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Arne Ruckert, in his article “Producing Neoliberal Hegemony? A Neo-Gramscian Analysis of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in Nicaragua,” examines the hegemonic aspects of poverty reduction strategies in the post Washington consensus. In his critical reading of the PRSP, Ruckert considers the extent to which this latest global “development” initiative differs from earlier structural adjustment programs. Taking Nicaragua as his case study, Ruckert argues that the PRSP can be seen as an attempt by international financial institutions to rebuild hegemony, but this is not the only result. Ruckert explores not only the ways in which counterhegemonic ideas can be drawn into the service of neoliberalism, but also how those ideas can have positive, perhaps unintended, effects.

The articles in this special issue extend research on urban space and politics in Istanbul with approaches that explorate the relationships between urban form, urban change, and political processes as assemblages of things, beliefs, institutions, and landscapes. They share a commitment to extended ethnography and thick description in urban studies, and contribute to research that destabilizes universalizing urban theory produced in Europe and America. The dramatic state-led project of neoliberal urban transformation in Istanbul has generated an important body of work that focuses on the consequences of creative destruction, urban displacement, and urban social and political exclusion. These papers contribute to that research with additional questions that incorporate understudied material and cultural elements of the urban political economy. What role do material elements (concrete, plexiglass, signs, maps) play in the practices that propel urban dynamics: that justify, for example, the rebuilding of some...

In this discussion, I contrast Knafo’s worry about online inhumanity with a perspective informed by Katherine Hayles’s humanistic work on cybernetics, the posthuman, and the technological unconscious. Drawing upon my own writing about cyberobjects and reality, I argue that Knafo’s claim that “technology has invaded our intimate lives” is wildly overstated and that it hinges upon a curious manipulation of a false active/passive binary that is then used as a litmus test for perversion. I challenge Knafo’s “evolutionary” and materialist claims with reference to the intercourse of perversion and neoliberalism.

The Australian Government's Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper aims to create a profitable and resilient Australian agriculture sector. In doing so, the White Paper emphasises farmers' individual responses to the structural problems which have undermined farmers' profitability, such as consolidated commodities markets. In particular, the White Paper recommends that farmers shape their farming practice to make their farms more attractive to private investors. This is presented as a normal response to farm profitability concerns. Farms are portrayed as investment targets and securing investment is framed as an essential skill of the modern farmer. To understand how this discursive construction has been made possible, this article develops a genealogical analysis of changing constructions of farmers, farming and of the role of the State. This research reveals the subtle discursive shifts which have helped shift responsibility for farming, from the State, to the self-reliant individual, and most recently, towards the private sector. Whereas the construct of the self-reliant, independent farmer has been used to facilitate deregulation of agricultural industries, this recent shift in power towards the private sector may potentially undermine farmers' autonomy and increase dependence on private sector investment.

This paper revisits the abolition of the colleges of education in England and Wales, specialist providers of teacher training which were effectively eradicated in the years after Margaret Thatcher’s 1972 White Paper Education: A Framework for Expansion. Its central argument is that the way in which change was enacted thereafter represented a significant break with the model of policymaking which had held sway since the end of World War Two. Whilst more far-reaching change would come after Mrs Thatcher’s ‘conversion’ to neo-liberalism later in the decade, the fate of the colleges of education was, I argue, an important if largely overlooked episode in the history of education – especially in terms of violating the collaborative relationship between central government and local authorities which had, until that point, dominated education policy in post-war Britain.

The neoliberal direction of social policy under New Zealand’s fifth National government (2008–) is demonstrated in its 2012 White Paper for Vulnerable Children. This document advocates increased monitoring and policing of welfare populations and the downgrading of child protection policy to a technical administrative system for managing ‘risky’ families. The White Paper’s release came soon after the coroner’s report into the deaths of the ‘Kahui twins’, which were treated by the media as a shocking case of child abuse, and exemplified the media’s use of a fantasy of a ‘savage’ Maori welfare underclass in reporting cases of child abuse. Drawing on Isin’s analysis of ‘governing through neurosis’, this article explores how these media and policy discourses reinforce normative patterns of neoliberal citizen subjectivity by offering compelling pathways out of anxiety that re-route citizens’ anxiety over child abuse in support of neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity.

This article is a critical poststructuralist analysis of Conservative led free school policy in England focussing on claims made by the New Schools Network and in the 2010 White Paper that free school provision promotes social justice. The article presents an empirical study of an alternative provision free school as a lens through which these claims can be interrogated. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of governmentality the article analyses the narratives of teachers working in the school in order to gain insights into the microphysics of the policy rationalities mobilised within the discursive site of the free school and claims that such provision promotes social justice. The teachers interviewed demonstrate a strong alignment to free school policy discourse, but also a blurring of pastoral and disciplinary rationalities expressed in terms of the rehabilitation of students on the educational boundaries of the “normal”. The article concludes that the school is a tactical move within neoliberal ed...

