Neoliberal Governance Research Articles

Realigning practices of care and environmental governance: findings and reflections from a transdisciplinary research project in Wales (UK)

This article presents This article presents findings from a transdisciplinary research project on collaborative practices for the sustainable management of natural resources (SMNR) in Wales. Here, the legislation establishes that the national well-being agenda and the principle of SMNR in environmental governance must be achieved through collaborative and participatory practices, across sectors and organisations, including within the public sector. However, neoliberal and hyper-bureaucratic governance structures, characterized by a risk-adverse nature, do not allow public sector institutional actors to experiment and engage with such practices in their everyday work. This article discusses a collective experience of reflecting on, and challenging such oppressing neoliberal structures, through experimenting with alternative ways of doing and being together. The emerging community at the heart of this experience is composed of policymakers, practitioners, artists, and academics (including the authors), who together carved out a 'site of negotiation' to contest techno-managerialism and mere rational approaches to (natural resources) governance. In the course of this research, these actors began to collectively create and shape new and shared meanings of doing collaborative and cross-boundary work (as required by the Welsh legislation), based on relationships of trust, reflexivity, embodiment, and relationality. Reflecting also on our own experience (and interpretation) of working alongside them, we believe that such emergent processes of collective meaning-making have the potential to transform neoliberal (environmental) governance structures into 'lived' and 'owned' institutions. Inspired by relational, integrative and caring forms of democratic governance, we argue that professionals in public sector organisations can realign governance structures in ways that meet the challenge of enabling the rapid and wide sustainability transformations that are so desperately needed.

Communities at Risk for Mobilization: Neoliberal Governance and the (un)Contentious Politics of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Rural Illinois

An abundant literature has developed to examine the conditions under which contentious opposition emerges to oil pipeline development. In this article, we compare the process to site and permit two pipelines in Illinois – Enbridge's Southern Access Extension Pipeline (SAX) and Dakota Access' Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Landowners mobilized against SAX but not DAPL despite demonstrable opposition to both projects. Moreover, DAPL generated organized resistance from landowners in neighboring Iowa. We thus seek to explain non-mobilization in a community otherwise at risk for mobilization. Drawing on in-depth empirical data, we argue that the lack of visible resistance to DAPL in Illinois is a consequence of the neoliberalized regulatory landscape in which landowners are embedded. Unless able to demonstrate that pipeline projects generate specific economic grievances – which was possible for SAX but not DAPL – landowners perceive themselves as having no capacity to resist. An inability to leverage economic grievances or noneconomic attachments as grounds for opposition forces acquiescence to energy development. Ultimately, this case seeks to assess how state-level regulatory dynamics help enable or constrain social mobilization. Our research contributes to scholarship examining the impact of fossil fuel infrastructure expansion on rural communities and raises important questions about the capacity of such communities to navigate energy (infrastructure) development in the ongoing energy transition.

Exploring everyday resilience in the creative industries through devised theatre: A case of performing arts students and recent graduates in Ghana

The concept of resilience has become widely used to account for how people respond both to acute crisis and, increasingly, to protracted precarity. Yet, cultural studies theorists have also vigorously critiqued resilience discourse as a tool of neoliberal governmentality. In this article, we turn from the discourse of resilience to the practice of resilience. We argue, through a case of theatre students and recent graduates in Ghana, that the practice of resilience can be both individual and collective. Moreover, we show that resilience practices involve the exercise of agency at various scales through the specific practices of coping, reworking, and resisting. Finally, we show the merits of using artistic research methods, such as devised theatre, to unveil the complex ways that creatives practice resilience in the everyday.

Accepting Depoliticisation? Council Members’ Attitudes Towards Public-Public Contracts in Spatial Planning

This paper focuses on how local council members consider public-public contractual spatial planning practices. Our approach addresses concerns over the depoliticisation of planning processes within a neoliberal governmentality. Our findings from three Nordic countries show that some of the council members accept being sidelined from contractual processes. Local council members may thus become complicit political subjects who foster depoliticisation through their own actions. We argue that council members’ interpretations concerning contractual practices give direction, not only to future planning practice, but also to societal understanding of the idea of the political in spatial planning.

