Neoliberal Rhetoric Research Articles

L'avvio del sistema nazionale di valutazione. La tensione non risolta tra le istanze di rendicontazione esterna e di sviluppo delle scuole

With the launch of the National evaluation system in the field of primary and secondary education and training (SNV), Italian schools have recently experienced internal and external-evaluation and the performance evaluation of school principals. This paper analyses the process of implementation of the SNV, by considering legal norms, implementing provisions and guidelines produced by the Ministry of Education and INVALSI during the initial phase of implementation. The aim is to highlight the objectives attributed to evaluation in the official documents and their impact on schools. Consistently with neo-liberal rhetoric, evaluation is presented as a necessary regulation mechanism to improve the efficacy and efficiency of the education system. The control at a distance activated by evaluation policies is based on the measurement of performances and promotes standardization of practices, comparisons and competition among schools. The regulatory apparatus emerging from the implementation documents points to an unresolved tension between the objectives of external accountability and those of school development.

Quotidian realities of organic mothering in Turkey

AbstractThis article explores how mothers in Turkey respond to the current atmosphere of food fear and the neoliberal rhetoric of the individualization of risks, as well as interrogating the class dimension of the varying ways in which mothers experience pressures regarding feeding their children in an organic manner. The article primarily suggests that mothers adopt different organic food strategies across class divisions—particularly through class-specific definitions of “organic”—so as to deal in stratified ways with the challenges organic feeding brings. It indicates that organic mothering practices have been incorporated into the lifestyle and cultural distinctions of middle-class families and reinforced by rural nostalgia. Contrary to this, ideas about “the organic” and rural nostalgia are mostly translated as “home-made” for lower-class families. Relying on sixteen in-depth interviews with mothers in İstanbul and on an analysis of posts and comments found on a mothering blog, this article offers empirical findings on analyses of organic mothering and risk from a standpoint and location that have been largely ignored in the existing literature. It also contributes to analyses about neoliberal transformations in the Turkish food market and the growing literature on family and neoliberalism under the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) by bringing a research-based view on the subjective experiences of mothers into a discourse that is rather political in nature as well as into policy research discussions.

Medicaid Reform, Responsiblization Policies, and the Synergism of Barriers to Low-income Health Seeking

Many recent health reforms in the United States are imbued with neoliberal responsibilization rhetoric, which encourages individual responsibility and reduced dependency on the state. This ideology is evident in waiver-modified Medicaid expansion programs which include personal responsibility requirements such as increased cost sharing and behavioral incentive programs. In this article, we explore the limits of responsibilization rhetoric in the context of the lives of a group of Medicaid-qualified people in Michigan. We consider the health needs and challenges they face, how they view and respond to such notions of responsibility, and their access to healthy behavioral choices such as exercising, eating healthy foods, and seeing a doctor. We found that most already embraced a desire to take responsibility for their health, but due to the synergistic impact of a variety of barriers—notably unreliable and changing health insurance coverage, fluctuating low-wage employment, and limited access to health reso...

Sharing values as a foundation for collective hope

A widespread “tale of terror” amongst those seeking social change is that people in modern Western societies are caught in a neo-liberal paradigm and have come to care most about materialism, individual success and status. Our research attempted to challenge this tale. Study 1 involved New Zealand participants (N = 1085) from largely, but not exclusively, left-leaning groups. We used an open-ended process to identify their “infinite” values (that which they consider of value for its own sake); and found these concerned connection to people and other life forms, expression, nature, personal strengths, vitality, and spirituality. Systems and regulations, success and status, money, ownership and domination were named as of “finite” value (of value because of what they signify or enable). These findings suggest that our participants readily distinguished between what is inherently valuable and what is of instrumental value or signifies social status. Study 2 (N = 121) investigated participants’ responses to a word cloud that displayed the infinite values identified in Study 1. These were predominantly a sense of belonging to a human community, reassurance, and feeling uplifted and hopeful. We suggest that the word cloud offered a “tale of joy” showing that, contrary to standard neo-liberal rhetoric, people do care deeply about the common good. We also suggest that such a tale is critical to social movements that depend on a sense of collective hope.