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of th...

This paper analyses the use of the concept of territorial cohesion in policy documents produced by the European Union. It is an idea celebrated in community documents, such as cohesion reports, the Territorial Agenda of the European Union and the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion; after more than a decade of political debate, the concept is about to gain a legitimate institutional role, after being included in the Lisbon Treaty, and is among the competences that the EU shares with other member states. At first, territorial cohesion seems to oppose the logics of neo-liberalism by reinscribing welfare problems and policies in spatial terms. However, using the analytical framework of cultural critics, and intending cohesion to be a discourse carried on by a community of European scholars and policymakers, the research will discuss the conceptual relationship between competitiveness and territorial cohesion in European policies and narratives.

The policy-making context in the ‘South’ would seem to have changed in recent years, potentially opening space for alternative voices. The international financial institutions no longer overtly insist on policy content. The ‘locally owned’ Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (prsp) has become the main vehicle for policy. Many have argued prsps represent a ‘remorphing’ of neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus as practised by the international financial institutions for much of the 1980s and 1990s. However, although much research on prsps has focused on the process of prsp production and the extent of participation, the outcome of the prsp process—the actual prsp—and its content has received relatively limited attention. This article is an exploratory piece. Taking the content of 50 prsps the following question is posed: has the prsp process opened space for something new, Stiglitz's post-Washington Consensus, or for the reproduction of the former Washington Consensus?

Research on policy enactment has explored tensions created by accountability approaches associated with new forms of management under neoliberalism. These approaches generate particular discursive constructs of the ‘good teacher’ – constructs that often negate the rich, unmeasurable, and ethical practices associated with teacher professionalism. This paper draws on data generated as part of an institutional ethnography at an Australian school. Five teachers reflected on their work and the policies and procedures that govern it. They reported a range of practices for coping with the demands of policy enactment; described by one informant using the heuristic of attachment, aversion, and indifference. Significantly, the influence of external contingency – specifically in the form of climate change – represents a complex space in which teachers must navigate using ethical judgment and practical wisdom. This kind of ethical work creates demands that exceed the circumscribed notions of good teaching present in governing policies. Taking up the Foucauldian concept of counter conduct, this paper argues that these ‘unofficial’ practices are an expression of ethical professionalism. Rather than being explicitly ‘activist’, these teachers are simply engaging in ‘good work’ as it might be understood under the external contingencies associated with a changing and challenging world.

Neoliberalism has had substantial resonance in Moroccan governance in the past few decades Neoliberalism has occasioned a wide-ranging reconstitution of profit accumulation, politics, society, and the individual ‘citizen’ not least as part of the construction of a new collective common sense The contention of this paper is that Moroccan language policy/politics is articulated amidst this neoliberal capture It unfolds in a discursive and institutional environment characterized by uneven, dispersed but dense topographies of neoliberalization, in turn carved up by the political rationalities of state-sanctioned capital accumulation, reproduction and governmentality While tokenistically congenial to linguistic pluralism, the Moroccan language regime espouses a marked neoliberal reconfiguration of language and multilingualism The Moroccan language regime appears to have congealed into a neoliberal linguistic consensus predicated on neoliberal multilingualism, a stratified matrix of linguistic differentiation informed by the ideologies and structures of neoliberal political economy and practices of power Embedded in this regime is linguistic governmentality, the linguistically sanctioned nurturing of neoliberal subjectivity couched within the coordinates of performativity and the neoliberal discursive assortments of human capital, the knowledge economy, employability and lifelong learning This paper attempts to sketch the lineaments of this evolving linguistic regime with a view to rendering visible the spaces of interplay between neoliberal governance and language politics The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications for the analysis of potential permutations of neoliberalism under Covid-19 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of North African Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

This conceptual paper examines the development of global citizenship education (GCE) by looking at economic regionalism’s political economy. First, this paper situates the Caribbean Community’s (CA...

In recent years, austerity measures in the UK have placed increasing emphasis on third sector organisations to address gaps in Central Government provision. Reflecting upon community sport services during this period, this paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of the everyday working practices of a group of community sport development workers (CSDWs) in the South of England, outlining how they adopted innovative and entrepreneurial practices as a response to fiscal constraint. We argue that, amidst an intensification of neoliberalism and new public management, the UK community sport development sector has become increasingly fragmented which, in turn, has presented a series of challenges that militate against the (re)establishment of community-based ideals. The paper concludes that there is potential to apply these findings globally to nations where austerity policies have been the primary response to the financial crisis and/or where a similar approach to community sport development exists.

