Neoliberal World Research Articles

Relationships and Responsibilities

This commentary on Bryan Brayboy's 2011 Presidential address to the Council on Anthropology & Education focuses on the concepts and performance embedded in Dr. Brayboy's demonstration of “how his stories are his theories.” Central concepts are academic life in a neoliberal world driven by the myth of disinterested markets, CAE's clear mission of social justice, and the application of an indigenous notion of stewardship to guide our relationships and responsibilities to one another.

Tidemarks and Legacies: Building on the Past and Moving to the Future

In this address, I ask a number of questions including: What are the tidemarks of our time? In response, I make three points. First, we live in a neoliberal world driven by the myth of disinterested markets. Second, CAE and its leadership has always been interested in issues of social justice. Third, I argue that relationships are a vital part of the work of educational anthropologists.

Why Not a World City? Astana, Ankara, and Geopolitical Scripts in Urban Networks

The world cities literature typically examines how and why certain cities achieve world city status, but this article examines why some actors eschew the world city competition and choose not to engage the discourse, despite deploying the very same urban development tactics. Through a case study of Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital city, I argue that state- and nation-building concerns in the era of independence have prevailed over interests in engaging the free market and liberalist narratives that accompany the world cities discourse. Demonstrating how the Nazarbayev regime has largely modeled its Astana project on Atatürk's development of Ankara, I jointly examine geopolitical discourses that shape how the relationship between the two cities is narrated and interpreted by elite and ordinary citizens alike. Drawing on data from interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted in Kazakhstan from 2009–2011, I demonstrate how these identities support the Nazarbayev regime's state-dominated economic arrangements much more effectively than could a neoliberal world cities script. [Keywords: Kazakhstan, Turkey, capital city, world cities, comparative urbanism, geopolitics.] An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle, Washington. Thanks also to Bülent Batuman and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions for improving this paper. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1003836. This research was also supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, an NSF Nordic Research Opportunity grant, an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity Grant, and a U.S. State Department Title VIII Grant for work at the University of Illinois Summer Research Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, or any other granting organization.

Reconstructing Apartheid, Redefining Racism

This essay examines transcripts from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission alongside literary and cinematic representations of the hearings and reflects on the challenges of confronting institutionalized racism through contemporary human rights discourse and its attendant modes of life narratives. The first section analyses the oral testimony of Ms Nomatise Tsobileyo – who spoke before the TRC's Human Rights Violations Committee in 1996. The second section then considers excerpts from and traces of Ms Tsobileyo's testimony in Antjie Krog's internationally renowned memoir Country of My Skull, and in the film based on Krog's book, In My Country. I argue that when eliciting and responding to testimony, the TRC tended to separate out bodily violence inflicted by the apartheid police from the witness's account of dispossession caused by apartheid laws and practices. When internationally marketed literary and cinematic representations reframe TRC testimonies by emphasizing the horrors inflicted on black bodies on the one hand and the guilt experienced by white characters on the other, they contribute to the commodification of mourning by further isolating stories of spectacular violence from their basis in institutionalized racism. In My Country, in particular, illustrates how commodified life narratives circulating in a neoliberal world order privatize racism when they address it primarily in terms of bodily rights violations requiring the admission of white guilt and a process of interpersonal reconciliation. What is increasingly obscured through these successive attempts at reframing TRC testimony is the economic inequality created by systematic dispossession and impoverishment of the majority of South Africans, the effects of which outlive the formal end of apartheid rule.

Effects of labor precarization and unemployment on men and on gender equity.

The present article presents the results of a multidisciplinary research project undertaken with a gender perspective in Mexico and Argentina. The project studies those changes taking place in gender relations and in the life of the subjects that are due to transformations of the economic structure leading to a growing unemployment. The aim is to relate the profound changes taking place in the economy and within labor relations to the crisis of masculinity, showing some of its effects. The starting point for the research is the precarization of working conditions and unemployment that are typical of today’s globalized neoliberal world. Specialists from different fields of the two countries participated in the project. The qualitative methodology of the project included various research techniques, such as deep interviews and life histories. The men that were interviewed came from the middle and upper classes with a high level of education. The research presents certain results and conclusions that contribute to the reflection on the effects of structural transformations on the lives of men, families, and on gender relations, in terms of the problems, pathologies, and profound crisis created, but also on the possible positive changes that might take place.