The ‘Imagined to the Reimagined’ Revival of Learning in Higher Education

In 1998 education was declared “the best economic policy that we have” (Department for Education and Employment [DfEE], 1998) highlighting links between educational attainment and potential earning power. It was from this point on that widening participation became an integral part of what education policy was about. Importantly, alongside this notion comes the assumption that economic, social, political and cultural injustices can be solved through education and up skilling. Offered as an opinion piece, for work that is on-going and expanding, this paper critiques the use of the most salient educational economic driver of the last 20-25 years, namely widening participation. This paper argues that the consequences of widening participation in higher education have been concealment of continuing social divisions, largely because they have been underpinned by neo-liberal rhetoric. It suggests counter-action through transgressive learning and teaching practice towards a consequence of remaking higher education that works more effectively for the disenfranchised and marginalised.

Counting the Cost? A Cautionary Analysis of South Africa's BRICS Membership

BRICS is a grouping of five major developing countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all with the ambition of changing the governance architecture of international political-economy but with claims to speedy industrialization, fast growing economies and relatively strong regional and global influence. South Africa joined BRICS at the invitation of China in 2010 and has shown commitment to the group through friendly relations with other member countries. The country’s extensive economic links with China and the other BRICS states underpinned its strategy of diversifying its external trade especially with regard to looking away from West. This article employs content analysis to reflect on South Africa’s membership of BRICS, focusing specifically on the country’s relations with China. It argues that, while South Africa’s economic indicators do not fit well with the BRICS grouping, China is promoting this relationship in order to counter the West’s neo-imperialism and neo-liberal rhetoric. South Africa’s willingness to accept Chinese superiority in the African market and to act as a junior partner in the global power configuration makes the country the perfect choice for this project.

Consumer Transformation: Cosmetic Surgery as the Expression of Consumer Freedom or as a Marketing Imperative?

McCracken’s analysis of identity construction in contemporary culture sees the drive to transform oneself as the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom. Transformation is accessible through cosmetic surgery, enabling consumers with funds to purchase a ‘whole new me’. This consumer is an active participant in the transformation process, not content with observing beauty but actively engaged in the creative construction of new improved selves. In doing so, they have “mastered the codes of cultural production” making themselves “co-creators in the culture they consume” (McCracken xvi). An alternative and far less positive narrative of consumer transformation focuses on the pervasive influence of promotion on individual identity. Marketing and promotion constructs a deficiency in the lives of consumers which, marketers imply, can be remedied by the purchase of cosmetic surgery. Rather than being powerful co-creators of their own fluid identity, consumers are constructed as victims of a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ and preys on consumer vulnerabilities (Fatah 1). In this paper I draw on consumer blogs, industry webpages and regulatory and professional publications to explore the tensions between these competing narratives of bodily transformation. In doing so, I argue that there is an inherent paradox in the discourse of consumer transformation which advocates consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to certain forms of ideal beauty which can be marketed by the promotional industries.

Political and economic transformations in Ukraine: The view from psychiatry.

This article examines contemporary Ukrainian psychiatry through the voices of patients, practitioners, and advocates, focusing on shifting objects of knowledge, interventions, and institutional transitions. Currently, we are witnessing the reconfiguration of psychiatry on a global scale through neoliberal rhetoric combined with the call for global mental health. The goal of the movement for global mental health is to scale up psychiatric treatments through greater access to psychiatric drugs, justified through the framing of distress as an illness. Neoliberal rhetoric suggests that cutting social service expenditure through the privatization and decentralization of the health care system will stimulate economic growth and, in the long term, combat poverty. This paper traces how these dynamics are playing out in Ukraine, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a psychiatric hospital in south-central Ukraine from 2008-2010, while working with a non-governmental organization.

