neoliberal discourses of competitiveness, employability, and mobility, cannot be considered outside this process of class erasure, particularly given the global status of English and its role in reproducing social inequalities. Yet, despite the profound influence of social class on language learning and teaching, social class awareness has received limited attention in English language teacher education (ELTE). To address this gap, this conceptual article proposes ways for ELTE programs to foster awareness of structural inequalities and unequal social positions. Building on a conceptualization of social class, the article emphasizes the integration of Freirean dialogue and critical interculturality into initial ELTE curricula. Through these concepts, the article seeks to help teacher candidates develop both critical intercultural repertoires and a deeper recognition of how social class shapes opportunities for language learning and teaching. In turn, future language teachers can acquire the dispositions and skills necessary to help alleviate class-based inequalities and contribute to socially just educational practices.

This study examines food advertisements in Women’s Health and Men’s Health magazines as a hitherto underexplored site of gendered meaning-making. Using content analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis, we investigate a large corpus of food ads and identify three dominant gendering strategies: (1) food advertising is more prevalent in Women’s Health , often directing women toward self-care and caring for others; (2) food types are gendered, with ‘healthy’ foods associated with femininity and protein or ‘unhealthy’ foods with masculinity; (3) multimodal representations construct food as feminine through emotional, relational, and sensual appeals, and as masculine through references to performance, science, and sport fame. We show how food is semiotised to reproduce traditional gender stereotypes while also reinforcing newer ideals, such as the muscular female body adding a new regime to women’s labour. Overall, food advertising sustains neoliberal discourses that frame food as a technology for gendering the self and the body.

Challenges in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), including complex and fragmented services, are well documented, particularly to young people with severe mental health problems and complex needs. Research on young people's experiences of CAMHS is scarce. Especially studies on young people who have dropped out of CAMHS and/or transitioned to alternative services are lacking. This article addresses the following research question: Which discourses can be identified when young people with severe mental health problems and complex needs enrolled in Youth Flexible Assertive Community Treatment (Youth Flexible ACT) articulate their past treatment in CAMHS, and contrast it with their current treatment? We conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 12 participants aged 15 to 19, recruited via convenience sampling from three Youth Flexible ACT teams in Norway. The interview data were analysed using a Fairclough-inspired critical discourse analysis (CDA), where discourse is understood as a particular way of understanding and talking about the world, and language is seen as a social practice rather than an individual activity. We identified three dominant discourses when the young people talked about conventional services/CAMHS in Norway: a biomedical, a paternalistic and a neoliberal. The findings suggest that treatment in CAMHS is shaped by a market-oriented understanding of mental health (neoliberal discourse), a medical model that reduces complex problems to medical terms (biomedical discourse), and a lack of user participation (paternalistic discourse). The findings indicate a gap between what young people see as helpful, the aims outlined in guidelines and the young participants' descriptions of CAMHS. The lack of user involvement and the unequal power balance need to be actively addressed with concrete practices that support more equal participation. The findings highlight the need for more differentiated treatment pathways for this group of young people, enabling timely, tailored support and reducing the risk of ineffective initial interventions. Our findings indicate that the framework in CAMHS is poorly suited to the needs of this group. In contrast, differently organised services, such as Youth Flexible ACT, may offer an alternative by providing a coherent framework for holistic, integrated and person-centred care.

Many parents have concerns about young children’s digital media use, while often perceiving potential benefits for learning. In a multilingual environment, parents’ attitudes and practices are influenced by their language ideologies as well as perceptions regarding dangers to health and wellbeing. This study, set in a post-Soviet, Global South context and shaped by globalisation and neoliberal discourses, explores how diverse influences potentially clash and ultimately combine in parents’ complex decisions regarding young children’s use of digital media. The research was conducted with five families of five-year-old children in Baku, Azerbaijan, over 15 months through family visits and a digital participatory method, Living Journals. Parents enabled young children’s access to digital media primarily to support multilingual learning, in line with aspirations for their children’s multilingual futures, while also setting constraints they deemed beneficial for their children’s overall health and wellbeing.

