Neoliberal Times Research Articles

Teacher Educators in Neoliberal Times: A Phenomenological Self-Study

In Sweden, and most Western countries, pervasive neoliberal policies have dramatically transformed the entire education sector in a matter of decades. As teacher educators, we have experienced how neoliberal currents have pushed Swedish teacher education towards a teacher training paradigm which may risk undermining the foundations for professional judgement. Moreover, the Bologna Process and the introduction of New Public Management have had significant consequences for what it means to be a teacher educator. In this study, we present our everyday experiences of being teacher educators, immersed in a teacher education culture in Sweden which has evolved under the pressures of neoliberalism. To address these complex lived experiences we engaged in a phenomenological first-person account. Three main themes emerged from an analysis of lived experience descriptions: (a) Alignment Slaves; (b) Audit Puppets; (c) Techno Phobes. These themes reflect different lived dimensions of being teacher educators confronted with neoliberal agendas. The paper concludes with a call for resistance to bring about change within teacher education.

Mapeando el capitalismo neoliberal: teorías críticas y la idea de crítica social

One of the defining characteristics of critical social theory is the production of emancipation-oriented knowledge vis-a-vis the realities of capitalist society in all its contradictions. After a period of withdrawal from the seventies to the nineties, social critique of capitalist society has re-emerged with a new vitality and vigour. One of the salient characteristics of the contemporary developments within the diverse field of contemporary critical theories is the recovering of the idea of the social to name neoliberal capitalism and contemporary society as a whole. Drawing on a discussion of the themes of utopia, recognition, and disagreement, and on the idea of cognitive mapping, this paper advances the idea of social critique as a three-dimensional concept able to grasp the specificities of critical theories in neoliberal times.

Teacher Dissent in Neoliberal Times: Counter‐Publics and Alternative‐Publics in Teacher Activism

AbstractIn this essay, Terrenda White examines distinct forms of activism by two influential organizations: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Teach for America (TFA). Despite differences between these groups, both have created new discourses and alliances among teachers in the public sphere — what White calls “teacher publics.” These new alliances, White argues, can be conceptualized as counter‐publics and alternative‐publics. CTU is a counter‐public because its activities counter the tradition of top‐down insular unionism and embrace “social movement unionism” where teachers are part of an expansive coalition for social transformation, including contesting city and state bureaucracies for adequate resources and equitable practices on behalf of minoritized communities. TFA has also created expansive coalitions for change, embracing a “new professionalism” that rejects public contestations with state leaders for resources. As an alternative‐public, TFA engages a network of private philanthropists and business leaders to generate change in public education through market‐based initiatives that challenge bureaucratic control of teachers and schools and that incentivize competition, audit culture, and data‐driven decision‐making. These two cases, because their approaches to educational change are so different, provide fertile ground for White's evaluation of what new forms of activism mean for the democratic goals of public schools.

Fitness Philanthropy and Social Capital: an Emerging Research Agenda for Sport and Community Well-Being

There is a growing recognition of the ways in which sport and leisure can contribute to well-being. This paper offers a socio-cultural account of the sport-charity nexus as a site and source of community well-being. The paper conceives sports charity as broader than a fundraising imperative or a motivation for physical health outcomes and benefits and argues instead that “fitness philanthropy” is an important socio-sporting movement that mobilises well-being in increasingly neo-liberal times. Drawing on the literature on sport and social capital, and leisure and well-being, the paper argues that fitness philanthropy provides an important social barometer for broader cultural and ideological imperatives that contribute in novel ways to understanding health and well-being.

On Gathering: Or, The Birth of Global Fiction from the Spirit of Tragedy

AbstractThis article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.