Canada and the Global Rush for International Students: Reifying a Neo-Imperial Order of Western Dominance in the Knowledge Economy Era

In a global knowledge economy, western nations compete for the best knowledge workers, while positioning English language and western education as superior. Drawing from critical theories of globalization, we argue that the international education field has become a site to maintain a neo-imperial agenda concealed by a neoliberal rhetoric of progress and economic expediency. Using Canada as a case study, we critically examine the global tactics of power and governance strategies in international education policy, as they influence and shape education and immigration policy within Canada. We illustrate how the OECD positions itself for global dominance in education and (re)produces the international education field using tactics such as rescaling, the policy cycle and ‘self-responsibilizing’ students. This process creates and maintains a global market for knowledge producers and expands the soft power of western nations.

Caught in between: neoliberal rhetoric and middle-income families in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACTIn both Canada and the United States, middle-income families feel neglected by policymakers but struggle to balance their financial need and desire for government support on the one hand with neoliberal beliefs in self-reliance and self-responsibility on the other. The focus of this paper is on the tensions experienced by middle-income participants in both countries as they try to negotiate a place for themselves amid these competing discourses. Specifically, this paper analyzes participants’ struggle to juxtapose their place in the ‘shrinking' or ‘forgotten' middle class, against their desire to be ‘good' citizens who take responsibility for themselves and their families. This analysis plays out against the backdrop of different socio-political environments and in the context of the 2007–2009 global recession which exacerbated the already increasing pressure on the middle class. It is argued that these contexts have shaped how participants in each country feel about the government support they require, deserve, and reject.

Teacher Evaluations: Corporeal Matters and Un/Wanted Affects

Teacher Evaluations: Corporeal Matters and Un/Wanted Affects

‘We’re In This Together:’ neoliberalism and the disruption of the coach/athlete hierarchy in CrossFit

CrossFit is a growing model of fitness that defines itself in opposition to conventional fitness practices. “Specializing in not specializing”, CrossFit aims to provide a General Physical Preparedness programme sustainable and scalable across an athlete’s life course. “Fitness” is achievable through “constantly varied high intensity functional movements performed across broad time and modal domains”. A differential modality of time is operational in CrossFit, which includes the “clock time” of earlier eras but is largely characterised by the “network time” that makes CrossFit omnipresent. Characterised by the neoliberal rhetoric of self-improvement and individual responsibility, CrossFit takes these ideas one step further by extending its practice and philosophy to every aspect of an athlete’s life, including their network of personal relationships. CrossFit’s lack of specialisation and articulation within network time function to shift the role of the coach from central authority to one who performs affective, emotional labour and forms of a “relationship” that involves supporting each individual athlete in the achievement of their own goals inside and outside “the box”.

КРЕАТИВНЫЙ КЛАСС – КРЕАТИВНЫЙ ГОРОД: РЕАЛЬНАЯ ПЕРСПЕКТИВА ИЛИ УТОПИЯ ДЛЯ ИЗБРАННЫХ?

The world experience explicitly shows that popular concepts of urban development in post-industrial societies coming from the ideology of creativeness are inapplicable not only universally to any urban entity in the world, but also to most of cities in the respective societies. This is due to: a) historical non-simultaneity of mankind’s development, when different societies solve distinctive problems of survival, accelerated modernizations, adaptation to post-industrialism, creative self-actualization, etc.; b) capitalist world system asymmetries that increase the class-based, economical and geographical polarization; c) narrowness of the world post-industrial economy segment and of the post-material values space; d) dependence of cities on networks and peripheries beyond agglomerations, regions, states. As a result, such concepts and proposed drivers of urban development as "urban city" (S. Sassen), "creative city" (Ch. Landry), "creative class" (R. Florida), "creative economy" (J. Howkins), "smart city" (A. Townsend, R. Hollands et al.), "gentrification" (D. Ley), "urban networked communities" (M. Castells), "symbolic positioning" and "cities branding" (by D. Vizgalov, K. Kiselev, M. Nazukina and other) uncover their nature as limited social utopias. Even in places where the level of urban economy capitalization enables to use potential drivers of development suggested by creative theories, their impact is usually in favour of distinct privileged urban minorities. Without any significant multiplicative economic effect, these theories use neoliberal rhetoric which helps to legitimate the decrease of social state, spatial segregation and reinforcement of different inequalities within a city. Thus they deprive urban dwellers of the conventional right to the city. As a result, creative city politics turns out to accumulate tensions and problems, and the creative class shows its accursed part – the precariat – as vulnerable at the labor market and politically dangerous class.

