Neoliberal Reality Research Articles

In between the neoliberal reality and the humanities imagination: a narrative inquiry of an English major’s identity construction in China

ABSTRACT This study reports an ethnographic case study of a Chinese female English major of a working-class background – Faye (pseudonym) and her English learning and use experience in an elite community in the Chinese context. Drawing on the data collected from a 13-month longitudinal inquiry, the study employs Darvin and Norton’s [2015. ‘Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics.’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35:36–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190514000191] model of investment to explore her identity transformation through English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) practices. Findings suggest that Faye’s investment in EFL practices appeared to transform with her evolving perceptions of EFL learning and imagined identities, which were shaped largely under the influence of neoliberal and humanities discourses. The study argues for a critical interrogation of the impact of neoliberalism on EFL learning and humanities education, cautioning against its tendency to constrain identity potentials and sustain structural inequalities. Pedagogical implications are suggested at the end of the article.

Nowe technologie – nowe praktyki? Artywistyczne działania na rzecz zmiany społecznej w Dolinie Krzemowej

The authors reflect on the artivistic practices of The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) collective operating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their activity is stretched between the demands of adapting to the neoliberal reality of the technosphere (Silicon Valley) and using adaptation to accumulate new competencies and knowledge to develop critical positions. Looking at technologically saturated spaces, the so-called silicon cities, through the prism of AEMP’s artivism allows us to stay attuned to the changes in contemporary artivistic engagement occurring due to the emergence of new technological tools. These play a key role in the authors’ findings regarding the limits of the methodology of resistance produced by the collective. The analysis of AEMP’s practices also provides insight into the difficulties of activists’ rejection of an anti-systemic narrative that is not only incompatible with the interdisciplinary methods, practices, and systems of social organization they propose, but also seems to hinder the possibility of developing a positive project of socio-political change. Key-words: artivism, new technologies, resistance, technosphere, Silicon Valley, anti-systemism

Examining Our Roots

Analysis of historical milestones in the field of library studies reveals the changing values, purposes, and structures of outreach broadly construed within academic libraries. A timeline and narrative are presented that traces the effects of the national outlook on higher education from the mid-century to the current neoliberal reality on outreach milestones within the field, from 1958 to 2020. We contend that the present post-pandemic moment affords practitioners a chance to turn a critical eye toward the purpose and audience of outreach in order to re-orient our actions to reflect an original philosophy of outreach: inclusivity.

Science as an ‘object of love’ – affective milieus in the neoliberal university

This study examines the affective milieus in the neoliberal university. Previous studies have demonstrated that, despite harsh neoliberal realities, academics still express a love for academic work. This study uses love as its conceptual tool to analyse the different forms of love that academics attach to science. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theoretisations of affect, this study shows that emotions play a crucial role in organising social order. Emotions work to divide academia into separate ingroups that have different visions of the virtues of science that represent the object of love for its proponents. While analysing higher education magazines with affective-discursive reading, the results of this study show that the neoliberal university favours the forms of love in which the individual ethos and competition are highly valued, while those forms of love that highlight collegial and emancipatory values are on trial. Overall, this study contributes to critical discussions of the neoliberal university by demonstrating the power of emotions in the construction of conflicting, intersecting and overlapping ways of othering and the complex assemblage of affective milieus that exist in today’s academia.

Hannah Arendt’s Action Theory, Aesthetics and Feminist Curatorial Praxis

This article considers the relationship between action (Arendt) and aesthetics in curatorial projects with feminist concepts. I suggest that Hannah Arendt’s theory of action provides the connection between aesthetics and the notion of action in feminist curatorial praxis. The vision of feminism discussed here refers to the desire to understand matters from the specific point of view of women and considers the distribution of power and potentiality in various levels of life. The feminist theory in this research aims to reveal, show, and transform cultural, historical and social structures. From a broader perspective, living in the neoliberal realities alongside capitalist and patriarchal state structures provides multiple reasons and a rationale for collectively forming a new foundation of resistance. Feminism emerges in and through curatorial actions involving varied artistic expressions of freedom, discontent, etc. Four case studies concerning women as subjects are investigated, whose subject is migration and border-crossing, and both works and exhibitions are compared in terms of their curatorial approach, the level of action and their aesthetics methods.

