Neoliberal Times Research Articles

Reignited flames: Just Early Childhood Education in neoliberal times

In Australasia there is great enthusiasm if little understanding of the ontology of Reggio Emilia preschools. The ontology of both Reggio Emilia schools and the New Zealand Early Childhood Education (ECE) bi-cultural curriculum emerge from invasive experiences of military violence, of framing ECE as social justice. In this paper I tell three tales of ‘quality’. Two are contexted, local, where the quality draws on the ontology of resisting violence. The third, with a veneer of neutrality, does a violence to these, through decontextualized econometric claims to universality.

Challenging neoliberal time: Creating space for radical praxis in geography

Challenging neoliberal time: Creating space for radical praxis in geography

Childcare Provision in Neoliberal Times: The Marketization of Care

Childcare Provision in Neoliberal Times: The Marketization of Care

Care ethics and contemporary art: Imagining and practising care

Feminist care ethicshas for some time guided contemporary artists and curators in their search for sustaining and sustainable practices in the current neoliberal backwash and climate crisis. With a focus on current Australian art in the context of recent care ethics scholarship, this article considers what contemporary art – in its processes as well as aesthetic outcomes – can offer in imagining and practising care for the human and more-than-human world. The article focuses on a series of exhibitions that comprised a key exploratory methodology of The Care Project: Feminism and art in neoliberal times (La Trobe University, 2019–2022). The exhibitions featured the work of regionally based artists. This accent on creative practices emerging from the experience of living in regional communities that are often on the frontline of climate change and social inequality offers unique perspectives on care ethics in practice.

Using Pregnancy and Parenting Apps and Social Media During COVID-19: Absence and Sociality, Agency and Cultural Negotiations for South Asian–Origin Women in Australia

This article reports on and analyses data from a situated and in-depth project on the experiences of six cisgender South Asian-Australian women/people who gave birth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, negatively racialized women experienced barriers to health care and a lack of social support, which were further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. International border closures in Australia combined with local mitigation strategies inhibited social and cultural support from families, impacting many migrant mothers/birthing people who gave birth for the first time in Australia. Many hospitals in the states of New South Wales and Victoria instituted restrictions to birthing services as a way of reducing exposure to the coronavirus during the pandemic. Our research suggests that pre-existing limitations of health care providers, digital platforms, and apps with regard to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women in Australia have been amplified during the pandemic. Online Facebook groups from the mothers’ countries of origin or cultural backgrounds, or for mothers who had babies due in the same month, represented a significant source of information and support for the participants. This was particularly important at a time when women’s capacities to engage in traditional cultural practices, which provide practical, emotional, and informational support, were compromised by the inability to garner familial support. We situate these findings in the literature on “performing good motherhood” in neoliberal times and via reliance on digital devices and platforms and what it means for CALD women’s sociality, sense of agency, and negotiations with cultural practices.

Performing (against) the state

ABSTRACT The reformation of the Arab state in neoliberal times has produced the narratives of the withdrawing versus intervening state. This article complicates these binary notions by taking seriously both top-down and bottom-up state practices in the realm of employment in Tunisia. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of precarious workers’ collective actions, it shows that the precarization of labour relations was structured by state actors’ arbitrary acts for and against a new state image in a neoliberal direction before and after the Uprising. Importantly, bottom-up mobilizations have criticized, challenged and attempted to correct these top-down state practices by performing their image of the state as a coherent entity that is bound by laws and protects the right to decent work.

The Harms of Imprisonment and Envisioning a Desistance-Supporting ‘Good Society’

Research evidence in the 21st century strongly indicates that prisons are inherently harmful environments in which to try to support rehabilitation, because of their destructive impact on identity, self-actualisation, mental health and social relationships. Yet HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) continues to propose that prisons can be legitimate sites of rehabilitation as well as centres of punishment. This article begins by interrogating this proposition by looking at research conducted in an adult male prison. By specifically focusing on the interpersonal conflicts and tensions that the men experience in their daily lives, the research highlights the ‘relational’ and ‘self-actualising’ harms that undermine the development of a successful rehabilitative culture within a prison. The article then moves on to consider a utopian vision of a ‘desistance-supporting’ rehabilitative ‘good society’ by drawing on a second piece of research that captures the voices and experiences of participants in a very successful community-based resettlement project. Lessons learned from this are then collated to consider how to build a rehabilitative ‘good society’ in prisons. The article concludes with a cautionary note about the possible difficulty of creating such a society in neoliberal times.