Emancipating the Image: The Beijing Olympics, Regeneration, and the Power of Performance

“In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1971 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau gazes down upon New York City from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre and sees the island of Manhattan as an image. In particular, he witnesses the famous Manhattan skyline as a powerful ‘image-text’ containing a multiplicity of meanings, interpretations, and symbols. Considering the possibilities of the city as visual simulacrum he asks: “[i]s the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation; an optical artefact?” Twenty or so years after De Certeau wandered the streets of New York and pondered its pictorial power, such a perspective can be applied to Olympic and Post Olympic Beijing. The Olympic Games gave the world an opportunity to read Beijing’s powerful image-text following thirty years of rapid transformation. David Harvey argues that this transformation has turned Beijing from “a closed backwater, to an open centre of capitalist dynamism.” However, in the creation of this image-text, another subtler and altogether very different image-text has been deliberately erased from the public gaze. This more concealed image-text offers a significant counter narrative on the city’s public image and criticises the simulacrum constructed for the 2008 Olympics, both implicitly and explicitly. It is the ‘everyday’ image-text of a disappearing city still in the process of being bulldozed to make way for the neoliberal world’s next megalopolis. It exists most prominently as a filmic image text; in film documentaries about a ‘real’ hidden Beijing just below the surface of the government sponsored ‘optical artefact.’ Film has thus become a key medium through which to understand and preserve a physical city on the verge of erasure.

Dancing life into being: Genetics, resilience and the challenge of complexity theory

A variety of scholars in critical security studies have recently argued that new modes of neoliberal world order are influenced by the emergence of complexity theory in the sciences, which manifests itself, for example, in the discourse of resilience. By contrast, this article aims to point at the number of governmental discourses and practices in which ‘old’ understandings of order are persistent. What will be argued is that such a set of practices can be found in the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in which the dominant approaches and strategies still rely on an understanding of life that is bound to a more traditional episteme that expresses the desire for predictable management with clearly controllable effects. The article then moves on to discourses of resilience to show how they are equally characterized by this episteme. In unravelling the struggle that exists between ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemes, the article aims to elaborate on the potential of complexity discourses for challenging particular governmental rationales, manifested in both the resilience context and the GMO controversy.

Surviving and flourishing in a neoliberal world: primary trainees talking

This article examines the ways in which the context of teaching shapes teachers' perceptions of their work. Its starting point is the seminal work of Nias, who argued from research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s that the particular historical context of the time in England encouraged teachers to be socialised into a tradition of isolation, individualism and a belief in personal autonomy. Nias theorised her findings in terms of the situational and substantial self, and I suggest that this particular environment encouraged the teachers' substantial self to be dominant. I then examine how the context for teaching has changed with the introduction of neoliberal reforms from the 1980s and, drawing on data from a qualitative project that has been investigating the characteristics and values of a small number of successful teacher trainees, argue that these participants' situational self is dominant in the teaching placements, where they have to show competence in 33 professional standards in a number of different schools to pass the course. However, as Nias's teachers, these teacher trainees want to be employed in a school in which they ‘fit in’ with the prevailing values, reinforcing the importance of school context in supporting and developing teachers' long term commitment to the profession.

Toward the NGO-involved schooling: a study on teachers’ risk perceptions and teachings

This paper focuses on revealing the ambivalent situations in teachers’ risk perceptions and teachings. Three ambivalent situations are found. The first is that, although the teachers reported that collective-related risks are more important than personal-related risks, they are less active in gathering knowledge regarding collective-related risks. The second situation is that, although teachers try to supplement their teaching materials with more risk phenomena, this may just be in response to their occupational needs, rather than due to their moral reflexivity. The third ambivalent situation is that the competitive and individualized environment seems to limit the teachers’ risk teaching. Based on these findings and other research, the author states that NGO-involved schooling might be a significant strategy to face the challenge of world risks in the neoliberal world.

Challenging Global Neoliberalism? The global political economy of China's capital controls

This article engages with critical ipe scholars who have examined the rise of China and its impact on the neoliberal world order by analysing whether China poses a challenge to the neoliberal norm of free movement of capital. We argue that China's capital control regime is marked by a contradiction between its domestic social relations of production and its global geo-economic ambitions. On one hand, the key raison d'être of China's capital controls is to protect and consolidate an investment-led accumulation regime that redistributes income and wealth from Chinese workers to its state-owned enterprise sector. Dismantling these controls would result in changing social relations of production that would not necessarily benefit Chinese industrial and financial capital. On the other hand, China's accumulation regime has found itself increasingly constrained by the dynamics of US monetary hegemony, making the contestation of US structural monetary power a key global geo-economic ambition of China's ruling elites. In this regard, China would have to challenge the dominance of the US dollar by promoting the international role of the renminbi and developing liquid financial markets. Since it would have to abolish its capital controls in order to achieve this, there is a plain contradiction between its domestic and global objectives. A good understanding of this contradiction is necessary in order to be able to assess whether China will be capable of challenging the neoliberal world order in general and the norm of free movement of capital in particular.

