Neoliberal Settings Research Articles

Right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance, system justification, and conservative political ideology as predictors of mental health stigma: The Hungarian case.

Insights from mental health stigma research indicate the importance of societal and political views on mental health perceptions. Most studies originate from typical Western neo-liberal settings and focus on generic mental health issues. Our research explores these associations in Hungary, an understudied post-communist context with significant stigma levels, examining a broad range of stigmas related to both general and three specific mental illnesses: schizophrenia, depression, and alcohol use disorder (AUD). The study aims to connect a wide array of political dispositions to stigma associated with both general and specific mental illnesses, exploring both attitudes and behavioral intentions. We surveyed 492 participants (147 males, 342 females) on their political dispositions, including Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), general and economic system justification, and conservative political ideology, and their attitudes toward general and specific mental illnesses. Regression analyses identified key political dispositions influencing stigma. RWA was significantly linked to most stigma outcomes, while conservative political ideology showed a selective impact. Other predictors had minimal influence on stigma outcomes. Our findings suggest that perceptions of danger, threat, and unconventionality, as indicated by RWA, are crucial for mental health stigmatization in Hungary. Intervention programs should target these factors, particularly in similar contexts.

Feminist Praxis in Exile

This work is a collaborative attempt to historicize our experience as feminist academics in neoliberal settings across different countries (Turkey, Canada, the United States) in the last two decades. We narrate how we learned to act as women academics in certain male and nationalist and/or racialized settings in neoliberal moment(s). We refrain from victimhood accounts as well as the charm of heroic feminist stances. We tell our stories in terms of our relations to the socio-economic contexts that host neoliberal universities, to our presence on neoliberal campuses, to the academic circles that we happen to join, and from which we are excluded

From a political to an im-political community: The end of the company town (Tocopilla, Chile, 1915-1996)

By using a historical and anthropological methodology, this paper describes and analyzes the urban case study of Tocopilla, Chile, a city that, as a result of the industrialization of the Chuquicamata mine in 1915 by The Chile Exploration Company, saw the installation of a powerful thermoelectric power plant that included a Company town, which operated under the same rules as the Chuquicamata camp. The thermoelectric plant, nationalized in 1971, remained under the management of CODELCO, before being privatized in 1996. Thus, the new company dissociated itself from the paternalistic control of workers and their housing, permitting the emergence of a process that brought an end to the Company town. This paper looks to characterize the organizational, material, and semantic transition seen in the settlement since 1996, understood as a process that took place under a neoliberal setting, which the authors have called the transition from a political to an im-political community.

Authoritarian practices between ‘para-coloniality’ and ‘cheap security’: when Chinese state capital meets neoliberal copper mining (and protests) in Las Bambas, Peru

ABSTRACT How does Chinese state capital operate in the neoliberal setting of Peruvian mining? The article tackles this question by focusing on Las Bambas, a large mine in the Andean highlands of Apurimac. We argue that China’s quest for Peruvian copper entwines state capital with neoliberal and authoritarian practices of state violence in a case of ‘para-coloniality.’ This concept explains how Chinese mining operations build on and reproduce the legacies of European colonialism and authoritarian rule under Fujimorismo to extract natural resources from formerly colonized territories. A corollary element in this relationship is that of ‘cheap security’, i.e. the Peruvian state’s practice of legally selling its policing services to mining companies who use them to discipline dissidents. The article draws on Critical Geopolitics, Legal Sociology and Political Ecology and highlights the shifting hierarchies of power that shape conflicts around copper extraction in the Andean highlands of Peru.

Campground or losing ground for adaptation? A case study of coastal change under neoliberal settings in New South Wales

Coastal areas are at risk from the dual burden of climate change and rapid development. Coastal areas are significant as contested interfaces where social, cultural and environmental values vie for attention amongst economic and political aspirations. As a political logic, neoliberalism favours market-based logics, privatisations and commodification. Under neoliberal settings, planning for coastal adaptation is constantly tempered by an economic agenda. This case study analyses the management of a particular coastal land use in New South Wales, Australia following a change in management which signals a move to the market-based settings of neoliberalism. Specifically, this paper examines the case of campgrounds on public lands following a State-led change of management from local municipality to a state-run enterprise. I draw on a critical discourse analysis to study local and national media articles and coastal and campgrounds management documents. Findings highlight the influence of neoliberal settings on community consultation, local knowledge and community connections to the coast; management of coastal risks and responsibilities; and the change from nature-based holidays to a more commodified experience. Discussed is how this change and approach is likely to impact on climate change adaptation, with a call for more ambitious and inclusive conversations around coastal futures under a changing climate.