Choose Not to Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy

Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 743 Alexis Lothian Choose Not toWarn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy OMG, academia is having the warnings debate. A year or so ago, I typed this message into an online chat window. I was talking about the eruption in blog posts, higher education think pieces, and intense Facebook arguments about “trigger warnings” in the classroom —especially classrooms in which gender, race, and sexuality are the focus of discussion—instigated by student-led campaigns to standardize notifications of potentially traumatic content.1 The potentially chilling effect of syllabus warnings on feminist and queer inquiry led to fears that vulnerable faculty might lose the freedom to teach “complex, potentially disturbing materials” without the risk of censure.2 Placed in wider cultural context, trigger warnings became a stand-in for the rise of a student-activist generation whose emphasis on sensitivity seemed to exemplify the neoliberal individualization and depoliticization endemic to contemporary capitalism.3 Meanwhile, other voices from inside and 1. Colleen Flaherty, “Trigger Unhappy,” Inside Higher Ed, April 14, 2014, https:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/14/oberlin-backs-down-triggerwarnings -professors-who-teach-sensitive-material. 2. 7 Humanities Professors, “Trigger Warnings Are Flawed,” Inside Higher Ed, May 29, 2014, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essayfaculty -members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings. 3. Jack Halberstam, “You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma,” Bully Bloggers, July 5, 2014, https://bullybloggers .wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoricof -harm-danger-and-trauma. 744 Alexis Lothian outside academia were insisting that trigger warnings could provide necessary consideration for students living with everyday trauma, including survivors of endemic racialized, classed, and gendered violence.4 In these fast-paced and contentious debates, it has often been the idea of the trigger warning, more than the practice of warning itself, on which the conversation centers. There is a shared standard narrative in which a student’s real or imagined articulation of a state of being triggered shades into teachers’ and students’ fear of triggering someone, and this fear leads to a demand for future enactments that would cut out any potentially offensive or uncomfortable material. This certainly may sometimes reflect reality.5 But when I messaged my friend in that tone of wearied recognition, I was referencing a different, though related, conversation in which similar arguments played out to different conclusions. While the ascendance of trigger-warning discourse is usually traced to feminist bloggers’ use of the language of trauma and to the flowering of social justice discourse on Tumblr, such warnings have a distinct history in the networks and communities surrounding fan fiction and fan video. This essay aims to offer some insights from that debate in a form that may prove useful for those contemplating the significance of trigger warnings in feminist academia. Within the networked publics of both academia and fandom, conversations about warnings, and the personal and organizational policies that get developed as a result of those conversations, are world-making practices. I ask what might happen if we let go of questions around the legitimacy of triggers and traumas and asked instead what it is that requests for warnings are asking for—not on the level of individual experience, but in terms of the physical and discursive spaces that such requests, and the answers to them, create. In contrast to academics’ 4. Julia Serano, “Regarding ‘Generation Wars’: Some Reflections Upon Reading the Recent Jack Halberstam Essay,” Whipping Girl (blog), July 13, 2014, http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-some. html; Allison Hitt, “Melanie Yergeau, ‘Disable All the Things,’” Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, June 24, 2014, http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative. org/2014/06/24/melanie-yergeau-disable-all-the-things-kn1. 5. Rani Neutill, “My Trigger-warning Disaster: 9 1/2 Weeks, The Wire and How Coddled Young Radicals Got Discomfort All Wrong,” Salon, October 28, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/i_wanted_to_be_a_supporter_of_ survivors_on_campus_and_a_good_teacher_i_didnt_realize_just_how_ impossible_this_would_be. Alexis Lothian 745 predominant concerns with surveillance, academic freedom, and neoliberal commodification of the self, fans’ arguments over triggers and warnings...