Semiotic representations of neoliberal dystopia in Black Mirror

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism as phenomenon has been noted for its pervasiveness, persistence and negative impact in society. The uncertainty, pessimism and tension associated with neoliberal societies have found expression in popular culture entertainment, more specifically in dystopic depictions of societies influenced by neoliberal logic. These dystopic presentations offer fantastical depictions as allegories, holding up our current realities for critique. While many studies have examined presentations of dystopia from various scholarly perspectives, we employ here a social semiotics approach to examine how semiotic resources are deployed in dystopic presentations of neoliberalism – neoliberal dystopia – to engender critical stances and attitudes. Using excerpts from the Netflix science fiction series Black Mirror, our study shows how combinations of semiotic resources are employed to draw critical attention to representations of neoliberal realities and society. The use of a social semiotics approach offers systematicity in the examination of representations of meaning via the utilization of established analytical frameworks, adding to already-existing commentaries on neoliberal dystopia.

Neoliberalism and neocolonialism in Nadia Prado’s @Copyright (2003): Toward a decolonial reading

This paper reads Nadia Prado’s poetry collection ©Copyright (2003) from a decolonial perspective, based on Walter Mignolo’s conceptualization of history as heterogeneous and decentred, aspects that I argue also permeate subjectivity and poetic expression. The poem delves into criticism of both Chilean neoliberal reality and a wider Latin American context in which the US has become a new economic and cultural hegemonic entity to be resisted from the margins. As a follow-up from the poetry/performance work Poesía es + (2002), co-authored with Malú Urriola, ©Copyright explores expression or its lack thereof within a profit-driven Chilean democratic transitional moment. Prado’s poetry opens up space that paves the way for a deep critique of neo-colonialism and neoliberalism. At the same time, this poem becomes part of a larger corpus of poetic, narrative and critical work that has compiled concerns and discontents since neoliberalism was imposed in Chile.

Better Problems

Better Problems

Youth Entrepreneurship in South Africa: Neoliberal imagination and township realities

Youth Entrepreneurship in South Africa: Neoliberal imagination and township realities

From the Editors

From the Editors

Art and Artists in City Space. Political and Economic Conditions of Art-based Revitalisation/Gentrification in Poland in both the Communist and Neo-liberal Reality: Elbląg Biennale of Spatial Forms and Gdańsk Shipyard Case Studies

Sztuka i artyści w przestrzeni miasta. Polityczne i ekonomiczne uwarunkowania rewitalizacji / gentryfikacji w Polsce komunistycznej i wolnorynkowej. Przypadek biennale form przestrzennych w Elblągu i Stoczni Gdańskiej
 Artykuł w sposób komparatystyczny podejmuje zagadnienie wprowadzenia nowych form sztuki, w funkcji rewitalizacyjnej bądź gentryfikacyjnej, w przestrzeń miasta w dwóch różnych realiach polityczno-ekonomicznych: w komunistycznej i wolnorynkowej Polsce. Przeanalizowano zjawisko biennale, organizowanych szczególnie często w dekadzie lat 60., na przykładzie I Biennale Form Przestrzennych w Elblągu z 1965 r., jak również współczesne procesy rewitalizacyjne przestrzeni miasta poprzez aktywność artystów – przypadek Stoczni Gdańskiej. Wymienione zjawiska natury artystycznej zostały osadzone w realiach polityczno-ekonomicznych odpowiednio Polski komunistycznej dekady lat 60., balansującej pomiędzy wolnością artystyczną a politycznymi ograniczeniami, oraz Polski współczesnej, po transformacji 1989 r., w której uwarunkowane ekonomicznie działania artystów na rzecz rewitalizacji dawnych terenów postoczniowych ścierają się z twardymi prawami wolnego rynku.

La formación profesional del Trabajo Social en Puerto Rico ante el contexto actual: Desafíos y posibilidades

The socio-economic and political context that currently pervades our Puerto Rican society impacts the lives of all of us as citizens and human beings. An economic crisis that seems to have no resolution, precarious living conditions, human rights violations, among other realities that unfortunately characterize the reality we live in. All this has, as a backdrop, a neoliberal context that has been increasingly exacerbating the reality of people’s lives. As a profession and collective, social work has a commitment to the defense of fundamental rights and the denunciation of everything that implies their violation. However, both the profession and the collective are not exempt from being impacted by this neoliberal reality that threatens us. This reality, sometimes disguised, presents challenges to our professional work and to the achievement of the ethical-political project that we are trying to build in Puerto Rico. Inevitably, as a chain effect, the social work education and training processes are also crossed by that context. Recognizing this picture, the following article aims to encourage reflection on educational and professional training in social work. Subsequently, set out some of the challenges that the current context represents for higher education and professional formation. Finally, in the face of the discussion and analysis of these challenges, propose actions or alternatives that make it possible to sustain a professional formation that transcends the challenges we face in different areas of social work.