ABSTRACT This study examines institutional discourses surrounding LGBT foster parents in Iceland through interviews with nine professionals working in child protection services and municipal welfare institutions. It explores institutional attitudes towards LGBT foster parents, with particular attention to the interplay of heteronormativity and notions of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Employing discursively informed reflexive thematic analysis, the research investigates how institutional frameworks that ostensibly value these parents remain anchored in normative understandings that privilege traditional nuclear family arrangements. Three discursive themes are constructed to analyse: the construction of LGBT foster parents as ‘just like everyone else’, contingent upon middle-class status; institutional disregard for marginalization and its effects on LGBT individuals; and the positioning of LGBT foster parents as ‘perfect in their imperfection’, rendering them particularly suited to caring for foster children with complex needs. Despite participants’ commitment to inclusion and non-discrimination, the findings indicate that heteronormative practices persist within Iceland’s child welfare system through neoliberal discourses that alternately emphasize sameness or difference while ultimately reinforcing conventional family hierarchies. The study contributes to critical understandings of foster care and family diversity by illustrating how ostensibly progressive societies continue to uphold cis-heteronormative ideals constraining the transformative potential of non-normative family formations in foster care contexts.

This study examines how Brazilian Olympians internalize, negotiate, and at times resist neoliberal discourses while navigating meritocratic ideals and the pressures of high-performance sport. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews with eight athletes from Santa Catarina who competed in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, we analyze how neoliberal rationalities shape both their practices and subjectivities. Interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022 explored athletes’ career trajectories, Olympic participation, and reflections on their experiences at Rio 2016. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, the analysis develops three interconnected themes. The first examines how athletes engage with neoliberal values, particularly the entanglement of meritocracy and performance that frames the Olympics as the pinnacle of sporting achievement. The second theme mobilizes Foucault's notion of neoliberal governmentality and Christiaens’ (2019) expansion of the “entrepreneur of the self” to show how athletes embody entrepreneurial traits such as disciplined rationality, alertness to opportunity, and strategic tolerance of uncertainty. The third theme considers how athletes internalize high-performance values by framing their trajectories through merit and self-reliance in constructing their Olympian identities. Together, these findings reveal an ambivalent interplay between neoliberal conditions and individual agency, demonstrating that athletes’ subjectivities are shaped through both the reproduction of and resistance to neoliberal discourses.

This paper explores the This paper explores the theoretical and empirical links between neoliberal policies and health inequalities in the Indian context. The pathways through which inequality generates population health outcomes remain a major source of dispute within social epidemiology and health economics. Virchow’s philosophy, which undoubtedly galvanized thinking across the disciplines, emphasizes how political–economic ideologies and income inequality shape the distribution of health and social problems. In this paper, we argue that the focus on health inequality, while important, understates the role of neoliberal discourses and practices in making sense of contemporary debates on health inequality. Many quantitative studies have demonstrated that more neoliberal countries have poorer health than do fewer neoliberal countries, but we rarely find comprehensive documentation of evidence in the Indian context. Considering the fast-changing political and social environment and policy priorities post-1990s in general and post-2014, this paper examines the impact of a rising share of private healthcare delivery on health inequalities. Using inequality in the under-five mortality rate (U5MR) as a health outcome and per capita NSDP, per capita public health expenditure, the share of private health care spending and the poverty ratio as indicators of neoliberal policies, through robust econometric assessment, we find that economic growth without poverty reduction and public health care spending increase health inequalities. The fixed effects model plots depicting the interaction effects of PCPHE and time on health inequality suggest that public health spending consistently has a negative association with health inequality. However, the period impact of PCPHE on reducing health inequality has declined over time. Random effects model plots that show the interaction effects of the share of private health care utilisation and time consistently show a positive association with health inequality. Our findings also suggest that a positive association exists between the poverty ratio and health inequality. We conclude that integrating understandings of neoliberalism into theorising about health inequality enriches the political economic and political demographic perspective of health. India must implement “post-neoliberal” social and political economic policies to counter neoliberal models that emerged in the 1990s and rising social and health inequalities. Reducing poverty and ending austerity in public health spending are two key steps for reducing health inequalities.

The system of norms that constitutes neoliberal imaginaries has permeated almost every aspect of everyday life. While New Zealand has long embraced neoliberal educational policies, reshaping its approach to English teaching in a manner similar to other Australasian and Western nations, the country now stands on the brink of an intensified neoliberal shift. Over the past two years, the English teaching profession in New Zealand has observed a gradual increase in neoliberal rhetoric, signalling an acceleration of these principles. As New Zealand’s English teaching sector prepares for this amplified neoliberal influence, it becomes crucial to examine the experiences of other Anglophone nations that have already been led by similar imaginaries. This paper employs collective writing methodologies to explore techniques, strategies and rationalities that are shaping English teaching across the Asia Pacific region. We find that techniques, strategies and rationalities associated with English teaching reform produce a self-discipling subject (school-English), and what Foucault refers to as self-disciplining subjects (teachers and students), characterised by accountability, transparency, standardisation, and competition. However, the forces acting upon English teachers are not consistent across contexts, with some experiencing an intensification of control and others finding space for relaxing. More research is needed to trace the new incarnations and invocations of neoliberal discourses across borders, and between new policy actors, to address how policy ideas that are shaping school-English travel, move, and are (re)appropriated. This work is fundamental if we are to fully engage with neoliberalism’s transformative effects and affects on English teaching.