This paper focuses on housing policy changes introduced by the administration of President Macri (2015-2019) which claimed to have made a U-turn in Argentinean policies. The study questions whether the housing policy changes introduced constitute a conjuncture with enduring consequences, or if the overall trajectory of the country’s housing events has only been temporarily disrupted by Macri’s administration. The paper contributes to current debates on path dependency studies in housing policies (Malpass, 2011) and a recent call for a more political focus in housing studies (Jacobs and Pawson, 2015). It does so by analysing the reactive changes introduced during the conjuncture and their potential to create a new path in a politically divided nation. The results show how a dramatic turn in politics –from the extreme left to the right- can be ineffective in making enduring changes in policy paths. As more and more countries around the globe are facing an increasing polarisation and atomisation of domestic politics, the example of Argentina demonstrates that path dependency easily perpetuates in the housing systems of politically divided nations.

This paper draws on personal experiences of teaching white British and Black African students on a social work Master’s course in England. In this paper, I critically discuss the fire at Grenfell T...

This paper draws on anthropological research exploring women's changing sexuality within an urban context of Tanzania. The women involved were participating in an HIV prevention trial and worked in bars, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs, or sold local beer or food in Mwanza city. In ethnographic fieldwork and interviews and group discussions with women, narratives about sexuality focused on gendered and moral discourses of sexuality, the commodification of sexuality, and emotions and intimacy in relationships. This paper discusses how women's sexual subjectivies are shaped by a city where social, structural and economic changes over an era of neoliberalism and AIDS has created both disciplinary and liberalising spaces in which gendered and moral discourses of sexuality have emerged.

The paper explores the concept of social justice in Health and Physical Education (HPE) as constituted and addressed across three different countries – Sweden, Norway and New Zealand – and how HPE teaching practices for social justice may be understood from regulative, normative and cultural/cognitive perspectives. Although much has been written about social justice in the field of HPE over the last three decades, there is little research that has examined how teachers operationalise teaching for social justice. Drawing on the experiences and insights gained from an international collaboration project, that sought to address this knowledge gap, this paper examines what constitutes pedagogies for social justice in HPE across different contexts. The aim of this paper is to discuss: (i) our conceptualisation of social justice; and (ii) how this can be understood in relation to HPE practice across different contexts. We conclude that what is regarded as important content for the teaching of social justice varies from one context to another although there are also similar approaches. Additionally, there is much to learn by seeing ‘it’, that is, the nature of social justice and how this is played out in school HPE – from the ‘others’ perspectives’.

This paper explores the vocabulary and frameworks offered by two theories of public policy process: the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the narrative policy framework (NPF) and what they offer to the study of global education reform. The foci of ACF are policy subsystems, formation of advocacy coalitions around policy issues, and their impact on policy change; the emphasis of NPF is the divergent narratives developed and used by these coalitions. This paper reviews each theoretical framework, summarizes existing research literature on their education policy applications, and then poses alternative questions and suggest alternatives to study global education policies, especially those presently critiqued using the term neoliberal which we position as nebulous in its current usage. The aim is to open channels of communication for scholars from different disciplines by introducing different theoretical approaches to analyse the role of the numerous elements that shape global education policy.

This paper examines how transformations in political economy and digital technology point toward potential post-neoliberal futures. Outlining the contours of a crisis of neoliberal hegemony, the authors explore how technological developments have contributed to political economic dynamics of market failure and oligarchic capture, resulting in new forms of digital precarity. As evidence, the paper examines a specific post-neoliberal discourse called neoreactionism (NRx), which has developed out of the distinct culture of Silicon Valley. NRx represents a specific vision for resolving conflicts inherent to neoliberalism by intensifying oligarchic capture and the acceleration of technology. While NRx is a techno-authoritarian discourse that exists largely outside of mainstream academic discussions, it is indicative of how transformations in late capitalism are fueling the rise of anti-democratic consciousness and identification. In response, the authors conclude with suggestions for developing post-ne...

This paper examines the tensions between education policy’s attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes wide shut. My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government’s 2016 white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Specifically, I read the white paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be ‘reality’, education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut.