Re-mapping integrative conservation: (Dis) coordinate participation in a biosphere reserve in Mexico

'Community participation' has, over the past decades, become a key component of nature conservation initiatives worldwide. 'Participation', a term that signals the involvement of local stakeholders in conservation practices, is central to Integrative Natural Protected Areas (INPAs) in Latin America, where INPAs have become the dominant form of environmental protection policy and biodiversity research. Based on an analysis of the Sierra de Huautla Biosphere Reserve (SDHBR) in Mexico, this paper describes different and frequently conflicting understandings and practices of community integration. Drawing upon Situational Analysis (SA), we examine the forms through which local participation may be coordinated, in advance, by extra-local conservation agencies. We then trace competing forms of participation where local stakeholders devise tactics to challenge imposed policy templates and articulate their own co-emerging interests. By interrogating a neoliberal rhetoric of inclusion, and by re-mapping local participation on the ground, we make visible an approach to socio-natural conservation research that is more critical, more accountable, and more attentive to local agency.

Recalibrating the State of the Union: Visual Rhetoric and the Temporality of Neoliberal Economics in the 2011 Enhanced State of the Union Address

For the first time in the history of the address, the 2011 State of the Union was accompanied online by an enhanced version, which gave viewers the option of experiencing the speech alongside a display providing images, charts, graphs, outlines, and data visualizations. This paper examines the visual rhetoric of President Barack Obama’s 2011 enhanced State of the Union, locating this rhetoric in an aesthetic regime of neoliberal temporality. I argue that the visual rhetoric of the Enhanced Address articulates between conservative and progressive temporalities in order to promise a future economic victory prefigured by the economic logics of the past. Working between Svetlana Boym’s understanding of a restorative nostalgia that seeks to return to a lost, mythic origin, and a reflective nostalgia which looks to the past to open up new possibilities for the future, I argue that the temporal rhetoric of neoliberalism stylizes the return to the past as modality of progression in the future. I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sarah Sharma to argue that the aesthetics of the enhanced State of the Union invite viewers into a recalibrative nostalgic temporality which works reciprocally between restoration and reflection, allowing viewers to adjust their relationship to a deflated political scene without fundamentally altering the political coordinates that produce the conditions of economic exchange.

District 9, race and neoliberalism in post-apartheid Johannesburg

District 9 is a sci-fi film, ostensibly concerned with the arrival of extraterrestrials in Johannesburg, that explores notions of regulatory control and economic supremacy in twenty-first century neoliberal South Africa. This commentary and political resonance are found beneath, and also work with the action and CGI special effects. This essay attempts to identify many real world features as allegories within the film: post-apartheid racism, economic subjugation and urban poverty and how, despite past economic constraints due to colour, the new neoliberal rhetoric of innovation and self-adjustment has replaced the white-centred nationalism of an older capitalism, but with devastating consequences. District 9 is, the author argues, a powerful film through which to think about the structural, spatial and cultural failures of post-apartheid South Africa. The indifferences by the South Africans in the film carry strong ideological and social signification to the past: the extraterrestrials encode the urban landscape which is then decoded by audiences as they interpret the haunting remnants of segregation and urban poverty now reanimated by immigrant aliens (doubling for Nigerians and Zimbabweans) in the narrative. More importantly, via the substitution of subservient extraterrestrials for black immigrants new to South Africa, the film throws up for discussion many discourses over race, politics, remembrance, inequality and reveals decades-old problems recalibrated in District 9’s sci-fi dystopia.

