Neoliberal Politics Research Articles

Countermovements: Rural Social Imaginaries Confronting Neoliberal Economics and Politics in Southern Poland

During the postsocialist economic transformation, liberal economic and political ideas encountered different pre-existing ontologies of power, work and economics in Poland, which were particularly prevalent in rural mountain regions in the south. This different world-making is the basis for a Polanyian countermovement against marketisation. However, the incompatibility of alternative ontologies does not prevent villagers from achieving economic success. These inherited ontologies are stabilising the uncertainties stemming from economic and political liberalisation through family ties and appraisal tools based on the values of rural culture.

Walls, Cracks and Change: The Challenges and Opportunities of Critically Engaged Research Within Current Academic and Refugee Research Structures

Many consider academic research an important means to address societal inequality of marginalized groups, such as refugees. However, transformative research arguably requires critically engaged practices that consider and transform dominant exclusive structures permeating both society and knowledge production. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of such research practices, especially given power and (neoliberal) politics around knowledge production within Dutch academic and refugee research structures. Based on 14 researchers’ narratives, the results reveal how critically engaged refugee research is challenged by its marginalized position, academic pressures and culture as well as the recently emerged ‘refugee research business’. However, the paper also uncovers various ways in which researchers manoeuvre within challenging and facilitating structures by operating outside or in the margins of academic structures, making use of facilitating spaces and strategically employing dominant discourses. Finally, researchers arguably transform academic structures by challenging dominant research paradigms and transforming the institution of academics itself.

Performing goodness in qualitative research methods

This essay addresses the use of diversity as a proxy for goodness in qualitative research. I argue that this presumption of goodness, operating through claims regarding participant group diversity, operates as a technology of neoliberal identity politics. Through framing diversity as a proxy for goodness, such research is performed as politically transformative, yet fails to maneuver research closer to revolution. Situated in a critical genealogy, I disrupt this use of diversity in qualitative research by considering the ways diversity works and is put in motion as containment, protection, and priority. In these ways, diversity is treated as fungible with liberation, has material effects, and reflects power over minoritized communities. These ramifications are further explored while providing 10 approaches that center equity and justice in qualitative research methods.

Neoliberal precarity and primalization: A biosocial perspective on the age of insecurity, injustice, and unreason.

In light of the observed rise in social instability and populist politics that has emerged recently even in some of the world's oldest and presumed stable democracies, this paper reappraises the role of the neoliberal political and economic consensus in fermenting popular discontent. While this is very well trodden ground the paper approaches the issues from a wholly new direction, specifically addressing how exposure to the destabilizing conditions of the present can be seen to have negatively impacted on the neurological functioning of many of the disenchanted and distressed of the current era, generating chronic negative emotional arousal and an associated impact on the capacity for rational thought and conduct. This condition of mental and emotional fugue, it is argued, has also rendered growing numbers more susceptible to marginal and radicalizing discourses, largely extended and amplified via social media, and not least the emotionally charged overtures of populist politicians. Against a backdrop of increasing insecurity, transformative changes to work and living conditions precipitated by neoliberal policy and the digital revolution, together with the epochal crisis presented by the global pandemic, it is argued that the task of understanding the deep and fundamental causes of social and political fracture have rarely been more urgent.

A Lesson in Class: the working-class experience of Anthropology

This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology. More specifically, it discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists (students, researchers and teachers) negotiate tensions found within the British university. It is concerned with the current climate of ‘diversity’ in education, and the role that socio-economic inequity plays in these discussions. This paper seeks to make room for class; it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I would call ‘cursory diversity’ - what Sara Ahmed refers to as a ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200). It is argued that anthropology as a discipline must start attending to the ways that financial precarity and social class impact the subjects that study, not just the subjects of study, by reflecting on the venacularity of the academy and the discipline itself. It achieves this through exploring the vernacularity of the working-class anthropologists’ experiences in relation to the prism of ‘diversity’; how class refracts to produce multiple forms of experience, of assimilation, and of exclusion - as well as resistance to such enclosure.