This paper analyses the impact of neoliberal policies on the film heritage sector at the European level. I first describe the specific debate to which this paper contributes, a conversation that deals with the relationship between neoliberalism and digital technology. With the aim of expanding the horizon of the debate beyond technology, I adopt an analytical framework that draws on the contribution of critical cultural policy scholars who have provided convincing accounts of neoliberalism in the cultural sector. Neoliberalism has had an impact on film heritage approximately in the same ways that it has on the cultural sector as a whole. In fact, economic instrumentalism, New Public Management and corporatisation – the three main features of neoliberal cultural policy – have found their ways into the film heritage sector. In spite of this, neoliberalism does not yet seem to have created a paradigmatic change, as the key features of the field persist. In the conclusion some potential ways forward are suggested.

This is a summary of the Editorial of the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of European Planning Studies. The editorial summarizes three representative articles from planners and economic policy actors published in 1993, the first year of publication of the journal. These write of threats and possibilities from privatized planning, from the European Single Market and the prospects for regional innovation policy. In the second part, nine papers are summarized. These range from an exegesis of the Anthropocene, the rise of populism and the transition in neoliberalist planning, and migration as a city planning issue in European cities. Other papers then analyse aspects of evolutionary change upon city and region policy and process dynamics. Finally a group of papers explore the rise of creative cities, 4.0 era industry and services and the role of ‘starchitects’ in city renewal as well as 4.0 digital settlements.

With many Irish teachers migrating to England, and with the Irish education system moving in a more neoliberal direction as accountability slowly permeates the landscape, this paper reports...

Notwithstanding stereotypes of Russian apathy, long-term field research reveals that there have always been grassroots and labour protests in post-Soviet Russia, even as the shock of ultraliberal reforms led to mass precariousness and social disorientation. However, the social mobilizations that do occur are scattered, weakly publicized and mostly small-scale. This paper conceptualizes them as ‘everyday activism’, that is, an activism embedded in everyday life experience and pragmatic sense. Only recently, and in a paradoxical relation to the populist and patriotic Kremlin discourse, some new trends have emerged towards other popular variants of the new discourse that includes social equality claims and what the paper calls ‘social critical’ populism. However, this populism from below does not automatically lead to mass mobilization, although it provides the necessary background for it.

The Australian economy has changed dramatically over the past quarter of a century. The combination of neoliberal reform, increasing dependence on natural resources, the rise of the services economy and the restructuring of the nation’s manufacturing sector has collectively transformed the national spatial economy. The publication of Fagan and Webber’s Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience in 1994 provided an overview of the shifting geographies of the nation’s economy as the country transitioned from relative stability during the ‘long boom’ after the Second World War into a period of rapid economic and policy change during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the changes, Antipodean economic geography has, arguably, yet to gain new methodological or theoretical footing. The collection of papers in this special issue attempts to meet the challenge of a new direction to economic geography, reflecting on how this transition played out across different spatial and sectoral contexts, primarily in Australia. Papers documenting structural changes in the agricultural, automotive, creative industries, and energy sectors provide an understanding of how the convergence of political discourses, structural forces, and macroeconomic trends have interfaced with broad global shifts. Tying these together in the collection is a sustained focus on financialisation, particularly through globalised capital flows mediated through Australia’s major cities. Thus the collection of papers in this special issue moves beyond Global Restructuring’s roots in structural political economy to a more globally nuanced perspective on industrial transformation. This editorial concludes by making the case for a direction in economic geography that emerges beyond a methodological Antipodean focus towards a more relational and practice-driven approach.

Young people are increasingly called upon to invest in educational qualifications, experience opportunities and other character forming activities in order to stand out from the crowd. This fetishizing of generic distinctiveness is promoted throughout education in England, and particularly Higher Education. This paper considers the policy and theoretical implications of the quest to enfranchise distinctiveness in English HE. From a policy perspective the universal promotion of distinction reflects how recent neoliberal reforms in HE have been moderated by a commitment to a liberal ethos of equality of opportunity. Theoretically the mantra of standing out from the crowd is emblematic of the entrepreneurial self as a tool of governmentality. The expectation of compulsory distinction encapsulates the duality of individualisation and regulation that is central to the project of governmentality. This duality is also implicit in the activity of enterprise and how it is calibrated by competition. Being entrepreneurial stimulates innovation but the uncertainty of competition may simultaneously stimulate isomorphic behaviours. The paper concludes by reviewing what the promotion of generic distinctiveness infers for young people and how the promotion of distinction is also bound up with the mantra of confidence.

Recent transformations in the politics of security in Turkey have been linked by many scholars to a global trend defined by a rapidly developing neoliberal security state form. The 15 July 2016 coup attempt, however, seems to disrupt the convergence of the Turkish case with the global politics of neoliberal (in)security. This paper revisits the neoliberal security state debate and argues that the radical scope of the legal, administrative and coercive changes enacted in the Turkish state signals a transition to a more ‘exceptional’ paradigm of security. To this end, the paper adopts the conception of ‘regime security’ and investigates how the AKP government policies have contributed to a party-oriented security paradigm bolstered by executive centralisation.