Everyday life in Russia past and present

Introduction Part I. Approaches to Everyday Life 1. The Scholarship of Everyday Life / David L. Ransel 2. Provincial Nobles, Elite History and the Imagination of Everyday Life / Mary Cavender 3. Resisting Resistance: Everyday life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Postsocialist Russia / Olga Shevchenko, 4. The Oil Company and the Crafts Fair: From Povsednevnost' to Byt in Postsocialist Russia / Douglas Rogers Part II. Public Identities and Public Space 5. 'We don't talk about ourselves': Women Academics Recall Their Path to Success / Natalia Pushkareva 6. The Literature of Everyday Life and Popular Representations of Motherhood in Brezhnev's Time / Elizabeth Skomp 7. 'They Are Taking That Air From Us': Sale of Commonly Enjoyed Properties to Private Developers / David L. Ransel Part III. Living Space and Personal Choice 8. Everyday Life and the Problem of Conceptualizing Public and Private during the Khrushchev Era / Deborah A. Field 9. Soviet Mass Housing and the Communist Way of Life / Steven E. Harris 10. Everyday Aesthetics in the Khrushchev-Era Standard Apartment / Susan E. Reid 11. The Soviet Communal Apartment Lives On, Adapting to Post-Soviet Conditions / Ilya Utekhin Part IV. Myth, Memory, and the History of Everyday Life 12. Everyday Stalinism in Transition-Era Film / Peter C. Pozefsky 13. Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles / Serguei Oushakine 14. Everyday Life and the Ties that Bind in Liudmila Ulitskaia's Medea and Her Children / Benjamin Sutcliffe Part V. Coming Home: Transnational Connections 15. Sino-Soviet Every Day: Chinese Revolutionaries in Moscow Military Schools, 1927-1930 / Elizabeth McGuire 16. Coming Home Soviet Style: The Reintegration of Afghan Veterans into Soviet Everyday Life / Karen Petrone 17. Everyday Life in Transnational Perspective: Consumption, Consumerism, and Party Favors, 1917-1939 / Choi Chatterjee Afterword / Sheila Fitzpatrick Bibliography

Shifting social dynamics and economic inequality in the post‐Soviet space: Networking and participation in toi among the novyi Kyrgyz

AbstractThis article analyzes recent changes in the important social gatherings of feasting celebrations in Kyrgyzstan (toi in the Kyrgyz language) as markers of significant change in social networking practices over the post‐Soviet period. I argue that the observable increase in the number of these celebrations has been mistaken for a revitalization of kinship relations, when in fact the toi often reflect more pragmatic and strategic considerations vis‐à‐vis social networking. In the context of the attrition of state services and increasing economic and social inequality since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Kyrgyzstan's subsequent independence in 1991, the resultant patterns of association evident in toi I interpret as a mélange of custom and the assimilation of neoliberal rhetoric that was widely disseminated across the former Soviet Union during this period. This has significant consequences for well‐being among the poorest segments of society that might not be appreciated by considering numerical measures of inequality alone, such as Gini measures of income inequality preferred by international development organizations like the World Bank.

Values-led entrepreneurship: Developing business models through the exercise of reflexivity

Successful entrepreneurship relies on the development of an idea and its execution in such a way that value is captured. The idea of value, however, is often framed solely as market return, rather than a more inclusive understanding of value as social good. Ethical and normative considerations are often ‘nice to have’ and treated, if at all, as an add-on rather than an integrated part of doing business. In this paper, I describe a pedagogical module for ‘sustainability entrepreneurs’ that has been developed as part of an MSc course at Imperial College London. Students are challenged to develop business models that have a well-integrated environmental, social and economic value proposition and challenge the dominant neoliberal business rhetoric. The key skill developed through the module is critical reflexivity. This allows students to see that they could shape the world through their own agency and break out of conventional modes of doing business to place values at the heart of their business models.