The Rise of Neo-Abolitionism in Europe: Exploring the role of the Neoliberalism–Vulnerability–Security Nexus in the Prostitution Policies of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Ireland

Abstract This article explains the rise of neo-abolitionism in Europe with reference to the intersection that it enables between the gender and sexual politics of neoliberalism, vulnerability, and security. Analyzing the recent adoption of neo-abolitionist prostitution policies in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Ireland, it contends that neo-abolitionism offers a suitable response to the needs that globalized neoliberalism creates for European states, allowing them to extend their control, disguise their moral agenda, and reproduce their material and normative foundations, guaranteeing the reproduction of the population and accumulation of wealth while reasserting their sovereignty and political identity as progressive in gender and sexual terms.

A new rural in the city: A no-middlemen markets’ ethnography

This article presents an ethnography of the no-middlemen markets in Athens, where producers from all over Greece sell foodstuffs directly to consumers. No-middlemen markets offer an interesting lens through which to view the political foodways created in Athens, reflecting a wider changing landscape of shifting responsibilities for better food futures. I draw from theories on moral economy and reflect on the body of literature on alternative food networks and civic food networks. I argue that in Athens-in-crisis, citizen-producers and citizen-consumers step in and renegotiate the dynamics and power relations between civil society, the market and the State. By doing so they rebalance the dependence of the Greek agriculture from the State and EU protectionism, as well as from the food industry's oligopoly of middlemen, moving towards a more economically sustainable model. They also work towards reconnecting rural and urban foodways and reconstructing social relations around food. As such, they reshape and protect the identities for urban and rural populations alike, provide a contrast to the abstractions of neoliberal politics, resilience to the crisis and ultimately protect the foundation of the Greek society. To this end, this article offers a useful lens through which to explore the diverse ways responsibility is enacted and the social food politics at times of crisis, leading to a better understanding of the complexities and processes of resistance to the crisis by urban and rural people.

The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting: The Gujarat Development Model and the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom

ABSTRACT In 2002, barbaric communal violence broke out all over the western state of Gujarat in India. Over 2000 Muslims were killed and more than 96,000 displaced through violent attacks by Hindus in retaliation for the burning of a train carrying 59 Hindu pilgrims. After 2002, the Gujarat government implemented the Gujarat Development Model (GDM), an economic development model based on neoliberal politics and late-capitalistic policies. Using a rhetorical lens, I argue that the GDM performs memory work to forget the minority Muslim identity after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. GDM is a rhetorical move that uses sectarian-neutral language circulated via newspapers to perform a simultaneous forgetting of the pogrom and the atrocities against the Muslims but remembering the moment of Godhra valorizing the majoritarian Hindu identity.

‘We’re Just the Gravel on the Road.’ The Dissenting Music of Tom Waits

ABSTRACT This article proposes a historicisation of the songs of Tom Waits in the context of the social transformation of the United States in the era of neoliberalism. Through an analysis of music and lyrics – form and content, the article explores questions of poverty, materialism, social injustice, and other issues referable to the impact of neoliberal politics on everyday America. Those issues are particularly evident in the songs composed by the singer-songwriter with his wife and artistic partner, Kathleen Brennan, since the mid-1980s. Using a Rortyan framework, this study finds a place for the music of Tom Waits in the American protest song, arguing that it mirrors the fall of American society into extreme individualism and materialism, while celebrating the solidarity and human warmth of a utopian social hope.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Economic and ecological rationalities: uses and abuses of the political exceptionality in the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction. This article discusses some anthropological and sociological slight reflections about the uses and the abuses of the political exceptionality in the Covid-19 pandemic. The relevance is connected with questions about the "New Norm", permeated with the daily destructiveness of antisocial metabolic practices of an even more predatory capitalism, whose social control cannot regulate violent neoliberal extraction in a mode of accumulation.
 Aim and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study the gradual resumption of interrupted social activities as a policy measure to combat the New Coronavirus Pandemic is placed from the perspective of its economic and ecologic rationalities as well as from the perspective of the new moral, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral demands directed to the common social actor and agent of big and small cities.
 Results. The article substantiates the context of the so-called "new norm", permeated by the daily destructiveness of antisocial metabolic practices of even more predatory capitalism in a violent neoliberal form. Therefore, due to this discrepancy between legality and legitimacy, the level of authoritarianism and further growth of inequality and indifference among people increases. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a mismatch between legality and legitimacy, as well as the legitimization of the interests of individual actors in the market as opposed to the adoption of legislation and for pro-capital interests. The principles of legitimacy were limited by bureaucratic rationality and the genocidal legalism of neoliberal politics.
 Conclusions. The pandemic has disrupted economies, has mainly punished the poorest and most underserved and has destabilized governments of various ideological nuances. Participants at all levels of the economy will suffer the most severe and immediate consequences of all losses. This is the controversial logic of capital and one of its main contradictions is revealed.