Community participation as a strategy in health aims to increase the role of citizens in health decision-making which are contextualised within the institutions of democracy. Electoral representation as the dominant model of democracy globally is based on the elite theory of democracy that sees political decision-making a prerogative of political elites. Such political elitism is counter to the idea of democratic participation. Neoliberalism together with elitism in political sphere have worsened social inequities by undermining working class interests. Latin America has seen adverse consequences of these social inequities. In response, social movements representing collective struggles of organised citizens arose in the region. This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic participation in contemporary Latin American context at the nexus of emerging social movement activism and policy responses. The paper will use empirical examples to highlight how such democratic practices at the societal level evolved while demanding political inclusion. These societal democratic practices in Latin America are redefining democracy, which continues to be seen in the political sphere only. Health reforms promoting participatory democracy in several Latin American countries have demonstrated that establishing institutions and mechanisms of democratic participation facilitate collective participation by the organised citizenry in state affairs.

In an era of expanding global educational privatization and shifting policies on how to fund educational facilities in many states in the US, this study engages the lenses of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology to examine educational privatization in the school facilities industry in California. Employing critical policy document analysis to examine approximately 40 primary and secondary source documents including propositions, bills, government and education codes, facilities reports, and state public debt data, this paper addresses the following research question: How have education finance policies shaped the system of school district facilities financing over time, specifically with regard to the field of private actors involved in the school facilities industry? This paper examines the historical policy context for privatization in school district facilities financing, evaluating how policies have evolved, been implemented, and affected stakeholders over time in the broader neoliber...

This paper introduces a preliminary conceptualisation of ‘austerity common sense’ in order to understand why austerity policies, despite the social harm they cause, have support not only from the economic and political establishment but also from the wider population including members of the social work profession. Building on the Gramscian concept of common sense, ‘austerity common sense’ refers to the set of beliefs circulated by the ruling elite and adopted by members of the leadership of the Professional Association of Social Workers (SKLE), as well as others within Greece and the European Union, to understand austerity policies. Through this framing, austerity measures are largely accepted as inevitable rather than challengeable. The paper maintains that the concept of austerity common sense provides an analytical framework for understanding the acceptance of austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere, since similar ‘austerity common sense’ framing is encountered in many countries. Furthermore, it is maintained that the concept of ‘austerity common sense’ can facilitate the interrogation of the socio-economic construction of ideas and phrases. This is an important process with which the social work profession needs to engage.ΠερίληψηΗ παρούσα δημοσίευση εισάγει μια προκαταρκτική θεώρηση για τη δημιουργία της «κοινής συνείδησης περί λιτότητας» προκειμένου να επεξηγήσει γιατί οι πολιτικές λιτότητας, παρά την κοινωνική βλάβη που προκαλούν, έχουν στήριξη όχι μόνο από την οικονομική και πολιτική ελιτ, αλλά και από τον ευρύτερο πληθυσμό, συμπεριλαμβανομένων καποιων μελών της διοίκησης του Συνδέσμου Κοινωνικών Λειτουργων Ελλαδας. Βασιζόμενη στη θεωρητική έννοια της ‘κοινής συνείδησης’ όπως την ανέπτυξε ο Γκράμσι, η «κοινή συνείδηση περί λιτότητας » αναwέρεται στη δέσμη πεποιθήσεων που κατασκεύασε το κυβερνών καθεστώς και υιοθετήθηκε από καποια μέλη της ηγεσίας του Συνδέσμου Κοινωνικών Λειτουργων (2011) Ελλαδας (ΣΚΛΕ), καθώς και άλλων στην Ελλάδα και την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση, να κατανοήσουμε τις πολιτικές λιτότητας. Μέσω αυτού του επεξηγηματικού πλαισίου, τα μέτρα λιτότητας γίνονται σε μεγάλο βαθμό αποδεκτά ως αναπόwευκτα χωρίς να αμwισβητουνται στο συνολο τους. Η παρούσα μελέτη υποστηρίζει ότιη έννοια της κοινής συνείδησης μέσα από μία κεντρική αwήγηση περί λιτότητας παρέχει ένα αναλυτικό πλαίσιο για την κατανόηση της αποδοχής των μέτρων λιτότητας στην Ελλάδα και αλλού, καθώς παρόμοια «πλαισίωση της λιτότητας» συναντάται σε πολλές χώρες. Επιπλέον, υποστηρίζεται ότι η έννοια της ‘κοινής συνείδησης αναwορικά με τη λιτότητα » μπορεί να διευκολύνει την έρευνα της κοινωνικοοικονομικής κατασκευής ιδεών και wράσεων. Τέλος, υποστηρίζει ότι πρόκειται για μια σημαντική διαδικασία, με την οποία πρέπει να ασχοληθουν οι κοινωνικοί/ές λειτουργοί.