Teaching in Neoliberal Times: Unraveling Teacher Voices at Basic High Schools in Türkiye

Teaching in Neoliberal Times: Unraveling Teacher Voices at Basic High Schools in Türkiye

Religion in neoliberal times: The global spread of marketization, implications for religion, and future research directions

Marketization is a profound force transforming societies, including how people relate to and practice religion. Drawing from a synthesis of interdisciplinary studies, we approach marketization as a megatrend, explicating how its global spread beyond the advanced economies of the United States and Western Europe is leading to significant changes in religion and its marketplace articulations. We identify four specific ways in which marketization’s global spread influences religion: detraditionalization, re-publicization, dedifferentiation, and deterritorialization. We map these four areas of influence at the intersection of religion and consumption. In so doing, we identify several under-theorized areas in consumer research and offer six future research directions: (1) new non-institutional stages of religious performance, (2) transhumanism as a new religion, (3) new religious authorities, (4) transnational networks of religious service movements, (5) prosperity religion in non-Western and non-Christian contexts, and (6) resistance to marketization. We advance marketing theory by drawing attention to the megatrend of globalizing marketization that we argue should inform the future of the study of religion in consumer research.

Sahelis in struggle: Reimagining feminist solidarity and friendship in neoliberal times

1980s. The autonomous women's movement burst into the scene capturing the imagination of so many women – women who were trapped in families, women who were battling sexism in their workplace, women suffocating in abusive marriages, women struggling to be seen and heard in political organizations that still refused to see gender as a primary question - women from different backgrounds, professions, caste, class, religion, political beliefs – all of whom who were ill at ease with their worlds, their homes, their works and were struggling to find air, grappling for a new home, came together in solidarity, resistance, rage and imagination. While the rumblings of the women's movement, of feminist politics could be felt long back since the waging of the freedom struggle, there was a novelty in the way the 80s moment brought in scores of women to talk, scream, organize, sing, dance, shout slogans, march, ideate on things that moved them, on ‘women's issues’. The idea of sisterhood though soon encountered the anti-Mandal commission agitation, and the rise of Hindutva that exposed the cracks, faultlines of any notion of sisterhood that subsumed identities of caste, religion, sexuality. The journey of the feminist movement in India, therefore, has also been a journey of making and remaking of ideas of sisterhood, solidarity, of the collective ‘we’. While the critical interventions from identity based movements have torn down the inherent ‘naturalness’ of women's friendships – bringing to question the identities and political locations that make the collective ‘we’, the question arises, how do we then think of forging bonds of resilient comradeships, of waging collective struggles in times of cancel culture and neoliberal notions of ‘allyship’. Informed by and building on the debates on ‘intersectionality’ (Nivedita Mennon, Mary John, David Mcnally, etc.), learnings from identity based interventions in movements, and Marxist feminist interventions, this paper will examine Jodi Dean's theorization of the communicative ‘we’, Devika Jain's reconfiguration of Ambedkar's concept of ‘maitri’, and insights from activists in the struggle to unpack how we can think of building companionship of resistances in today's times. Furthermore, as we interrogate the possibilities of friendship in organizing social relations in the new world, we will also look into the possibilities it then holds in crafting a new morality, new ethics.

Rethinking the logic of early diagnosis in cancer.