Science needs more external evaluation, not less

When science is evaluated by bureaucrats and administrators, it is usually done by quantified performance metrics, for the purpose of economic productivity. Olof Hallonsten criticizes both the means (quantification) and purpose (economization) of such external evaluation. I share the concern that such neoliberal performance metrics are shallow, over-simplified and inaccurate, but differ in how best to oppose this reductionism. Hallonsten proposes to replace quantitative performance metrics with qualitative in-depth evaluation of science, which would keep evaluation internal to scientific communities. I argue that such qualitative internal evaluation will not be enough to challenge current external evaluation since it does little to counteract neoliberal politics, and fails to provide the accountability that science owes the public. To assure that the many worthy purposes of science (i.e. truth, democracy, well-being, justice) are valued and pursued, I argue science needs more and more diverse external evaluation. The diversification of science evaluation can go in many directions: towards both quantified performance metrics and qualitative internal assessments and beyond economic productivity to value science’s broader societal contributions. In addition to administrators and public servants, science evaluators must also include diverse counterpublics of scientists: civil society, journalists, interested lay public and scientists themselves. More diverse external evaluation is perhaps no more accurate than neoliberal quantified metrics, but by valuing the myriad contributions of science and the diversity of its producers and users, it is hopefully less partial and perhaps more just.

Social justice and action research: can we collaboratively create a new social movement with social justice at the centre?

ABSTRACT Ideas about social justice are influenced by the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the worldview in which they are located. Since the seventeenth century, the dominant worldview in the western hemisphere has been shaped by the separatist and deterministic principles of classical Newtonian science. During the twentieth century, with the advent of quantum physics, these principles have been contested from within science itself, indicating that the universe may instead be inter-relational, entangled and participatory. A historical investigation demonstrates how, despite findings from modern science, the Newtonian worldview has become deeply embedded in the western psyche, including in neoliberal politics, education, and educational research. As a counter-narrative, an alternative worldview is proposed, which is grounded in the ontological assumption of a participatory consciousness, with implications for ethics and social justice. Supporting a call for the creation of a new story which negates the prevailing neoliberal narrative, I look at ways in which advocates of social justice can, using an integration of first, second and third person approaches to action research, collaboratively initiate a new social movement, with intellectual depth, and with social justice at its centre.

African women, ICT and neoliberal politics, by Assata Zerai: A review by Elisabeth Dubois

African women, ICT and neoliberal politics, by Assata Zerai: A review by Elisabeth Dubois

“Is gentrification a municipal crime?”: Reflections and strategies on “Urban Activism: Staking Claims in the 21st Century City"

In this photographic ethnography, Dominic T. Moulden reflects upon his own organizing experiences with ONE D.C. in Washington D.C.- the capital of empire. He shows homes that have been evicted and scenes of gentrification, while offering the framework that “gentrification is a crime,” an analytic that would benefit scholar activists and community organizers to further explore. Moulden also proposes organizing strategies to address the issues of poor, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and all working-class people’s claim to a right to the city, particularly in Covid-19 contexts. Research and organizing must be brave enough to create zones of contestation and liberation, including ‘No Displacement Zones’ to contest the neoliberal politics and zones of gentrification.