Histories of Radical Interactionality: Rivers, Disease, Borders, and Laundry

ABSTRACT The Spanish flu’s efficacy of spreading across El Paso was in part due to neoliberal governments and racially prejudiced free-market economies exploiting a natural ecosystem to marginalize a Latinx community. This study identifies the tragic consequences these actions brought about for an entire city of both marginalized and privileged. This work argues for a new paradigm of rhetorical agency that accounts for interactions between rhetorical ecologies happening over time. This work demonstrates this paradigm through government policies, newspaper articles, press releases, and ecological surveys of El Paso, Texas, beginning with the early nineteenth century through the first years of the Spanish flu (1918–20). Through the lens of rhetorical methods concerning agency distribution and radical interactionality, we see how one neighborhood played a vital role in the epidemic’s spread throughout the city.

Teacher professionalism: Chinese teachers' perspectives

PurposeThis study aimed to investigate associations between the organisational and cultural contexts in which Chinese teachers work, the influence of these on their understandings of professionalism, and relationships between these and their perceived willingness and commitment to be effective in teaching to their best.Design/methodology/approachThe research was part of a two-country collaboration between the universities of Beijing and Sydney into Australian and Chinese teachers' perceptions of influences on their professionalism in which research protocols were jointly developed and implemented. This paper focusses mainly upon the Chinese research but also refers to key differences between Australian and Chinese teachers' perspectives. Seventeen teachers in early, middle and later career phases were recruited from a convenience sample of primary and secondary schools in Beijing. Qualitative data analyses of individual interviews, and cross case comparative analyses were conducted.FindingsThe analyses of the data from Beijing indicated that almost all teachers emphasised their strong moral purposes and commitment to teach to their best, despite identifying the challenges of workload, school contexts and cultures and personal circumstances, which tested their resolve. In contrast, concerns about teacher autonomy and agency, which were common in the Australian study and other published research literature, were not highly visible in the Chinese data.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors acknowledge that this study was small scale and data were collected from a narrow sample from one urban region of China, and we should be cautious with the generalisability of findings to other regions and schools of China since there are significant discrepancies between developed coastal areas and large cities and the remote rural areas in China. Furthermore, interview data were only collected once, restricting insight to a snapshot in time. This research may be seen as an encouragement to researchers from other regions and countries to further explore the impact of socially situated understandings of teacher professionalism on practice. Future research could also benefit from utilising multiple data sources, longitudinal design and cross-cultural collaborations to further explore the challenge of defining teachers' understandings of professionalism locally while engaging with global perspectives.Practical implicationsThe practical implications relate to (1) expanding conceptualisations of teacher professionalism by developing locally nuanced understandings of perceptions and enactments of professionalism in different contexts across the profession, which take account of the unique roles of national and local cultural contexts; (2) designing initial teacher education and continuing professional development programmes so that they take account of the influences on the professions' ideals and individual teacher identities, of the ideological and practical interplay in the workplace of structures such as mandated standards, and different socio-economic geographical settings (e.g. rural and urban); (3) designing leadership development programmes that take account of research on associations between school leaders' values, qualities and practices on school cultures and their effects on teachers' well-being, and capacities and capabilities to fulfil their understandings of being professionals and teach to their best.Social implicationsThe social implications relate to (1) further research on the associations between the effects of external policy demands on teachers' work and work–life tensions, teachers' sustained commitment and quality; and (2) further research on the impact of the collective influences of national cultures, broad-based policy conditions, personal values and the demands of particular schools, parents and students that influence teachers' experience, perceptions and enactments of professionalism in order to provide further insights into understanding the complexity of teachers' lives and promoting teachers' sustained enactments of professionalism in broad contexts.Originality/valueThe research findings, though tentative, revealed that the altruistic nature of their mission to serve students and the parental community was the dominant marker of professionalism for teachers in China, regardless of school structures, cultures, academic achievement imperatives and personal circumstance; and that their professionalism was informed by the socio-cultural formation of individual and collective moral responsibility, reinforced through national educational policies. These findings differed from the concerns reported by the teachers in the Australian study, which aligned with literature that suggests that teacher professionalism is being eroded through neo-liberal government policies, excessive workloads and performance-oriented cultures. Though the comparative data set is small, these findings suggest that whilst there are increasing policy convergences across nations, which seek to define teacher professionalism through their abilities to make improvements in students' measurable academic achievement, how teachers in different countries and cultures define themselves as professionals may differ.