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (review)

Bilinda Straight, Western Michigan UniversityDorothy Hodgson situates the topic of her book, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World at an intersection as important as it is intriguing: claiming indigenous identity in a postcolonial African state. Although Hodgson leaves this implicit, her book's title is a play on Thomas Spear and Richard Waller's (1993) Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa. Whereas those essays challenged their readers to consider what it meant to be Maasai in the globalizing late 20th century, Hodgson's book-part homage, part playful wink-offers up a reflection of how Maasai themselves have self-consciously repositioned their own identities over the past several decades. By what process do ethnic marginals create a politically and economically empowered space for themselves within states that affirm the self-evident indigenous status of all their African citizens? Based on her experiences with Maasai spanning a quarter of a century, Hodgson offers an astute and sensitive response to this question, ultimately portraying a movement whose predication of indigenousness somewhat successfully created transnational alliances-but failed at home.The book's introduction highlights the contradictions of postcoloniality for cultural marginals like the Maasai, and defines her theoretical and methodological approaches. In order to consider Maasai activitists' shifting strategies of self-representations in navigating diverse postcolonial arenas within and beyond states, Hodgson employs Stuart Hall's concept of positionings as elaborated for indigenous politics by Tania Li. From here she proceeds to tell several biographies-of Maasai activists, indigenous movements, and resource-building organizations.The ethnography of struggle at the core of Hodgson's book begins in Chapter 1 with the professional biography of Maasai activist Moringe Ole Parkipuny, who was the first Maasai to make the connection between transnational indigenous rights struggles and the marginalization of certain African groups-namely, pastoralists and foragers. Parkipuny's insight was the culmination of a trip he made to the United States in 1977, when he serendipitously met members of Navajo Nation and recognized their shared needs and agendas. The fact that all indigenous Tanzanians were, well, indigenous, might complicate the picture; nevertheless, like the Navajo, Tanzanian and Kenyan pastoralists and foragers were culturally distinct and politically marginalized within the nation-states that had forcibly encapsulated them. Initiating his activism before the era of Tanzanian civil society organizations, Parkipuny worked for ten years through government channels as a Minister of Parliament before working alongside, or rather, in open challenge to, the state. Parkipuny was a radical who assisted in making a place for Maasai as indigenous within the United Nations and founded one of the first NGOs in Tanzania.Nevertheless, Parkipuny's early successes were eventually weakened by a combination of timing-critiquing a Tanzanian state that viewed pastoralists and foragers as anachronistic to modernization, lack of civil society alternatives, and even his own success. Thus, Chapter 1 traces Parkipuny's activist biography and the tense, early biography of the process of negotiating a place for pastoralists and foragers within the international indigenous rights movement. Chapter 2, in turn, examines the successes and failures of indigenous rights at home, as younger activists bring alternative visions and civil society organizations proliferate. A number of these younger activists viewed Parkipuny's radicalism in strategically negative terms and instead sought more conciliatory methods to achieve their rights- and resource-based aims vis-a-vis the Tanzanian state. At each step of the way, whether in international or domestic arenas, differences between groups-based on racialized or ethnic identities, age, generation, gender, and agendas-undermined the indigenous rights movement. …

Teaching for Humanity in a Neoliberal World: Visions of Education in Serbia

In Serbia, teachers and policy makers express different and sometimes competing visions of education. Teachers express their desire to “awaken” students by using progressive pedagogies, while European Union and World Bank reformers appropriate progressive education in the service of neoliberal goals. The research findings presented here indicate that many teachers also seek to help students become what they call “complete humans,” not solely to “develop human capital” (a neoliberal goal). Teachers’ perspectives suggest the continuation of Slavic ideas of humanism and reflect a desire to maintain an identity distinct from others while achieving the modernity of Western Europe.

The Fog of Violence in Latin America: Structured Disorder in a Neoliberal World

The Fog of Violence in Latin America: Structured Disorder in a Neoliberal World

Doing and learning action research in the neo-liberal world of contemporary higher education

Understanding how action research can be practiced, taught, and learned in contemporary universities requires understanding the dominant structures that organize higher education in the 21st century. This article presents the neo-liberal and Taylorist structures affecting higher education and then places the practice and study of action research in this context to outline ways action research could contribute to an improved future for higher education.