The doorway effect: Stories of feminist activism and survival in the neoliberal university

A doorway is an entrance into a space. A gateway that denotes passage and movement. In the contemporary university, doors separate, connect, and demarcate belonging and exclusion. In our experiences as academics and in our qualitative interviews with academic women at universities across Australia, there are many accounts of the liminality of doorways and of doors being closed literally and metaphorically. Closed doors speak to a lack of transparency and a blind eye to inequality and discrimination in academia, as well as an absence of connectedness and solidarity in a highly competitive and critical neoliberal work environment. What happens in these academic entrance ways in neoliberal times? Drawing on critical autoethnography and the writings of Virginia Woolf and Helene Cixous, this paper uses the spatial metaphor of doorways as symbolic structures to describe the dissonance between academics and institutions as well as between individuals. In this paper the neurological and cultural phenomenon of “the doorway effect” is employed as an allegory of forgetting to highlight the way the individualisation of thoughts and feelings diverts attention away from institutional accountability on issues of gender inequalities in Australian higher education.

Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework

In this article, we propose a cross-pollination of two prominent lines of educational thought: open education (OE) and threshold concepts (TCs). Open education has gained an increased profile through the growing popularity of open educational resources (OER) and massive online open courses (MOOCs). Educators who create or make use of such resources, or employ related open educational practices (OEP), are often suggested to have a transformative impact in educational settings. In recent years, educational research has increasingly discussed learning as a process of attaining or crossing certain conceptual thresholds, which involve such a significant shift that the learner eventually achieves a different and deeper understanding of core disciplinary knowledge, even a new identity. Of the eight characteristics of TCs identified in the core literature of this theory, we consider that three in particular offer the maximum potential for understanding the evolution of teachers towards the open educator identity: transformative, troublesome and liminal. This work presents a theoretical framework that includes the transformative impact on identity in the process of becoming an open educator, the troublesomeness inherent in this evolution and the liminal space through which the evolving teachers progress. It is argued that a focus on the development of open educator identity aligns with current reflective approaches to working on teachers’ professional identity, and at the same time supports a focus on teachers’ commitment to a democratic approach to education, which is necessary in neoliberal times.

Adult-child relations in neoliberal times: insights from a dialogue across childhood and parenting culture studies

In this introductory article for the special issue ‘Childhood, Parenting Culture and Adult-Child Relations in Global Perspectives’, we provide an overview of our fields of study (childhood studies and parenting culture studies) by placing them in dialogue. We do so as a basis for drawing out themes emerging from the special issue, in order to explore potential synergies and open broader debates. We begin by tracing moves towards more relational approaches in the social sciences indicating their epistemological and methodological implications. Relational thinking provides a basis for countering antagonistic positionings of children and adults, allowing for circulations of childhood and parenting cultures to be interrogated in relation to new and enduring forms of inequity and changing state-family-capital relations. We suggest that this complicates existing conceptualisations of neoliberalisation while drawing attention to the need for further interrogation of the transnational nature of adult-child relations.

Abortion stigma, class and embodiment in neoliberal England

Research on abortion stigma has given insight into how women experience abortion, tell stories about abortion, and make decisions about abortion. Stigma encompasses a range of feelings, experiences and discourses that can make having an abortion a negative experience or one that women might wish to conceal. This paper explores how abortion stigma is both classed and embodied, using the life stories of 15 middle-class women who have had abortions in England in ‘neoliberal times’. It argues that the women’s class position gave them access to various discursive resources with which to articulate their abortion stories, shaping their experiences and narration of stigma. It also draws attention to the ways in which both class and stigma are ‘made through marking’ on the body, and thus to the under-theorised embodied aspects of abortion stigma. In doing so, it argues that abortion stigma acts as a regulatory ‘technology of the self’ that is enabled by middle-class practices of self-control.

Prophets, pastors and profiteering: exploring external providers’ enactment of pastoral power in school wellbeing programs

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the governance practices that external providers of school wellbeing programs employ in their contribution to the subjectification function of education. In neoliberal times where this ‘game’ of subjectification has become more open, governmentality scholars have been challenged to provide more robust insight into how discourses permeate individual subjectivities. In response, we draw on recent theorising of Foucault's pastoral power concept and a resulting analytic framework of four interlinked practices to explore external providers’ endeavours to ‘shepherd’ students, teachers and parents in the practices and responsibilities of personal wellbeing. Our data revealed that discourse tension and conflict emerges within school communities’ increasingly ‘messy’ pastoral terrain. In conclusion, we suggest that more empirical and theoretical insight into actors’ resistance and agency within the pastoral power landscape of schools offers a vital contribution to our understanding of external providers’ influence on education policy and enactment.