Migration flows have shaped Australian higher education since the colonial era. In the last two decades, Asian mobility has literally changed the face of Australian campuses. Government policies and university regulations have, paradoxically, moved to reinforce a Western-centric curriculum and pedagogy. This paper investigates this paradox by examining how Asian international students in Australia are governed by a homogenised educational process via a regulatory state that is underpinned by both neoliberal and post-colonial ideologies. The paper argues that ‘critical thinking’ is used both as a totem pole to attract Asian students and a governmental yardstick to measure their academic performance.

In this paper, the authors advocate for using creativity in one's pedagogy, believing that it can be the catalyst for self-empowerment, deeply powerful dialogue, and substantive critique. Creativity as pedagogy does more than offer an aesthetically diverse approach to complex issues, as it pushes against cultural conformity and domination, prompting participatory methods, reflexivity, and provocation. One possibility for this push is through the praxis framework rehearsal, named in this paper. The tenets of rehearsal are: (re)membering, recall, and representation. Rehearsal, as a radical site, insists on preparing for, or practicing, owning one's voice and body simultaneously as a means of disrupting norms and the status quo. This paper will illustrate the possibilities, tensions, and potential outcomes of creativity for pedagogical practice while simultaneously proposing how educational spaces can be theorized, enacted, or resisted in ways that unsettle neoliberal, regulatory, and colonial discou...

In our earlier paper, we drew upon Franz Kafka’s literary writings to attend to the repressive sides of the State and markets and their impact on subaltern positions. Moreover, we pointed to some of the key limitations in the theories of the base of the pyramid and subsistence marketplace. In this paper, responding to the commentaries, we clarify some doubts, provide correctives to misinterpretations and further develop the broad theoretical argument we made in our earlier paper. In response to Viswanathan’s commentary, we specifically clarify the role of neoliberal ideology as it impels discourse of subsistence markets. Moreover, as a corrective to Karnani’s reading, we explain the limitations of the State, markets and private enterprises in alleviating poverty in India. Through these clarifications, we ask scholars to attend to systemic features of the current political economy that create poverty and call for an imagination beyond the current capitalist zeitgeist to empower the subaltern.

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity” (Rosalind Gill, 2016). While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism (Catherine Rottenberg, 2014; Angela McRobbie, 2015; Gill and Shani Orgad, 2015), this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary (Jennifer Gillan, 2014) made to mark the re-brand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.

This paper examines historical and contemporary racializations of Asian(Americans) within the STEM system. The prevailing perception of Asian(Americans) as model minorities masks how their multiple and contradictory positionings in the STEM system perpetuate the neoliberal racial project and reproduce systems of racism and oppression. Through a multidisciplinary analysis of STEM education and industry, we demonstrate that the shifting racialization of Asian(Americans) secures advantages for White Americans by promoting meritocracy and producerism and justifies White supremacy. By serving these functions, the racialization of Asian(Americans) within the STEM system is central to the neoliberal racial project. This paper also suggests how STEM education researchers can reveal and resist, rather than veil and support, the neoliberal racial project in STEM.

The efforts of political and economic elites to instill in wider society cooperative dispositions that will value ‘partnerships’ across gradients of power are an important aspect of the neoliberal project. Neoliberalism must embed a benign cooperativeness in society in order to deliver the social stability necessary for a deregulated market economy to function. A central part of the neoliberal project is the creation of the conditions whereby subordinate groups will reject conflict for ‘the virtues’ of partnership, cooperativeness, pragmatism and consensus. Using Northern Ireland (NI) as a case study, this paper will illustrate how the voluntary and community sector has been both an object of elite policies aimed at regulating civil society activity and an instrument of that policy. Through a historical sketch of the repeated ‘turns to civil society’ of successive administrations in the UK and NI, and through interviews with voluntary and community sector staff and government officials, this paper...

