Commodifying diversity: Education and governance in the era of neoliberalism

• Authors: Andrew Wilkins
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In this paper I explore the pedagogical and political shift marked by the meaning and practice of diversity offered through New Labour education policy texts, specifically, the policy and practice of personalized learning (or personalization). The aim of this paper is to map the ways in which diversity relays and mobilizes a set of neoliberal positions and relationships in the field of education and seeks to govern education institutions and education users through politically circulating norms and values. These norms and values, I want to argue, echo and redeem the kinds of frameworks, applications and rationalities typically aligned with modes of neoliberal or advanced liberal governance, e.g. marketization, monetarization, atomization and deregulation. I conclude the paper by considering how diversity in education renders problematic conventional antinomies of the citizen and consumer, public and private, state and civil society, etc., and forces us to confront the rhizomatic character of contemporary governance and education in the era of neoliberalism.

Keywords

EN

neoliberalism; diversity; consumerism; personalized learning; pedagogy

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 122-130

Dates

published

2012-04-01

online

2012-03-20

Contributors

author

Andrew Wilkins

• Roehampton University

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/s13374-012-0012-5