Abstract Public administration plays a fundamental role in accountability relationships between citizens and the State, but how these take shape in public encounters is remarkably understudied. Analysing relational dynamics within and around public encounters expands the relational perspective on accountability in public administration–challenging core assumptions of the principal-agent model underpinning studies of citizen-State accountability relationships. We conducted a critical-interpretivist ethnography of public encounters in the UK Tax Credits (TC) system and share findings from our Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis of multiple data sources, including 28 open interviews. We discuss four relational dynamics of account-giving–emerging from the interplay of neoliberal discourse, digital technologies, and communicative practices–that ‘reversed the accountability chain’. We demonstrate how claimants experiencing significant financial and emotional hardship, in their encounters with an unaccountable State, became accountable for their TC obligations and welfare. We explain these findings by mobilising interdisciplinary theory from critical accounting research on relational power to offer original conceptual and empirical insight into the interactive, dynamic, and emergent accountability relationships between citizens and agents of the State.

This article examines how neoliberal ideas, investor interests, and institutional design converged in the creation of Opportunity Zones (OZs), a federal tax incentive program marketed as a tool for equitable development but structured to advance capital-friendly outcomes. While many critiques of OZs focus on implementation failures or unintended consequences, this article contends that the program reflects a case of policy capture by design. Neoliberal ideas played a legitimating role, framing deregulatory features such as generous capital gains tax deferrals, investor anonymity, and the absence of reporting or community benefit requirements as necessary for market-led revitalization. These ideas served as “coalition magnets,” helping to secure bipartisan support by reimagining private capital as a vehicle for public good. Drawing on legislative histories, planning documents, and secondary analysis, the article shows how the institutional architecture of OZs steered investment toward already improving areas, sidelining more deeply disinvested communities. Once implemented, ideational commitments to equity and local empowerment quickly faded while core market logic endured, exposing the durable imprint of elite economic interests embedded in federal tax policy. OZs illustrate how neoliberal discourse can operate as an instrumental and ultimately disposable device for legitimizing investor-oriented policy. This case contributes to theories of policy design, neoliberal urban governance, and policy capture by demonstrating how ideas, interests, and institutions align to reproduce inequality under the guise of reform.

It is still up to future generations to assess the scale and nature of the influence of the ideology of neoliberalism on humanity, as well as the extent to which it has permeated the minds of both ordinary people and decision-makers. Contrary to predictions, there was no increase in resistance to neoliberal discourse in the world in 2022–2025, as there was still no understanding of the essence of the global confrontation. Therefore, information and educational work should be based on the fact that the “front line” is not located in the inter-civilizational rifts, not between the West and the Non-West, and not even between major powers and their blocs. The balance is between the world of states, which is facing a historical challenge from transnational capital. It is the large business networks that skillfully use the ideological toolkit, which is extensive and well-established, under the umbrella of “neoliberalism” to counter the state apparatuses that were voluntarily disarmed by de-ideologization at the end of the 20th century. The picture that has been emerging in recent years confirms that the leading political forces in most countries around the world are not aware of the nature of the struggle, which means that, using the terminology of the systemic approach, they have lost the ability to recognize real threats and are at risk of being absorbed and assimilated. It is dangerous to reduce the task of overcoming the consequences of neoliberal influence on all aspects of life to the condemnation of its basic narratives. In an era of advanced and rapidly evolving technologies for manipulating people, criticizing a phenomenon can easily become a tool for promoting it and contributing to its inclusion in the public agenda.