“WE ARE THE PLANET”: INCIPIENT SOLIDARITIES IN RUSSELL BANKS'S CONTINENTAL DRIFT

This essay explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti. In bringing together these two narratives, Banks's novel insists that the story of the White, U.S. working class in an increasingly post‐industrial, globalized era is also a story of the hemispheric, migratory underclass, composed in large part by poor people of color. Following the fate of questing workers in an ultimately fruitless search for well‐being and wealth, Continental Drift stresses the urgency of class consciousness in a neoliberal world, even as it finally insists that the historic legacies and still ongoing dynamics of slavery, colonialism, and the geographically and culturally uneven dimensions of capitalist development make such consciousness in and of itself insufficient to establish a sense of solidarity among laboring peoples from disparate racial and national contexts.

School Choice: Shaping Personal, Family and Social Imaginaries in an Era of Neoliberalism

The paper provides a critique of ‘school choice’ research, which is particularly relevant for Australia where ‘choice’ of school is strongly advocated by government. The promotion of choice, along with policies of market competition in education, the commodification of schooling, and rigid accountability policies that require the publication of national, standardised test result, illustrates the extent to which neoliberal education policies have been adopted in Australia. The paper argues that more holistic research on school choice needs be centred on processes of choice-making within the powerful political context of neoliberalism and in relation to the aspirations and imagined futures of students, parents, teachers, schools and communities. Such research must also acknowledge and understand that, as key elements of the neoliberal world view (such as competition, choice and high stakes accountability) are normalised in the day-to-day practices of schooling, the norms and values that characterise not only our education system, but also our society and democracy, are also affected.

The seductions of technology

This article considers today's neo-liberal capitalism and its reliance on new digital technologies in commoditizing everything, including education. The rise in the use of digital technologies is one way that neo-liberal ideologies have entered the university, changing the relationships between faculty and students, and changing the way students learn. Some teaching technologies have proved to enhance students' learning experience, some, in my view, have not. But the ideology of the importance of new technologies in education seems to be here to stay, bringing the university increasingly into the neo-liberal world of the commoditization and marketization of everything.

Being Maasai, becoming indigenous: postcolonial politics in a neoliberal world

Preface List of Key Organizations and Documents Introduction: Positionings--The Cultural Politics of Representation, Recognition, Resources, and Rights 1. Becoming Indigenous in Africa 2. Maasai NGOs, the Tanzanian State, and the Politics of Indigeneity 3. Precarious Alliances 4. Repositionings: From Indigenous Rights to Pastoralist Livelihoods 5. If We Had Our Cows: Community Perspectives on the Challenge of Change Conclusion: What Do You Want? Notes Bibliography Index

Governing Biosecurity in a Neoliberal World: Comparative Perspectives from Australia and the United Kingdom

International trade poses a serious and growing threat to biosecurity through the introduction of invasive pests and disease: these have adverse impacts on plant and animal health and public goods such as biodiversity, as well as food production capacity. While international governmental bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognise such threats, and permit governments to protect human, animal, and plant life or health, such measures must not be applied in a way that is restrictive to trade. This raises a fundamental (but little-examined) tension between effective biosecurity governance and the neoliberal priorities of international trade. In this paper we examine how such tensions play out in the different political and geographical contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom. A comparative approach enables close scrutiny of how trade liberalisation and biosecurity are coconstituted as compatible objectives as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in making these domains a single governable problem. The comparative analysis draws attention to the policy challenges facing Australia and the UK in governing national biosecurity in a neoliberal world. These challenges reveal a complex geopolitics in the ways in which biosecurity is practised, institutionalised, and debated in each country, with implications for which pests and diseases are defined as threats and, therefore, which commodities are permitted to move across national borders. Despite efforts by the WTO to govern biosecurity as a technical matter of risk assessment and management, and to harmonise national practices, we contend that actual biosecurity practices continue to diverge between states depending on perceptions of risk and hazard, both to agricultural production and to rural environments as a whole, as well as unresolved tensions between internationalised neoliberalism and domestic concerns.

Democracy and People Power in Africa: still searching for the ‘political kingdom’

1This article analyses current trends in the struggle for democracy in Africa, including the role of social movements. Such movements found early expression in the anti-colonial movement, while recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are reminiscent of the second liberation struggles of two decades earlier. The article undertakes a critical evaluation of emerging democratic forces in Africa, arguing that such a review is vital to the analysis of the trends in the struggles for people power, and explores strategies for avoiding the pitfalls that undermined earlier waves of democratisation in the continent, particularly that of the 1990s when initial euphoria led to uncritical acceptance of movements that were later found to be opportunistic and undemocratic. The article concludes by examining the conditions under which an ‘emanicipatory’ African national democratic project—defined by an increase in people's participation in authoritative resource allocation—can be initiated and sustained in the face of a deepening crisis of the current neoliberal world order.