To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question: A Journey Through Performance Autoethnography

Across significant moments in my training in performative autoethnography in the United States, I share through performative writing my ideas, experiences, and reflections between the different moments of qualitative research, among which I am in a process of transition that stresses my biography, over cultures and paradigms. In this process, a feminine voice emerges with force silenced by data and traditions. The process makes visible doubts and contradictions of my own, mixed with subjective reflections on the self-construction of the professional identity of becoming a researcher in the academy. The importance of “raising the voice” in a globalized neoliberal context, characterized by capitalism in scientific production and the power that has an impact on research and methods is revealed. This highway traveled serves to stimulate reflection and debate among the academic community of qualitative researchers. Everyday practices are not insensitive to the people who make up academic institutions and spaces, nor do such practices have no impact on the lives of the researchers. I also write to annoy and disturb, to mobilize and question these practices and the relationships between researchers and research, confronting their inter-and-intra spaces with the neoliberal times that we live in the academy. This allows awareness and position with coherence and ethics before qualitative research as responsible social commitment and moral act.

Student voice research as a technology of reform in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT Calls for educators to promote student voice and agency in classrooms often overlook the importance of the policy milieu in which teaching and learning is performed. In this article we interrogate the constitution of student, teacher and researcher subjectivities within student voice research. Working with Stephen Ball’s neoliberal technologies of reform (technologies of the market and performativity (including technologies of the self); implemented through acculturation), we take up the notion that those of us working in education are complicit in the reforms we work to disrupt and conceptualise research as a technology of reform. We analyse performativity mechanisms at play in our student voice research that produced students, teachers and researchers as neoliberal policy subjects even whilst working toward the democratic intent of student voice. We contribute a heuristic with which scholars and educators can interrogate technologies of reform at work in their student voice work.

Growing socio-spatial inequality in neo-liberal times? Comparing Beijing and London

Growing socio-spatial inequality has become one of the topics that most excites social, economic and urban geographers most recently. Contrary to the general expectation, this paper finds a failure of this growth in inequality to be more applicable globally. Although escalated in London, socio-spatial inequality became less acute in Beijing over the same 2000–2010 period. This failure of replicability challenges our traditional understanding of the causes of the problem, as the two commonly accused shifts, one towards service economy and the other towards neoliberalism, are both evident in both cities. What makes the two cities different is the recent speed of change. The fast-developing Beijing has compressed de-agriculturalisation, de-industrialisation and tertiarisation into a just few decades, which were changes seen within London successively over many more decades. Beijing's current explosive urban expansion was seen by London around a century ago. Hence the link between growing socio-spatial inequality and the shifts towards service economy and neoliberalism is not universal but depends on a fully-industrialised, slow-changing urban condition. This is a condition that is not ubiquitous but is largely restricted to now economically slowing down Western societies. These results highlight not only how important is the speed of change in theorising socio-spatial inequality, but also how great is the potential of a wider set of urban comparisons in advancing a more global research agenda.