To reduce morbidity and mortality of cancer, more countries have implemented strategies to detect cancer, based on the logic of 'the sooner the better'. Time is thereby an essential component in how cancer research, policies, and prevention are practiced today. Where the logic of early diagnosis benefits some, the logic also produces harms. In this article, we use a cross-disciplinary case-study design to discuss how different notions of time and linearity are essential in today's research ontology of cancer, describe the individual and societal consequences of such ontology, and invite a rethinking of time in cancer. Drawing on theoretical concepts of time together with cancer epidemiological, historical and ethnographical data, we analyse how the logic of early diagnosis has been established as a stable concept. Although evidence supporting the logic points in different directions, the message 'the sooner the better' is currently not being challenged by research, policy or society. This at least partly, can be explained by a linear perception of time and societal traces of neoliberalism and acceleration in our society together with cancer still being a somewhat enigmatic disease that requires acute action. To support a sustainable healthcare sector, we argue there is a need to nuance the logic of early diagnosis. Continuing the linear perception of symptoms and cancer, risks doing more harm than good by making more people patients unnecessarily and by spending health resources on those with the least need.

Decolonizing applied linguistics in Africa and its diasporas: disrupting the center

ABSTRACT The decolonization of applied linguistics is a critique of applied linguistics (see Phillipson, 1999; Phipps, 2018 and Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). We argue for a shift toward the Global South, in particular Africa, and for the importance of paying attention to ‘race’ as a significant category of analysis in applied linguistics in Africa. Three points require attention in a decolonized applied linguistics: 1) The identification of northern sociolinguistic theories masked as universal and a shift toward Southern frameworks, 2) The acknowledgment of ‘white privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ in language studies, more generally, and the inclusion of ‘race’ as a category of analysis among authors, and 3) The under-representation of female African scholars. The challenges transcend an agenda that redresses exclusions, and the colonial past of linguistics and location in neoliberal times. We question principles underlying applied linguistics in the Global North, often based on patriarchal and capitalist impositions, and epistemological racism in applied linguistics. We argue for a decolonized applied linguistics which draws from indigenous cosmovisions. These cosmovisions sidestep the dualism that is typical of Global North scholarship: individual/collective, body/mind. We show that Euro-American applied linguistics is evolving toward Africa in particular fields.

Mental health in Brazil in times of neoliberalism and pandemic: retrogression and resistance.

This study analyzes aspects of mental health in Brazil as an active political field involving a range of social segments and actors from opposing fields in a context of advancing neoliberalism and pandemic. The analysis begins in 2016, when fiscal austerity entered the national agenda, and proceeds through the pandemic until the present day, when both phenomena continue to prevail, even if the intensity of the pandemic is now reduced. In the ambit of mental health, the national policy based on the principles of the psychiatric reform has suffered severe setbacks. Nonetheless, despite state-sponsored efforts to discourage social control and public participation, important sectors of society are engaged in active resistance.

Keeping a distance in neoliberal times: The politics of friendship in the City of Sanctuary movement

AbstractIn 2010, the UK government transferred all contracts for the accommodation and reception of asylum seekers from local authorities to private contractors, followed by large financial cuts to support services. This article explores the consequences of these neoliberal reforms for the languages of asylum used by the City of Sanctuary movement, and how these languages relate to the politics of asylum of the state. Drawing on an analysis of semi‐structured interviews with the founders and volunteers of the movement in Swansea, the article uses Heideggerian and Derridean theories to show how the movement's original language of ‘friendship’ emerged in response to the UK government framing asylum seekers through languages underpinned by ‘foreignness’ and was meant to reduce relational distance. It then shows how neoliberal reforms of asylum housing caused discursive and practical changes within the movement: a moral responsibilisation of volunteers to substitute for support services lost through austerity measures, and a structural professionalisation to be able to do this support work. It was those structural changes, this article argues, which shifted the dominant framing of the relation between volunteers and asylum seekers from friends to case workers. This re‐establishment of relational distance is of conceptual importance as it highlights how friends and foreigners can often be constructed in a very similar manner.