Dreaming the Welfare-State: Indian Women-Studies-Movement, Neoliberalism and Feminist Future

Through an account of the history of women-studies-movements in India, the paper aims to interrogate the ‘temporality’ of feminist response to the neoliberal reality. By juxtaposing two dominant narratives situated differently, the paper appeals for a reevaluation of contemporary feminist knowledges that bemoan the loss of ‘welfare state’ and collective political struggles. Through a critical account of women-studies-movements in India, and the inability of their dominant stories to respond to the current conundrums of responding to the ‘neoliberal’ subject, the paper argues that it is not just the neoliberal reality which is hegemonic and all too powerful, but also the feminist stories that constitute it.

The neoliberal reality of higher education in Australia: how accountingisation is corporatising knowledge

Purpose As accounting academics, the authors know that performance measurement is well-trodden ground in the literature. Yet rarely have they turned their gaze inwards to examine the performance controls which they are subject to in the own everyday working life. Over the past 40 years, the rise of the New Public Management paradigm and neoliberalism has intensified changes in the way universities, disciplines and individual academics justify the quality of their work. This paper aims to explore the impact of accountingisation on the field and the Australian public sector higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach The perceptions of accounting academics in Australia’s 37 business faculties and schools were collected via an online survey. Additionally, a document analysis of annual reports, internal reports, strategy documents and other confidential material were also used. Findings The changes have included the use of corporate and individual research metrics aimed at increasing institutional status, brand reputation and revenue generation. These changes have transformed business schools and universities into commercial enterprises and commoditised education. What this analysis demonstrates is the apparent relationship between various government agendas, the commercialisation of universities and the distortion of the research activities by individual academics. For increased profits and efficiencies, individual scholars have paid the highest price. Practical implications If the accounting discipline is to be sustainable in the long term, business schools in Australia must reconfigure their performance measurement systems. Originality/value To date, research on “accountingisation” has previously been primarily conducted in the health and social services sectors. This research raises rarely heard voices to expose the actual social and human costs of accountingisation in Australia’s higher education sector.

The deliverance of the administrative state: deep state conspiracism, charismatic demonology, and the post-truth politics of American Christian nationalism

ABSTRACT This article uses discourse analysis to explore the intersection of spiritual warfare demonology and Christian nationalism among Trump-supporting neo-charismatic evangelicals. Analysing public materials produced during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign, it demonstrates how demonologies operate discursively to categorise, comprehend, and contest understandings of American identity and destiny. Situating spiritual warfare demonology in relation to narratives of ‘post-truth politics’ as the destabilisation of neoliberal consensus reality, the article explores how charismatic evangelicals position Trump’s election as a divine assault on a demoniac status quo, epitomised in the conspiratorial figure of the ‘Deep State.’ Examining demonologies of the ‘state’ and ‘border’ as joint arenas of epistemic and societal contestation, the article shows how spiritual warfare discourses seek to (re)define sociocultural notions of truth and falsity and thereby (de)legitimise specific gendered, sexualised, and racialised forms of being and belonging.