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism by Patricia A. Ybarra

Reviewed by: Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism by Patricia A. Ybarra Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. By Patricia A. Ybarra. Northwestern University Press, 2018. Cloth $99.95, Paper $34.95, eBook available. 247 pages. 8 Illustrations. Given the dearth of monographs dedicated to theatrical performances about and from a Latin American perspective, Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism by Patricia A. Ybarra is a welcome contribution to a significant but underexplored topic in theatre and performance studies scholarship. Through both outlines and close readings of plays and performances by playwrights with Latin American and Caribbean heritage from the early 1990s to the 2010s, Ybarra positions neoliberalism and the disgruntlements it breeds in the context of what she calls "Latinx Theater." Ybarra embraced the term "Latinx" before it became normalized; and although some ethnic studies scholars still find it hasty nomenclature, for Ybarra "Latinx" signals "a gender neutral cultural signifier" that enables her to be "truly inclusive of all genders of persons of Latin American cultural identity without resorting to a gender binary" (x). Indeed, the text eschews many normative narratives and concepts, instead opting to challenge long-established conventions and perspectives in favor of expanding new ways of knowing. Ybarra revisits more than twenty plays and productions, many of which have not always attained critical success, and some of which have received negative reviews. In this way the text offers a generous reading of these works, an endeavor consistent with a wholehearted commitment to the championing of dramatic works historically silenced by conquest and imperialism. Ybarra's theoretical approach is eclectic, drawing from a variety of fields in subaltern studies, thus expanding her work's accessibility to all interested in critical practices and the use of dramatic texts and performances as a method of sociopolitical analysis. By strategically selecting plays that push against "the conditions they are describing" (17) Ybarra provides an opportunity for readers to learn about dramatic works that are searching for new ways to stage "the destruction and denigration caused by savage capitalism" (ix). Organized into four loosely related foci, the four chapters explore indigeneity, the Cuban Special Period, femicide, and the narcoguerra (drug war) along the US Mexico border in the 1980s. Latinx Theater begins with a Preface, Critical Introduction, and first chapter dedicated primarily to an analysis of Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga's work, and favorably covers four of Moraga's plays, along with her pivotal "Queer Aztlan" essay. As the text shifts into the first chapter, "'Never Any Other Time but This Time No World but This World,' or Staging Indigeneity in Neoliberal Times," the book shifts to featuring scholars who have called for an undoing of "the colonial and imperial governmentalities and theoretical paradigms that have created racialized gendered, and sexed identities that separate people" (30). The chapter goes on to touch on the work of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, [End Page 155] along with that of Michael John Garcés, which convey, to one extent or another, "how memory, identity, and selfhood are experienced affectively in the midst of crisis and 'after' it" (71). In chapter 2, "Havana Is (Not) Waiting: Staging the Impasse in Cuban American Drama about Cuba's Special Period," Ybarra highlights "mobility as a mode of self-definition" (76) and traces this idea through the plays of Jorge Cortinas, Nilo Cruz, María Irene Fornés and Eduardo Machado, culminating in relating migrants' immobility not to "stillness," but to "ineffective motion" (93). Many of the plays in this chapter deal with the Cuban rafter crisis or literally take place—as in the case of Cruz's Bicycle Country—on rafts at sea, where motion is largely perpetual, inhibited, and untamable. Ybarra's analysis stresses the cruelty of neoliberalism's promise of the American Dream, which for many characters in the plays discussed comes only in sleep. Chapter 3, "Neoliberalism Is a Serial Killer," examines plays that challenge the seemingly unchecked femicide in Juarez, Mexico. Playwrights such as Victor Cazares, Coco Fusco, Marisela Trevino Orta, and Caridad Svich all provide Ybarra with an opportunity to juxtapose the use of nonrealistic representations of violence with testimonio or first-hand...

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War by Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War by Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham

The Production of Urban Space in Vientiane: From Colonial to Neoliberal Times (1893-2020)

Urban space in Vientiane has been produced and reproduced by different driving forces. Although this space has been examined extensively in academic literature, very few scholars have studied these production processes. The objective of this paper is therefore to: 1) investigate the history of the urban planning and development from the French colonial to the neoliberal periods; 2) analyze vision, policy and the major driving forces in the urban development; and 3) examine the main actors in the implementation of the urban development vision, including an analysis of who benefits from this process. The study uses qualitative and documentary research methodologies, to interview key informants. The result finds that the city has been restructured many times. The urban development vision has been adjusted to global development trends. Neoliberal policy has been applied as the major driving forces in urban development. Many urban projects use private investment and joint ventures between state and private enterprises, and between domestic and foreign companies. Property developers from China and Laos are the main actors in these projects. The projects cause some state agencies and communities are moved to resettle in the outskirts. The movement has both voluntary and involuntary patterns. Involuntary resettlement and its impact have been compensated by the private project developers. Beneficiaries from this process can be summarized as follows: 1) Direct beneficiaries include the state, capitalists and upper-class households; and 2) Local people, especially middle- and lower-classes have benefited indirectly from improved infrastructure services. However, private companies have monopolized their economic interests on public land based on frameworks of concession contracts.