Multiple crises, multiple sticky plasters: repositioning regimes of truth in ECEC policy to affirmative ethics of interconnection

ABSTRACT In recent times, the role of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), as a public service within Irish society has been illuminated. In the twenty-first century, although crises may unfold on a global scale, the response from society is galvanised at local level. Amongst other functions, ECEC is ideally positioned to form part of a local response to unanticipated public crisis. However, ECEC in Ireland finds itself in a space of converging multiple crises such as high fees for parents, poor working conditions for staff, alongside concerns of how children experience provision. This article analyses the institutional systems from which ECEC has emerged by mapping several discursive ‘regimes of truth’, that have built up through Irish history. Exposure of multiple crises, such as fragmentation and the commodification of care are mapped to a neoliberal discourse set in a history of colonialism and religious doctrine. Pulling off the sticky plasters is painful, whilst facing multiple crises can lead to a state of exhaustion. However, guided by affirmative ethics this article aims to generate possible solutions, thereby proposing mechanisms for creating a more sustainable model of ECEC as a public service, embedded in an interconnective narrative of ethical care.

Industrial heritage in tourism marketing: legitimizing post-industrial development strategies of the Ruhr Region, Germany

ABSTRACT Many post-industrial regions reinterpret their industrial past as a heritage resource for marketing purposes. This paper explores how two sites in the Ruhr area in Germany, Zollverein and Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, are narrated in marketing brochures with selective industrial heritage narratives. Industrial heritage is utilized for both immediate marketing purposes and as a tool for memory and identity politics. Through thematic analysis, we uncover that industrial heritage legitimizes the Ruhr – Europe’s largest post-industrial region – as a distinct region by providing a seemingly uncontested, neutral and universal industrial history targeted at a wide audience. Simultaneously, the established narratives reinterpret industrial heritage as places of consumption, valued for their aesthetics and facilities for sports, arts and leisure. Such a marketing practice attempts to tap into the growing demand for postmodern consumption of culture, and simultaneously justifies and institutionalizes a specific, consumption-driven post-industrial development strategy for the Ruhr. The study reveals how the marketing of a post-industrial region promotes a select set of industrial heritage narratives that aim to strengthen the region’s economic position in a neoliberal setting of interregional economic competition.

Academics’ perspectives on a student engagement and retention program: dilemmas and deficit discourses

ABSTRACT Within the contemporary higher education landscape, maintaining student engagement and retention has become of critical concern to universities. Universities have mostly responded to this concern by implementing institutional engagement and retention initiatives by professional university staff. Thus far, however, the role that teaching academics can play in student engagement and retention programs has been largely unexplored within institutional settings and within the higher education literature. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences as teaching academics involved in a student engagement and retention program at our university. Through a series of individual reflections and collaborative conversations, we problematise common approaches to student engagement and retention and question the role of teaching academics in these programs within neoliberal university settings. We bring to light troubling ethical dilemmas we faced during our participation in the program and our concerns about the deficit framing of students within institutionally driven engagement and retention initiatives.

Peri-urban territories and rural water community governance in Chile

PurposeRural drinking water services in Chile are managed by Rural Drinking Water Associations (RDWAs) with a community governance model. However, urban growth and a neoliberal institutional setting tend to favor market-style governance, both in terms of territorial planning and drinking water supply, placing stress on the community governance model of RDWA. The authors seek to understand these processes and identify the position of RDWA actors facing socio-territorial and environmental transformations experienced in peri-urban sectors of the city of Talca (Chile).Design/methodology/approachThe authors used georeferenced data, participant and non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews. With these data, the authors analyzed the positions and discourses of water governance actors in relation to socio-territorial transformations in the peri-urban areas of the city, as well as for tensions between community and market governance.FindingsThe authors identified a growth tendency of RDWA users around the city of Talca due to a sharp drinking water demand increase in peri-urban territories. As such, the authors describe and contrast RWDA managers and governmental regulators' discourses regarding environmental and socio-territorial transformations. In these discourses, the authors found three critical topics: (1) land liberalization blurring urban territory borders; (2) Law #20998, a poorly financed reform which raises the specter of RDWA privatization, jeopardizing historic community drinking water management; and (3) the consequences of declining community commitment to RDWAs.Practical implicationsOne key implication of these findings is the need to modify RDWA pricing policies to deal with new rural inhabitant lifestyles and drinking water demands and to fulfill water basic needs of rural families, avoiding privatization risks. This change could help not only dealing with growing scarcity during global climate change, but could also provide financial resources to face new technical and administrative requirements of SSR Law.Originality/valueThe originality of the study comes from using a framework of governance tensions applied to water governance in peri-urban areas in a neoliberal institutional setting.