Breaking through Schizophrenia by Wilfried Ver Eecke

Reviewed by: Breaking through Schizophrenia by Wilfried Ver Eecke Thomas Hutchinson VER EECKE, Wilfried. Breaking through Schizophrenia. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 269 pp. Paper, $55.00 Wilfried Ver Eecke's Breaking through Schizophrenia is a fitting title. It breaks through disciplinary barriers befitting its theoretical source, Jacques Lacan. Continuing Lacan's critical project, BTS begins from a psychoanalytic dissent against mainstream psychiatry. Pushing further than Lacan, he includes a philosophical lesson in German Idealism, from which psychoanalysis originates. He demonstrates the influence of Hegelian philosophy on Lacanian psychoanalysis. The very debate that grounds BTS pushes psychoanalysis itself beyond the clinic and into a confrontation with twenty-first-century neoliberalism. In the spirit of Lacan, Ver Eecke shifts the source of mental illness from individual physiology to the linguistic environment. Externalizing sources of mental illness demands psychoanalysis confront both philosophical [End Page 631] and political problems; scrutinizing institutions as objects of analysis potentially threatens the stability of embedded neoliberal power structures. Given the destabilizing capability of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the appeal of BTS is interdisciplinary. Ver Eecke's ability to summarize Lacan's often impenetrable language makes it digestible for nonpsychiatric specialists. Meanwhile, he demonstrates the importance of German Idealism for purposes both theoretical and practical. The image of psychoanalysis illustrated in BTS warrants attention from readers across the humanities. The book as a whole should be read with an awareness of the way in which it consistently points beyond itself, firstly in its break with mainstream psychiatry, then through its movement into political society vis-a-vis philosophy. Thereby the reader remains conscious of the philosophical, social, and political dynamics at work in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Drawing parallels between and among Lacan's "mirror-stage," Hegel's master/slave dialectic, Lacan's theory of "aggressiveness" and Hegel's "Law of the Heart," Ver Eecke inherently builds psychoanalysis upon both Hegel's philosophy and Hegel's political philosophy. Perhaps the main principle in BTS is that Lacan's mirror-stage theory of ego development is philosophically linked to Hegel's master/slave dialectic. This leads to the conclusion that Lacanian self-consciousness constitutes nothing less than a philosophical anthropology. Therewithin, the development from childhood to adulthood is an incredibly complex process, and the ego develops through many stages. The main argument in BTS is that "mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, can be understood as a failure in the psychosocial and linguistic development of the person when growing up." This means that the social institutions constitutive of the subject, most recognizably family, school, church, and so on, are linguistic communities, both distinct and interwoven within a broader sociolinguistic community. By grounding the stages of self-consciousness in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Ver Eecke implies that ego development is an emergent function of interaction between no fewer than two individuals. More importantly, it appears inherently conflictual; it is both (1) grounded in language and (2) social and political. According to Lacan's mirror stage theory, the ego emerges from a number of interactions and tensions between self and other, even before advancing to the Oedipus complex. The family is the immediate source of consciousness and mental illness, and is consequently the first social institution implicated. This problematizes the very notion of family, something perhaps taken for granted in Freud's and even Lacan's time. Is the family not ever increasingly more subject to sociopolitical institutional pressures? Due to the dynamic nature of contemporary neoliberal reality, psychoanalysis aims at an ever developing, moving target. It thus needs to understand itself within a view of the whole, within a philosophic horizon. [End Page 632] Hegel teaches in Philosophy of Right that "the ethical life" amounts to the conscious unity of family, civil society, and state. It constitutes "the whole" of practical existence. Ethical life unites the family, civil society, and the state into a common whole, meaning that each is in contact with another in the ethical life. Ethical life at the same time transcends the particular instances of each. In the language of German Idealism, the ethical life is precisely that which is in the whole of the family, civil society, and the state more than themselves. Hegel contends that, in the family, "the mother...

Precarious University Life in Post-Welfare Sweden: Time, Place and Identity in Isabelle Ståhl’s Just nu är jag här (2017)

How are today’s precarious life conditions and complex class distinctions processed in contemporary fiction? Since class has become more and more of a floating concept (Standing, 2011), the need for new approaches is imminent. In recent years, a group of Swedish novelists have described precarious life among university students, which in an age of mass education can no longer be considered a middle-class reserve. Though these depictions differ in many ways, their protagonists share similar struggles to ‘pass’ in the uncertain and competitive university environment, and in late-modern existence as a whole. This article deals with one of these works, Isabell Ståhl’s novel Just nu är jag här (Right Now I am Here, 2017). The novel depicts first-person protagonist Elise’s aimless drifting through urban neo-liberal reality – poor, depressed and detached. Even though class is immanently present, its nature often appears obscured in the narration, and I address how this is linked to Elise’s evasive experiences of the world and apparent unwillingness to assert a specific identity or lifestyle. I also reflect on what challenges these seemingly distant, emotionally numb depictions – not conforming to the edifying, emancipatory demands usually imposed on ‘political’ literature – evoke for literary researchers interested in the complex dialogue between art and society.