“We're Playing Sisters, on Paper!”: children composing on graphic playgrounds

AbstractIn this paper, I draw on two childhood ethnographies to ask basic questions about the foundation of child writing. The first question is, where does writing come from in young children's lives? Answering this question will lead us to childhood play as the foundation of writing. The second question is, how do educators negotiate an inclusive, playful classroom culture in racially divisive and neoliberal times? This question will lead to a critical consideration of forming an inclusive culture in a racially and culturally diverse classroom. In this time of uniform, mandated curricula, rampant in the United States and elsewhere, and of the dismissive attitude towards play and towards childhood diversity (e.g., in race, culture and socioeconomic class), it is worth revisiting basic questions about the beginnings of writing in childhoods. The questions are relevant whether a child is writing on paper, screen, slate, or sand.

The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times

ABSTRACTThis article maps the many lives of the concept of fungibility in contemporary theories of both blackness and neoliberalism. Framed by the 2018 political chants across the US against ‘white supremacy’, the article unravels how neoliberalism obfuscates the singular vector of anti-blackness that grounds the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism. By tracing the concept of fungibility through the work of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and C. Riley Snorton, the article shows how fungibility works both ontologically and semiotically. The article then tracks fungibility through the neoliberal episteme, as derived from Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, to expose how the neoliberal episteme bastardizes the concepts of social difference into clever accoutrement, thereby eroding the capacity of neoliberal subjects to grasp the persistent ontology of anti-blackness. While the article does not track these dynamics strictly along the trajectories of bio/necropolitics, the foundational role of black death in the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism is precisely what the neoliberal episteme obfuscates; by approaching neoliberalism, through Foucault, as the birthing of biopolitics, we see how the division and tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics are racialized. Put more stridently, neoliberalism enables the biopolitical celebration of both life and diversity as values in and of themselves, without any concern for the histories of specific forms of life and specific forms of difference. In this vein, necropolitics calls out the foundational and persistent role of anti-blackness in the colonial ontology of liberalism that neoliberalism intensifies. This leads to the article’s concluding demand that white subjects must countenance fungibility in its ontological and semiotic iterations, speculating that we may be entering a historical moment when this might occur.

Advancing Universalism in Neoliberal Times? Basic Income, Workfare and the Politics of Conditionality

Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it applies a variegated understanding of neoliberalism to identify two distinct reform trajectories for family payments and unemployment benefits. While appearing to follow a common template of liberalization, in practice each trajectory fostered distinct social outcomes and political dynamics. I argue the more inclusive restructuring of family benefits reflected the influence of social movement pressure intersecting with an increasingly pro-competition and technocratic state, producing new, hybrid, patterns of universal social provision similar to forms of basic income. However, in reflecting on these political dynamics I highlight how the mobilization of universalism is contingent on existing welfare institutions, suggesting dangers in applying these lessons more broadly.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND NEOLIBERALISM

Neste artigo, nós refletimos sobre as possibilidade e responsabilidades da pedagogia crítica em relação ao neoliberalismo e a Educação Física. Ao explorar essas ideias, nós também discutimos os problemas da definição, bem como o colapso e confusão de termos como pedagogia crítica, pesquisa crítica e saúde crítica e Educação Física, bem como a problemática posição do neoliberalismo nos estudos críticos. Embora exista um crescente corpo de pesquisas que iluminam as nuanças e onipresença das políticas e práticas neoliberais em HPE – tanto em contextos globais e em contextos sociais específicos – nós argumentamos que ainda existe mais trabalho a ser feito para identificar como o trabalho pedagógico crítico pode dirigir-se (ou ao menos tentar) aos efeitos do neoliberalismo. Ao fim, continua a existir o perigo de que a pedagogia crítica em tempos neoliberais possa transmitir, em vez de contestar, os piores efeitos da escolarização neoliberal e do neoliberalismo em saúde e Educação Física.