In this article, we critically discuss a Swedish hospital foodservice reform by putting foodservice in a historical and social context and analyzing a case, "the most flexible patient foodservice system in Sweden," by using Bacchi's what's the problem represented to be (WPR) approach. We show how hospital foodservice governance in Sweden has become more focused on the individual patient as a consumer. Our analysis points out how in political protocols and related policy materials freedom of choice, flexibility, and efficiency were articulated as drivers of change. Freedom of choice was argued to enhance quality, increase food intake, diminish demand for special diets and lower costs. This can be seen as empowering patients, but also shifting part of the responsibility of nutrition care and health over to individuals, whether they want it or not. Flexibility was seen as beneficial for patient logistics regarding medical treatment and argued to improve allocation of staff resources. Inefficiency was a characteristic attributed to the old system, while the reform was an opportunity to modernize and be more cost-efficient. The new organizational structures may lead to tensions between foodservice and healthcare. The changes, system flexibility and patient freedom of choice, are salient within a broader neoliberal discourse.

Relevance. The article explores the cognitive practices of the precariat in the context of post-truth and digital transformation of society. The relevance of this study lies in the need for a philosophical understanding of how social vulnerability, unstable employment, and neoliberal discourses shape new ways of producing and legitimizing knowledge. In the situation of a crisis of trust in traditional institutions, truth acquires the form of temporary consensus, established within network communities and digital modes of communication. The purpose of the study is to identify the epistemological features of the precariat’s cognitive practices and their relation to processes of social and cultural transformation. Objectives. The research objectives include: analyzing the influence of social vulnerability and employment instability on the formation of cognitive strategies; examining the role of the digital environment and network communities in knowledge verification; defining the philosophical grounds for the shift from universalist models of truth to multiple and situational forms of its recognition. Methodology. The study relies on an interdisciplinary approach, combining social philosophy, cognitive sociology, and epistemology. The theoretical framework includes M. Foucault’s concept of "regimes of truth", the works of V.A. Toshchenko and G. Standing, as well as contemporary research on post-truth philosophy and digital communication. Results. It is shown that the cognitive practices of the precariat are fragmented and situational, based on horizontal forms of collective verification. Truth is understood as a process established through social trust and consensus within micro-communities. Fact-checking and critical thinking are not optional skills but necessary strategies of survival in conditions of informational instability. Conclusions. The cognitive practices of the precariat represent a specific form of epistemological adaptation that undermines universalist models of truth and opens the space for multiple, flexible, and socially conditioned forms of knowledge.

Indigenous evaluation literature is a powerful approach to upholding the aspirations of Indigenous Peoples. As a site of knowledge production, literature shapes the evaluation processes and practices that serve self-determined priorities: This article offers a synthesis of international Indigenous evaluation theory, to move beyond culturally competent evaluation as a framework for prioritising Indigenous values and aspirations. We acknowledge that ‘culture’ and ‘context’ remain necessary and strategic principles in evaluation design, particularly when evaluation of Indigenous programs continues to be strongly bound by funder and settler government priorities. However, we argue that such principles are insufficient, drawing instead on the broader field of Indigenous evaluation theory that centre Indigenous sovereignties, for programs that enact Indigenous aspirations. Insights from our theoretical review indicate Indigenous evaluation frameworks can play an active role in moving beyond neoliberal discourses of evaluation often adopted by governments and other funders, towards relational responsibilities that inform Indigenous approaches to validity. We take up the frameworks of relationships, relevance, and responsibility (3 Rs) as providing an important framing to foreground relational accountabilities and place-specific priorities in evaluative practice for Indigenous-led social change.

ABSTRACT This article examines the emergence of reborn motherhood in Latin America, a digital phenomenon in which women perform maternal practices with hyperrealistic dolls. Drawing on digital ethnography and media analysis of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, alongside journalistic sources from Brazil and Mexico, we show how reborn care practices operate as gendered projects of neoliberal self-making, shaped by enduring colonial hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Reborn dolls circulate within technological assemblages that span global infant markets and digitally mediated care spaces. Our analysis unfolds along three axes. First, reborn mothering generates normative feminine subjectivities, shaping ideals of care and conduct through digital regimes of affective governance. Second, grief, therapy, and play are reconfigured as commodified displays, repositioning loss and affect within neoliberal circuits of consumption. Third, the industry mobilizes racialized imaginaries, positioning the reborn baby as both a technology of motherhood and of whiteness and ableism. The reborn industry naturalizes a neoliberal discourse of care that obscures structural inequities linked to race, ability, and reproductive health. We argue that seeing reborn mothers as abnormal risks overlooking how neoliberal femininity operates subtly within affective governance, reinforcing the erosion of gendered social reproduction amid the rise of right-wing politics.