Por uma PEDAGOGIA urbana insurgente

Considering the search to understand how popular groups immersed in an oppressive neoliberal reality may be historical subjects in the production of social space, the objective is to establish a brief theoretical reflection about the production of the environment built under the advances of capitalism. So, a review of literature is carried out, in the light of the thought of Freirian and Marxist perspectives; authors who bring a hopeful perspective on urban insurgencies and community public education, being the critical reflection of this hope one of the main points of this article. Thereby, it is observed that a political action intersected between diverse patterns and the class struggle, without suppressing one by the other, is made feasible and viable public education. Which allows to conclude that it is necessary to search an action including politics, in which it considers all the diversities of the contemporary movements and the role of the public education in the development of the construction of the critical thought of the popular classes.

Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Candice Amich

Reviewed by: Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Candice Amich César Barros A. Amich, Candice. Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas, Northwestern UP, 2020. 232 pp. What forms of resistance can artistic practices, poetry, and performance art, in particular, stage within a space swallowed by neoliberal governance—a global system that creates exploitative and precarious forms of work and sociability and that hinders collective organization and political transformation? This is one of the main questions that Candice Amich attempts to tackle in Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. The book sets out to analyze an important body of work from consecrated artists across the Americas, ranging from Canadian-based poet Dionne Brand to multifaceted Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña. Amich uses 'utopia' as the main conceptual tool to understand how these artists, the majority of whom are women, confront neoliberal precarious contexts. Their strategies, Amich contends, do not stage other possible worlds directly (in the more affirmative sense we tend to give classic forms of utopia) but rather, through an Adornian turn, affirm the negation of the "neoliberal sensorium," thus staging the blatant contradictions and tensions in the ways of life determined by neoliberalism. These works respond to precarity by creating forms that, through the affirmation of a negation, point to the possibility of transforming the base structure of neoliberal realities across the continent. This utopian wager can take the form of "utopian longing" (Nancy Morejón and Brand), "precarious forms of bonding" (Ana Mendieta and Coco Fusco), or "state ritual violence," as Amich proposes in the case of Regina José Galindo's performances. With this book, Amich has created a fruitful space for dialogue among practices from different artists during different periods of the neoliberal historical sequence. The book will appeal to those interested in performance art and poetry and in the relation between artistic practices and pressing issues such as migration, exile, precarious forms of labor, and post-revolutionary and post-dictatorship struggles for justice and visibilization. Her close readings are illuminating and some of them offer novel ways of entering or re-entering classic works. Among these is the reading of Fusco and [End Page 151] Domínguez's Dolores from 10 to 22, in which Amich dives into the tensions within the neoliberal gaze. The crossing of this work with performative strategies of the Zapatistas is revealing, as is the insertion of Debordian ideas to develop these arguments, if at times the author over-emphasizes the "staging" strategies of the Mexican revolutionary movement over other important facets. One also wonders if Amich's utopian wager can be so seamlessly applied to indigenous world-making practices. One of the most illuminating parts of the book is her reflection on testimonio as a way of entering Galindo's work. Precarious Forms creates productive dialogues among artistic practices that imagine paths of resistance during these unjust, carceral, and deadly times. Some chapters would benefit from a clearer characterization of the realities they confront. For instance, the critique of masculinist revolutionary narratives that Brand, Morejón and Daisy Zamora react to in their works, a critique central in Amich's reading, could have been developed in more detail. The same could be said of the very interesting point of the neoliberal individualization of subjectivities—how does this come to be and to what ends are these processes of subjectification deployed? The breadth and scope of the book is nonetheless impressive and Precarious Forms is a novel contribution to a corpus of critical works that center utopia in the struggle against neoliberalism. César Barros A. SUNY New Paltz Copyright © 2020 The Center of Latin American Studies

Rethinking neoliberalism, rethinking social movements

ABSTRACT Social movement scholars have not satisfactorily engaged with the concept and reality of neoliberalism. The growing academic consensus is that neoliberalism is a waning analytical category devoid of conceptual rigor, and therefore, inadequate for academic use. At the same time, research on neoliberalism repeatedly confirms the centrality of organized collective action in its ascent to global hegemony. Blurring the artificially constructed boundaries between politics and the academy, I propose an actor-centered approach to neoliberalism, shedding light on the mechanisms driving the term’s conceptual stretching and its exclusive usages by its political and intellectual foes. But I also probe social movement theory with the case of neoliberalism, understood as a peculiar type of movement: a transnational movement of market-fundamentalist intellectuals that, interestingly, relentlessly refrained from collectively asserting an ‘identity’. This makes neoliberalism a case ill-suited to canonical ways of describing social movements. Hence, my aim is to rethink not only neoliberalism but also to stretch a bit what we think movements are.