Labour Reforms in a Neo-liberal Setting: Lessons from India

Labour Reforms in a Neo-liberal Setting: Lessons from India

Chaos Theory and the Neoliberal English-Based Dimension of the Polish Higher Education Reforms 2018/2019

This article draws on chaos theory to critically analyse the recent higher education reforms that have been taking place in Poland. The argument launched in this article aims to show that the reforms are based primarily on neoliberal foundations and to expose the linguistic dominance of the English language in neoliberal settings. The English language appears to be a strong tool of neoliberal power, used to empower or to marginalise local academics. The divisive power of English exploited by reformists creates a growing fissure between age cohorts, disciplines and academics representing diverse social backgrounds. The tension and uncertainty brought about by the reforms have increased the anxiety and competition between scholars, undermining solidarity and compromising joint agency. The long-term results of entering the neoliberal “rat race”, which is strongly reliant on English language skills, are yet unknown.

Acquiescent market citizens? Age and redistributive policy attitudes in Australia

ABSTRACT As in other advanced industrial democracies, tax and welfare policies in Australia over the last few decades have tended to preserve benefits for some groups of citizens while the safety net for others is weakened. Young people, including children, are among those bearing increased social risks which tend to be exacerbated rather than ameliorated by redistributive policies. There is little evidence of discontent about the overall redistributive policy context, suggesting it broadly aligns with public opinion. The research described in this paper set out to explore the factors underpinning the attitudes of young adult and senior Australians towards redistributive policy, whether there were differences between the two age groups, and if there was any support for policy reform. The results suggest that the young participants’ habituation to neo-liberal policy settings, particularly their adherence to individualistic norms, made them less likely than the seniors to express negative attitudes towards existing policy settings or to advocate reform.

The auste-city model and bio-political strategies: re-visiting the urban space of Athens (Greece) during the crisis

ABSTRACTThis article offers a depiction of Athens focused on the consequences that the initial round of Memoranda measures (2012–2015) produced on its urban space. On a theoretical level, a strategic function of the Greek capital is posited, seeing it as an urban laboratory for testing debt policies; accordingly, the primary focus is on the neoliberal agenda set in motion there, mainly consisting of the combination of privatization programmes and the securitization of urban space. Consequently, some of the emerging critical issues – i.e. Rethink Athens and the cases of the Akadimia Platonos, Ellinikò and Aghios Panteleimonas neighbourhoods, alongside the most relevant bio-political tactics of social control - are encapsulated within a specific model of governance, named auste-city and specifically targeted at normalizing the ‘extraordinary’ state of economic crisis into an ultimate rule. The conclusion is that austerity is currently disclosing an opportunity for neoliberal forces to reorganize their own dominion.

Water Law

A new statute for fresh water has been proposed by the New Zealand Mäori Council to give legal stature to water as elemental to life. This would remove fresh water from governance through the RMA, where it is managed as one among many resources. A new law would also remove water from neo-liberal settings and the wider context of commercial interests that have pervaded the interpretation of the RMA. An independent Freshwater Commission would be the centrepiece of the regime, with iwi/Mäori representatives included as commissioners. Mauri is proposed as the standard for water quality, and allocation and commercial use to be accommodated within this standard of ecosystem health. New water councils at catchment and rohe levels would engage hapü interests and have implementation responsibilities. This is a vision with pathways for facing challenging issues that have escaped resolution: Mäori rights and interests, equity of allocation and wider public good interests.