Debt and Desire: Differential Exploitation and Gendered Dimensions of Debt and Austerity

Austerity as management of public debt is at the core of neoliberal policies and proceeds as differential exploitation. To explore the gendered dimensions of debt, the paper inquires how debt is bond to desire and inscribed in bodies. After indulging in David Graeber’s, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guttari’s work, the analysis focuses on accumulation through debt and dispossession. Drawing on Verónica Gago, Luci Cavallero and Silvia Federici, it reflects how current economies of debt exploit feminized work in times of authoritarian neoliberalism. The paper sheds light on solidaristic struggles against austerity that manifest a desire for social transformation and economies of care.

Discussions on inclusion in times of biopolitics and neoliberalism

This article aims to bring a discussion about inclusion in times of biopolitics and neoliberalism and, for that, we will present concepts and understandings about normalization, medicalization, and neoliberalism. In the search for an analytical movement and using the methodology of bibliographic research, we selected three academic works defended by the GEduMaD research group and we read them from the theoretical lens presented at the beginning of the text.

Making (and enduring) feminist relations

SummaryThis essay reviews Srila Roy's (2022) Changing the Subject. It notes the multiple dimensions along which she articulates feminist and queer politics in two organizations in West Bengal, India, including scale, space, and generation. Feminism and queer politics are co‐constituted from the Global South, across rural and urban relations, and through older and younger generations of activism. By examining two sites of the constitution of feminist and queer politics, she shows how “queer feminist governmentalities” and processes of subjectification emerge and entangle in different ways. The review goes on to ask several questions about understandings of the political. Finally, I engage her conclusions around critique as care. Roy's book offers a rich ethnographic contribution to debates over politics in neoliberal times.

Structural violence in much more than neoliberal times: the case of slum redevelopment in Mumbai

This paper examines the concept of structural violence through the lens of slum redevelopment policies in Mumbai. While slum redevelopment is often seen as a welfare policy that gives free houses to slum dwellers, the article argues that it is actually a form of ongoing structural violence that began as a scheme, but over time, has emerged as a regime of socio- spatial control that perpetuates dependence on speculative markets and creates new forms of exclusion. Additionally, the regime based on the unlocking of land values represents a violent social order that slowly changes the narrative and practices of informal settling and strikes at the heart of the political agency and voice of the basti residents. While the outcomes of this order are devastating, they are perpetuated through a facade of rehabilitation and a delegitimization of occupancy urbanism.

Explaining Feminist Movement Impact: Provincial Abortion Policies in the Wake of Decriminalization, 1988–2018

AbstractFocusing on four jurisdictions where abortion facilities and providers faced violent attacks following the Morgentaler decision of 1988, this study compares provincial government responses to core feminist demands in the area of women's reproductive health: enhanced hospital access, public funding of clinic abortions and safe zone protections. Consistent with previous research on childcare and anti-violence policies, the study finds that in neoliberal times, the presence of left governing parties in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario generally favoured abortion rights interests while conservative regimes disadvantaged them. The article contributes valuable new insights in revealing (1) the importance of centrist leaders in Ontario and at the federal level to pro-choice policy changes, (2) the significance of feminist critical actors to these outcomes, and (3) major variation among New Democratic Party provincial governments on abortion policy. The conclusion discusses implications of these results and proposes directions for further research.

Performances of Closeness and the Staging of Resistance with Mainstream Music

Abstract Performances of closeness—showing one's uncovered face, physically touching others, rhythmic chanting combined with hand gestures, and collective singing and dancing—were central to pandemic-skeptical protests in Germany. This article shows that publicly performing such intercorporeal practices can become a political act when governments and health professionals promote physical distancing and mask mandates. Moreover, it analyzes how pandemic skeptics used both visual and auditive symbols of resistance against past dictatorships that are popular in Germany's dominant national narrative to legitimate their protest and stage “the people.” Protesters’ invocation of a new totalitarianism closely connects to fears revolving around the erosion of representative democracy in neoliberal times and the emergence of a digitalized world ruled by mega-corporations that is seen to be threatened by anonymity and isolation.