A common theme in higher education research is the factors that affect university funding. Studies frequently examine how universities cope with funding cuts and the changes that have stemmed from operating in a neoliberal age, a period that now sees institutions commonly functioning on a cost/benefit basis. This paper offers an original contribution by using the Australian Federal Government Department of Education and Training’s document, Finance 2015: Financial Reports of Higher Education Providers, to problematise the financial assistance individual Australian public universities received from the federal government. The paper acknowledges the factors that can account for some institutions receiving more funding than others but nonetheless highlights the substantial discrepancies concerning government financial contributions that exist between Australia’s highest and lowest funded universities. At a time when a performative culture has increasingly become part of higher education, and an insti...

It is increasingly recognized in Australia that single, older women are particularly vulnerable to housing-related stress and homelessness. This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored the housing experiences of single, older, non-homeowning women in regional New South Wales, Australia. Interviews were conducted with 47 participants living independently in precarious housing. This paper focuses upon the housing preferences expressed by the participants. A feminist standpoint perspective was adopted and thematic analysis was employed to interrogate the data. Findings showed the women’s primary preference is security of tenure in housing that is affordable and suited to their needs. Further, they want to feel they have autonomy in the private sphere. Over the participants’ life course, twin discourses of patriarchy and neoliberalism were identified as influential in shaping social arrangements, both in Australia and other developed countries. These findings may assist policy-makers in pla...

The paper takes up the challenge of exploring the relationship between sustainability and leisure by developing the notion of sustainable leisure. We first set the stage by discussing the broader ideological context of neoliberalism and explore the potential of sustainability, and sustainable leisure, to become potent countervailing forces. We next introduce the notions of civil commons and life goods as they are key elements of sustainability and, ultimately, sustainable leisure and suggest that leisure, understood as a life good, has the potential to build, enhance or preserve the civil commons. Three examples of leisure forms – farmers’ markets, social movements and community-based tourism, are then assessed to demonstrate how sustainable leisure works in practice. The paper concludes by encouraging more research to both test and to improve our conceptualization.

In the current post-Fordist, neoliberal Canadian state, the concept of the ‘enterprising self’ has come to define worker-subjectivity and ability to access the labour market. The discourse of entrepreneurialism promotes individual initiatives and resources as the most useful qualities necessary to be successful in the neoliberal labour market. This paper, based on two qualitative research projects examines the mechanism through which enterprising conduct is instilled within immigrants in Canada. In particular, the focus is on South Asian immigrants to take up questions of how racialised immigrants fit into the enterprise culture. This is an area that has remained understudied, despite the fact that immigrants of colour in Canada are consistently pushed towards re-training and re-skilling because of their higher rates of un/under employment in Canada. Informed by the theories of governmentality, the paper highlights two findings; first, it demonstrates how work-related training programs offered by the settlement agencies in Canada advocate the importance of being ‘enterprising’ by harping on discourses of self-sufficiency and personal endeavour to become productive workers; second, the programs implicitly correct or redress immigrants of colour to conform to the hegemonic Eurocentric codes underlying normative citizenship. In foregrounding the experiences of South Asian immigrants, this paper thus explores how the process of neoliberal subject making, particularly in the first world countries, has a racial and cultural undertone. Racism continues to circulate powerfully in the neoliberal era, reordering existing modes of inclusion and exclusion which, having been relegated to the realm of private choice becomes difficult to pinpoint.

This paper addresses a central paradox that affects the nature of the student experience in the UK. On the one hand, the marketisation of higher education, with its associated emphasis on performativity indicators, may be seen to have reduced students to numbers, with the attendant consequence that the affective domain of studying and learning has been lost. On the other hand, there is more attention given to student feelings than was ever the case in the past and questions about student satisfaction have become more prominent. This paper will explore this paradox using empirical data gathered from a longitudinal study of ‘non-traditional’ students at one ancient university in Scotland. We indicate the ways in which the tension between the technicist spaces of the neo-liberal university and its empathetic, caring spaces are mediated by students as they make their way through their degrees. We argue that caring relationships with staff are of central importance to students’ well-being and success at university, and that students actively seek to construct support when and where they need it.

This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Africa, in order to think about how slavery, segregation, and apartheid, as well as responses to these, have shaped ideas about national identity and belonging. In it I explore the ways these two histories of racial oppression – both slavery and segregation in the US, as well as segregation and apartheid in South Africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of larger transatlantic dialogs on race, racial governance, and the boundaries of national belonging. The paper attempts to chart a history of exchange, between South Africa and the US, of ideas on racial policy and race thinking. This different genealogy for crossing the Atlantic will offer ways to think together events such as the shootings in Ferguson in the US and the shooting of miners at Marikana in South Africa, as related instances of how race – as defining feature of neoliberalism – continues to function in both places.