Neoliberalism of disaster and long-term recovery: The case of the 2010 earthquake in Talcahuano, Chile

In this article, it was analyzed the long-term disaster recovery after the earthquake and tsunami that affected Talcahuano, Chile in February 2010. Under the assumption that disaster governance is neither politically nor discursively neuter, the aim of this article is to describe the long-term recovery process of Talcahuano, where urban planning was adjusted to the political neoliberal frame. We used a unique-case study. There were considered 7 maps that show longitudinally the changes in Talcahuano's city design. There are maps about tsunami risk zones and landslide risk zones. Additionally, there were used 25 interviews to complement the recovery process. The results show that Talcahuano experienced post disaster changes in urban planning in line with neoliberal politics. The changes can be seen in the enlargement of commercial and residential zones. In some cases, the new building zones overlap in potentially risky zones of coastline and hills. The conclusions of the study show there is a recovery in terms of rebuilding and the organization of its local governance in emergency responses. Nevertheless, it was not able to avoid the general frame given by neoliberal regime. For more than a decade, the post-disaster recovery process favors the market growth and partially omit the local community participation in decision-making about the city design. The study case about 2010 earthquake in Talcahuano, Chile, contributes to observe long-term recovery as complex processes where the political regime aspects should be included in the analysis.

Towards a theory of neoliberal constitutionalism: Addressing Chile’s first constitution-making laboratory

AbstractBefore neoliberalism became global, it was an intellectual project that had a particular view of the power of constitutions to limit sovereign states, anchor economic freedoms and protect markets from democratic pressures for greater equality. In Latin America and the developing world, neoliberalism has long been identified with the political economy of the Washington Consensus. However, the comprehensive study of its legal foundations and institutional arrangements is still an area of limited scholarly attention. This article attempts to advance in that direction. By examining the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan, it explores a theory of neoliberal constitutionalism within Chile, the so-called first neoliberal laboratory. These authors visited the country during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), and were connected with top Chilean authorities as part of their global ambitions to implement their theoretical agendas in real-world scenarios. The article argues that Chile’s constitution-making process between 1973 and 1980 offered an on-site experiment in introducing neoliberal’s radical economic transformation. It addresses how the dictatorship’s natural law-based rule of law principles were compatible with the neoliberal constitutional ideology by supporting a distinctive view of the state’s role and designing the innovative institutional arrangements necessary to guarantee the market’s priority in the structural and rights dimension of the 1980 Constitution. In the wake of Chile’s recent constitutional change agenda, this article not only contributes to the existing debate by reflecting on the ideological origins of the still-persistent constitutional neoliberal features, but also works as a case study for evaluating new global turns towards authoritarian neoliberal politics.

Queer science: Temporality and futurity for queer students in STEM

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science’s interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants’ current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists.

Role of economic development cooperatives in improving the livelihoods of women in Gauteng, South Africa

ABSTRACT It is widely acknowledged that the limitations of neoliberal politics and economic globalisation have contributed to feminisation of poverty in Global South countries. The implementation of cooperatives has played a visible role in localising the economy and addressing poverty amongst women. This paper attempts to advance empirical evidence in the field of social development and feminisation of poverty. Using qualitative methodology, I present evidence from eight women who were involved in a sewing cooperative in the province of Gauteng, South Africa. Underscored by the sustainable livelihood approach, this article presents three interconnected themes: human capital development, building social capital and striving for economic capital. Ultimately this cooperative project presents a positive social development strategy that community development practitioners can embrace to assist women to work towards sustainability of their livelihood activities in the informal economy.

Impeachment, lawfare y fake news en Brasil. Un espejo latinoamericano

El propósito de este artículo es analizar en el caso de Brasil los mecanismos de poder del impeachment, el lawfare y las fake news, mecanismos que han sido también determinantes en otros procesos electorales recientes. Ello nos permite reflexionar sobre el actual escenario político latinoamericano, caracterizado por una mayoría de gobiernos de derecha liberal —conservadora o populista— identificados con políticas neoliberales.