Why Following the Rules Will Not Stop Them:

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of several knowledge traditions within academic clusters inspired by and engaged in productive dialogue with transnational social movements such as feminist, queer, trans* and Crip studies, critical race theory, indigenous studies, and degrowth scholarship (Choudry & Kappor 2010; Bhattacharyya & Murji 2013; Carruthers 2018; Salisbury & Connelly 2021). Despite significant theoretical and methodological differences, these traditions share a recognition of the fundamental role played by social actors outside academia in the struggle for social justice in academic knowledge production. Recent decades have also witnessed the emergence of ethnonationalist and anti-gender social movements, networks, and political parties attacking these academic traditions and focusing on the university as a fundamental arena for generating and reproducing their ideologies of hate (Perry 2009). These attacks target academic fields and individual scholars sharing a commitment to social justice issues (Floyd 2009) and an understanding of knowledge production inside academia as contributing to visions of social justice beyond academia (Young 2000). Central to these threats against scholars working within social justice paradigms is the argument that their scholarly production is “political” and hence unscientific. In this article, we explore the politics of knowledge claims among key anti-gender and right-wing actors within and related to academic institutions in Sweden. Inspired by the concepts of neoliberal depoliticising and neoliberal governance, we analyse arguments and strategies from 2015 to 2021 designed to undermine gender studies and to create and establish arenas for right-wing ethnonationalist knowledge production within the academia.

Performative enactments of pedagogy in the classroom: strategies and tactics of relationality

ABSTRACT Within neoliberal regimes of educational performativity, expectations of teachers’ work have become increasingly prescriptive, standardised and formulaic. To counter the reductive effects of this ‘exteriority’ of influence over teachers' work, we draw on three conceptual prompts—relational pedagogy, informality, and de Certeau’s theorisation of strategies and tactics—to examine empirical accounts of teachers who challenge the normative expectations of their work. We contend that teachers who seek to work beyond the restrictions of neoliberal educational managerialism engage in deliberate acts of tactical intervention, which involve the deployment of relational and informal modes of engagement with students and other educators. In doing so, teachers can more fully assert their professionalism and nurture important relational bonds with students in ways that respond to the contingent nature of classrooms in rich and contextually meaningful ways.

Roadmaps to post-communist neoliberalism: the case of the Baltic states

ABSTRACT This article uncovers the pre-1991 origins of Baltic neoliberal regimes. It highlights the role of the communication networks between reformist economists in the Baltic National Fronts and social forces advocating neoliberalism in Scandinavia and the United States. We assert that those networks functioned as the early carriers of ideational and policy change, even if reform contents were authored by domestic rather than transnational agencies. Firstly, the article previews the structural factors conducive to network formation. Secondly, it examines the networks by highlighting cross-national differences. Finally, it chronicles the idiosyncratic paths of neoliberal reformers’ ascendance to the positions of influence.

Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era by Marianna Ritchey

Reviewed by: Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era by Marianna Ritchey Dale Chapman Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. By Marianna Ritchey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. [v, 213 p. ISBN 9780226640068 (hardback), $90; ISBN 9780226640235 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780226640372 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, index. When I heard that the composer Mason Bates was going to register one of his operas as a nonfungible token (NFT), the story struck me as an archetypal embodiment of the times, on two interrelated fronts: The phenomenon of the NFT (in which blockchain technology is used to exchange unreplicable iterations of digital media) has been invoked as the potential savior of music's financial valuation, allowing undercompensated artists in the era of streaming to achieve the market scarcity specific to the contemporary art world. Meanwhile, Bates, in embracing the technological fetishism of Silicon Valley and the electronic dance music (EDM) world, has been received by classical music institutions as the potential savior of a Western tradition whose obituary is republished on a near-weekly basis (Felix Linsmeier, "Ethereum Voices: Do NFTs Matter for Classical Music?" VAN: An Independent Online Classical Music Magazine, posted 13 January 2022, https://van-magazine.com/mag/nft-classical-music [accessed 26 February 2022]). The story of the Bates NFT entails a narrative of messianic rebirth specific to neoliberal discourse: that a new financial instrument might be the vehicle through which this or that moribund cultural practice or industrial sector becomes unshackled from the earth and permitted to fully become itself. A less rose-tinted critical perspective on the NFT, however, might see it as falling somewhere between a quixotic boondoggle and an alarming multiplier of wealth concentration; similarly, a more skeptical critical perspective on Mason Bates himself might wonder what his ideology of techno-market credulity might be doing to our understanding of a classical music legacy that listeners sometimes see precisely as a refuge from Karl Marx's idea of capitalism's ethos of "creative destruction." The kinds of questions raised by the Mason Bates NFT require the development of a new(er) musicology, a field of critical practice adequate to the demands placed upon it by a formidable set of ideological and political-economic formations. Few scholars in contemporary musicology are as well [End Page 417] placed to achieve this daunting task as Marianna Ritchey, whose new book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era, is the culmination of her exciting research on the ways that the longstanding cultural practices of Western classical music have collided with the emergence of the neoliberal regime of flexible accumulation. Ritchey is part of a dynamic cohort of scholars, including Andrea Moore, William Robin, John Pippen, and others, who are interested in the ways that late capitalism has shaped classical institutions, reframed its prevailing ideological assumptions, and variously established or undermined the conditions of possibility for working musicians. One important function of Composing Capital is to register a strategic impatience with contemporary musicology's frequent bracketing of class and political economic analysis, particularly in the context of the New Musicology's otherwise vital critique of gender, race, and sexuality. Outside of musicology, this perspective is by no means new. We might locate it, for instance, in work by Terry Eagleton extending back to the 1990s, or in Thomas Frank's work from the same era, which highlights the utility, for capitalism, of an approach to cultural studies that, in setting aside materialist analysis, permits its subversive rhetorics to be co-opted by capital (see, for instance, Terry Eagleton, "Body Work," in The Terry Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen Regan [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998], 157–62, and Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy [New York: Anchor Books, 2001]). For this reason, Ritchey's incisive puncturing of musicology's treatment of cultural difference as an isolated vector of analysis—one too often shorn of its connection with political economy—is important and comes not a moment too soon. To be sure, the point can never be to ignore the way that patriarchal, White supremacist, and heteronormative ideologies and practices enact structural violence; rather, it becomes...

Work–faith integration in the neoliberal age: Women professionals’ alignment of evangelical identity with professional identity in South Korea

Prior studies on work–faith integration have only explained professionals’ negotiation of religious and professional identities within one occupational setting, overlooking how the negotiation diverges in the soaring force of neoliberal regime that intersects with gendered workplace culture. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean evangelical women professionals, the article demonstrates how women, proportionately more religious than men, arrive in the alignment of two identities at the workplace. The research finds two patterns of alignments: (1) individual moralising, which is achieved through displaying the narratives of calling and participating in expressive activities, and (2) selective compartmentalising, which is obtained through the practices of setting flexible boundaries and turning evangelical language off. Bringing a neoliberal and gendered perspective to the categorisation of workplaces, this study argues that women are likely to display higher degrees of faith and more evangelical language within less neoliberal-oriented, feminised workplaces than in neoliberal-oriented, masculine ones.

‘벌거벗은 생명’과 주디스 버틀러의 오독

Giorgio Agamben’s ideas of sovereign power and ‘Homo Sacer’ received a lot of criticism because the decline of nation-states due to globalization tends to be equated with the weakening of sovereignty. Especially, Judith Butler argues that the process of removing the heterogeneity within the citizens to invent those who are the foundation of the nation-state cannot be explained by the operation of sovereign power and the mass production of ‘bare lives’ presented by Agamben. Butler explains the ‘statelessness’ in the sense that the situation of global violence is out of territorial conditions, and also highlights the ‘statelessness’ to deconstruct the basis of the nation-state and explore the possibility of resisting it. According to her, given the diaspora produced across territories and the operation of power, this violent exclusion today is caused by neoliberal governmentality, not sovereign power. And it is necessary to see power working in many ways to materialize the diaspora and resist state violence. For Butler, the concept of diaspora is presented as a resistance practice and ethical request of the dispossessed. However, this thesis aims to reveal that Butler’s criticism against ‘bare life’ is misread. Butler’s misinterpretation arises from the difference in perspective of Agamben, who reads Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. If sovereignty is an anachronism to Butler, the original form of sovereignty is biopolitics to Agamben. In addition, Butler considers Arendt distinguishing between the public and private realms and maintaining a discriminatory perspective on the private, whereas Agamben reads that Arendt paid attention to the modern reality in which this public/private distinction is collapsing. Unlike Butler’s criticism, ‘bare life’ does not exist outside of the polity or power. Even if the citizen belong to the nation state, there is the potential for them to become a “bare life,” or diaspora at any time, which reveals the possibility of rethinking the identity of the diaspora.