The effects of neoliberalism on young people and youth workers through outsourcing government services has attracted critique from multiple sources. Post-structural analysis interrogates subjectification effects of these policies on youth. However, this kind of analysis of the governmental formation of youth ought to consider the interaction between the knowledge of youth underpinning neoliberal social policy, and those employed by non-government agencies implementing them. The interaction between these two shape the reciprocal governing activity within the young person and youth worker power–knowledge relationship that, this paper will argue, is an important factor in the critique of neoliberal social policy. Young people are governed by a diverse array of knowledges developed by government, youth studies, NGOs and young people themselves. These knowledges interact, reinforce and contradict discourses of youth work. This paper focuses on a neoliberal social policy (FLO) which constructs youth as ...

In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, communities of faith are attempting to help their constituents traverse a transition in the life cycle of the United States. This paper posits two heuristic lenses - the neoliberal age and prophetic soul care - that inform pastoral care practices for communities who are navigating a nation that is wrestling with a proverbial life cycle crisis. Of particular import, this paper is attentive to how pastoral care providers might be responsive not only to the discontent that has arisen in the wake of Trump’s election, but also to the discontent that led to it.

This paper uses ideas drawn from Wendy Brown’s critique of neoliberal approaches to governance, to argue that the ‘economisation’ of social policy such as welfare and legal aid and the family justice system, has resulted in an economic re-making of the ideas of justice, fairness and equality, which have traditionally underpinned these policies and the context of the family court. The paper will map the political context to the implementation of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO hereafter), in order to understand how it has been possible to justify the cuts to family law that were made under the statute. This will involve considering how attitudes towards social security and welfare have changed, and how a waning commitment to the original aims of the legal aid scheme has manifested in the specific context of family law. The paper will then explore the effects of this approach for the family justice system, specifically the post-LASPO family courtroom. Using recent case reports, the paper will argue that the family court is now ‘dilemmatic’, in that it is now caught between its traditional obligations of safeguarding fairness and equality, and the economic demands which constrain the ability of judges and court staff to ensure those obligations. Having considered the way in which legal aid policy and the family justice system have been approached through a solely economic lens, the paper will finally turn to examine how LASPO itself was justified in this neoliberal context. It will be argued here that the re-made notions of justice, fairness and equality have been repurposed for economic aims, and that this is a symptom of a wider loss of commitment to the original substance of these principles. In understanding how traditional notions of justice have been re-drawn in economic terms, this paper concludes by arguing that family lawyers, practitioners and academics operating in a post-LASPO context must explicitly reject the economic terms of value against which these notions are measured, if their arguments against the effects of these cuts are to be in any way effective.

This paper examines how early childhood policy initiatives in the United Kingdom and internationally currently reflect neoliberal concerns with school readiness in the development of human capital and what diverse theoretical perspectives might offer. The focus is a project involving a group of early childhood academics from one university and a small group of practitioners from a range of early years’ settings in the North of England. In thinking about practice, the paper explores a number of ‘lines of flight’, drawing on literature, philosophy and sociology to eat and scrape away at how provision for young children is commonly understood. What emerges from the scraping is not the clarity of fixities but the need for the weaving of resemblances that constantly transform meanings. We offer an engagement with heterogeneous theoretical ideas to help us think differently about the negotiation of ethical and equitable practices with children.

This paper examines the reworking of gender in the measured university and the impact this has on gender equality in academia. Neoliberal market rationalities and measurements embedded in academic publishing, funding and promotion have transformed Australian higher education and impacts upon the careers of academic women in ways that are gendered. Based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with female academics, this paper focuses on the performative and discursive decisions women make in regards to their academic careers, and argues that the mainstreaming of gender equity in Australian universities seeks to render gender inequality invisible. It employs ‘cruel optimism’ to highlight how our optimistic attachment to gender equity and diversity policies as tools for improving the representation of women may be detrimental to academic women’s career progression and the realisation of gender equality in academia.

This paper examines school principal responses to the policy discourse of widening participation in higher education. As a critical analysis of how policy is produced, read and responded to by principals [Bacchi, C., 2009. Analysing policy: what's the problem represented to be? New York: Pearson], the paper questions the assumptions underpinning policies aiming to widen participation of young people in schools where families have traditionally not viewed higher education as a possible or desirable option [e.g. Bok, J., 2010. The capacity to aspire to higher education: ‘It's like making them do a play without a script’. Critical studies in education, 51 (2), 163–178]. Policy is adopted, adapted, ignored or countered by principals and teachers due to ‘situated necessity’ resulting from the history, location, pupil and parental social mix, staffing, material and economic conditions of the school and community infrastructure [Braun, A., et al., 2011. Taking context seriously: towards explaining policy...

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the c...