Efficiency versus social justice? Teachers’ roles in the epoch of globalisation

The literature portrays globalisation as a ‘Janus-like phenomenon’, implying that it has two ‘heads’ like the mythical giant Janus; beyond the rise of hyber-liberalism, xenophobia and socio-economic inequity, globalisation has also humanistic and democratic elements. In this context, a global agenda of social justice and equity of educational opportunity appears to be counteracted by global discourses of neoliberalism, which are embedded in international performance indicators, and international tests and scores. Apparently, teachers in the era of globalisation are assigned with diverse, and often ‘unbalanced’, social and professional roles. In such a context, this article aims to address the following question: What roles are teachers called to play in the epoch of globalisation? In this article, we acknowledge that global preoccupation with efficiency and performance has contributed to the development a managerialist model of education causing the de-professionalisation of teachers. Such model has in turn restricted teachers’ opportunities to mediate social justice. Nonetheless, what we conclude is that teachers are not ‘trapped’ in a trade-off between efficiency and equity. Even if we accept that neoliberalism is an inevitable top-down policy framework, neoliberal settings can still provide spaces for teachers to act as democratic agents by developing autonomous, active and collegial professional identities. However, this article concludes that teachers working in solidarity in local/global coalitions may counteract the hegemony of neoliberalism by bringing bottom-up structural transformation towards social justice, equity and diversity recognition.

Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University

In this article, we present “retrospective autoethnographies” as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our present and our desire for a utopian future to begin to create an image of the New University. Together, as people raised in the postcolony and within coloniality, we begin at the negative affect as neoliberal universities invisibilize, surveil, audit, and discipline—but then, we strive to imagine a New University characterized by radical hope, doing so alongside student movements pushing for decolonizing the university. This article is envisioned as an exhortation for a decolonial intervention of radically dreaming the New University into place.

Problematizing markets: market failures and the government of collective concerns

Neoliberalism is usually associated with pro-market values. This paper argues that more attention should be paid to the specific forms of market criticisms that unfold in neoliberal settings. We adapt Foucault's and Callon's notion of problematization to study recent policy reforms in Chile. The analysis shows a transition from a set of policies justified in terms of the virtues of the market to policy interventions based on a comparison between the situation in the specific area and ideal well-functioning markets. This transition, we propose, signals a particular mode of governing with its characteristic cognitive operation (areas of collective concerns are assessed in terms of market failures), apparatus (policy instruments oriented to remediate market failures), and the jurisdiction of a particular type of experts.

Assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: an ethics of care

ABSTRACTWe document and interrogate our collective experimentation with disruptive academic practices as early- and mid-career women researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We grapple with our disruptions and attempted interventions to do academic work differently. We find that, in our efforts to resist, and attempts to promote different norms within a neoliberal university setting, we exercise a commitment to care: for colleagues, students, our friends, families and selves. This ethic of care emerged as we interrogated our gendered experiences in a set of experimental interventions designed to disrupt gendered neoliberal practices. These interventions – the formation of a national Women and Gender Geographies Research Network (2013), an interactive seminar (2015), and a panel session at the New Zealand Geographical Society Conference (2016) – generated different experiences of living, working, and relating in academic spaces. In productively disrupting, we learned the value of collectives to generate momentum and build solidarity, and the importance of creating safe spaces for sharing experiences. Our experiments emphasize that mutual trust, especially within our collective, is critical to progress. The interventions’ generative work privileged other forms of labour and fostered an active and equitable (knowledge) community in which practices of care for diverse academic communities and ourselves were paramount.

Documenting sociopolitical development via participatory action research (PAR) with women of color student activists in the neoliberal university

Political activism attests to the sociopolitical development and agency of young people. Yet the literature sparingly engages the intersectional subjectivities that inform the sociopolitical development of young people, especially women of color. Important questions remain in the theorizing of sociopolitical development among youth engaged in political activism within higher education settings. Thus, we focus on the following question: What experiences informed or catalyzed the sociopolitical development of women of color student activists within a racialized neoliberal university in the United States? In addressing this question we demonstrate how student-led participatory action research (PAR) within the neoliberal university can facilitate and support sociopolitical development. Of most value, this paper demonstrates how PAR can be used as a tool to support the intersectional sociopolitical development of student activists organizing within racialized neoliberal settings of higher education that threaten the academic thriving and overall wellbeing of students of color, specifically women of color. Sociopolitical development theorizing must engage elements of relational healing as a dimension of wellbeing. Therefore, our work contributes to these conversations by centering the experiences of women of color student activists.

Higher education for citizens of caring democracies

Educational development has gained legitimacy as a field of inquiry. Larger structural questions about the place of universities within democracies, however, should be a basic concern of educational developers. This paper poses the question, “which side are you on?” It argues that developers can either acquiesce to the conditions of universities in a neoliberal setting or can resist by thinking about universities as a critical tool in the development of caring democracies.