“Why Talk About the Children?”: James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and the Future of Care

AbstractThis essay argues that the child—especially the unborn child that is all potential—has a notably figurative function in the Black literary imagination of the 1970s. The child shifts the emphasis from an ideal nationalist subject (or the aspiration to be such) toward the interactions and ethics of care work. This shift is explored in the novel form, so this essay turns to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). As these novels reveal, in a reactionary era when the emergence of neoliberal governance intensified the vulnerability of Black life, the child occasioned literary exploration of care—waged, unpaid, invisible, delegitimated, cross-gendered labor that has sustained Black lives for generations. On such an occasion, the child has a Janus-faced function. From the standpoint of an uncaring present, the child prompts a glance into the life-sustaining practices of the past, while it invites speculation over what future practices could be.As the conduit among imagined states of time, the child exhibits an unspoken interest in reimagining temporal movement—beyond nationalism’s progressive linearity—in an era of disillusionment.

The proliferation of men’s sheds in Australia: the problematization of masculinity in a neoliberal regime

ABSTRACT Men’s sheds emerged in Australia with a promise to restore men to health and happiness through the provision of a gender-exclusive communal space and access to ‘traditional’ masculine activities. This article traces their emergence in order to examine how anti-feminist claims about the rights and needs of men have been yoked together with ideas about health and wellbeing in late modernity. Deploying Foucault’s concept of governmentality, moreover, reveals how community men’s sheds have both responded and contributed to the problematization of the ‘older man’ in a neoliberal regime. The history of their emergence and widespread support reveals how masculinity can function as a site of neoliberal intervention, responsibilization and privilege, particularly when viewed in contrast to the decline in funding and support for women’s services.

The Anthropology of Legal Form: Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Transnational Law

For most of legal anthropology’s existence as a distinct subfield, ethnographers have studied the function of law rather than its form. With the proliferation of neoliberal technologies of governance, however, anthropologists are increasingly turning to law’s form. This article surveys the anthropology of legal form and its contribution to the study of transnational law and governance. In taking legal form as the object of ethnographic inquiry, legal anthropologists examine the material, sensory, and symbolic dimensions through which law is recognized. Such an approach analyzes how power operates not through law’s substantive meanings but, rather, through its aesthetic dimensions. Current anthropological scholarship has illuminated the diverse ways in which the technical and formal aesthetics of law operate to foreclose political contestation. I argue, however, that the aesthetics of legal form may also be mobilized to render power relations visible and open to challenge amidst proliferating forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within one arena of global governance—the UN Committee on World Food Security—I illustrate how activists draw on the aesthetics of rights to illuminate inequalities and politicize governance processes. In doing so, I suggest that greater engagement with Jacques Rancière’s political theory of aesthetics can deepen anthropological insights into the power of legal form in the context of transnational law and governance.

LIFT and the London 2012 Olympics: Spectacular Experiences

In 2012, London staged the Olympic Games and the associated Cultural Olympiad, which produced the ‘London 2012’ Festival, funding a wide series of events including many productions by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). A decade on, this article considers the impact of these overlapping events during a period of unprecedented austerity in the United Kingdom, and how arts events might be considered as having colluded with the government’s own agenda. The connection between neoliberal governance, with its programme of increased privatization, rapid gentrification, and the opportunistic marketing of diversity is examined with reference to increasing nationalism through Olympiad displays, together with the increasing influence of the ‘experience economy’ as defined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a Lecturer in Theatre and Social Change at Rose Bruford College. This article, derived from their PhD on LIFT in its social, cultural, and political context, follows ‘LIFT and the GLC versus Thatcher: London’s Cultural Battleground in 1981’ (NTQ 141) and, in the same issue, Patey-Ferguson’s interview with LIFT’s founding Artistic Directors, Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal.

Corporate Social Responsibility as a Tool of Neoliberal Governance in Turkey

Bu makalede Kurumsal Sosyal Sorumluluk (KSS), neoliberal yönetişimin bir aracı olarak ele alınmaktadır ve Türkiye’deki KSS pratiği bu çerçeveden incelenmektedir. Makale, dört eksen temelinde KSS’nin neoliberal yönetişimin bir aracı olarak değerlendirilebileceğini ileri sürmektedir: Birincisi, KSS neoliberal politikaların ‘minimal devlet’ savının tamamlayıcısı olarak ele alınabilir. İkincisi, KSS faaliyetlerinin uluslararası kuruluşların yardımıyla yerel ekonomileri küresel, neoliberal ekonomiye entegre etmede önemli bir işlevi vardır. Üçüncüsü, KSS faaliyetleri neoliberalizmin finansal, ekolojik ve meşruiyet krizine bir çözüm olarak sunulmaktadır. Dördüncüsü, KSS’nin hayırseverlik boyutu, neoliberal ekonominin olumsuz etkileriyle başa çıkma stratejisi olarak görülebilir.

‘In time, every worker a capitalist’: Accumulation by legitimation and authoritarian neoliberalism in Thatcher’s Britain

In this article, I show that current literature on authoritarian neoliberalism has not only overlooked the crucial role of legitimation in authoritarian neoliberal regimes, both pre- and post-2008, it has also failed to properly conceptualise it. While existing scholarship mainly pictures neoliberal governments as pursuing legitimation to ensure accumulation remains unopposed, I instead argue that neoliberal governments see legitimation as an instrument of, and precondition for, accumulation – as directly feeding into it. Indeed, my contribution shows that governments aim to transform citizens into neoliberal subjects that actively and willingly participate in neoliberal accumulation. I call this project, which relies on state-driven mass behavioural change, a strategy of ‘accumulation by legitimation’. The article illustrates this with the case of Thatcherism, analysing newly released governmental archival sources through a Marxist-Foucauldian framework. I unearth the Thatcher government’s propaganda campaign and employee involvement policy, which were a combined effort to influence the British people through governmental education, share ownership as well as communication and consultation in industry. The objective was to turn British workers into self-identifying capitalists that would willingly support the market order and accept its imperatives by themselves, such as the need to moderate their own wage demands. Thatcherites saw this as a prerequisite for their employment and counter-inflationary policies to work. This far-reaching strategy however faced significant obstacles, both from inside government and from British capital, illustrating key contradictions in neoliberalism. While neoliberal ideas endure, this sheds light on the incomplete and fragile character of neoliberal hegemony up to today.

Bringing classes back into poverty discussions.

The 1980s saw a shift in the emphasis of discourse on poverty from production relations to consumption relations, with levels of consumption and purchasing power used to define poverty. Based on this concept, much of the research establishes absolute poverty lines or develops relative indicators to distinguish between "poor" and "non-poor." This paper makes the case that such poverty measurement, while useful for assessing trends over the long term or taking into account relative dynamics, distorts our knowledge of poverty by hiding its root causes and results in overly optimistic interpretations. These discussions also decontextualize poverty from its political and economic context by uncritically accepting and promoting neoliberal regime. Moreover, the article questions the meaning of the "eradication of poverty" and suggests that the nominal rise in PPP income obscures historical capitalist accumulation processes (such as dispossession, proletarianization and depeasantization). As a result, the study suggests to recenter the analysis on the material causes of poverty, which are rooted in the functioning of the capitalist system, its antagonistic character, and the class-based contradictions of production itself.

Post-disaster neoliberal normalization in the 1985, 2010 and 2015 Chilean earthquakes

PurposeThis article analyzes biopolitical strategies for the recovery of neoliberal normality in urban areas affected by earthquakes in 1985, 2010 and 2015 in Chile (intensity >8.0Mw).Design/methodology/approachThis is a qualitative design research. In total, 198 semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven focus groups. The data were processed in search of discursive threads, guided by the categories contained in the analysis and those arising from the interview transcripts.FindingsResults describe three clusters of discursive threads: disruption of normality, strategies of disaster biopolitics and narratives on the recovery of normality in the medium to long term. In the analyzed cases, disaster biopolitics entered domestic and community spaces to govern life; while the aim was to safeguard lives, it also sought to ensure the continuity of the neoliberal regime. The disaster biopolitics used the exception to normalize, constructing subjectivity and memory around the idea of catastrophes.Research limitations/implicationsThe qualitative design can be used in sudden and extreme situations, but it is not possible to anticipate similar results in other kind of disasters (e.g. drought).Social implicationsThis study wants to contribute a political vision about disasters by describing the process of restoring order, which follows highly destructive disasters, by demonstrating that in Chile, the biopolitical exception was key to returning to neoliberal normality.Originality/valueThe findings can help improve emergency responses and propose the necessity of political contextualization in post-disaster recovery processes.