The article is a reflection on the neoliberal knowledge economy, the traffic in antiracist feminist theory, and the way my work has been read (lost or found in translation) and has crossed geopolitical and racial/cultural borders. It comments as well on the development of my intellectual project in relation to my location in the US academy and the intellectual and political communities that have made the work possible. The larger frame I seek to examine using responses to my work in three sites – Sweden, Mexico, and Palestine – is the way feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist theory emerges from a particular geopolitical, intellectual space; the way it enacts crossings; and the way it is trafficked, consumed, and understood in different geographies. Given the global and domestic shifts in social movements and transnational feminist scholarly projects over the past three decades, my major concern pertains to the depoliticization of antiracist feminist/women-of-color/transnational feminist intellectual projects in neoliberal, national-security-driven geopolitical landscapes.
Contemporary educational policy of many developed countries is permeated with the ideology of neoliberalism, the essence of which is to increase the efficiency and "focus on the best," while respecting the principle of indifference to sex, race or social origin. It is belevied that in neoliberalism, education - seen as the "good of the individual" is bringing economic benefits to society. Learning / knowledge becomes a commodity, an individual is treated in accordance with the logic of neoliberalism as "innovative entrepreneur", which determines his/her own success or failure. Here there is a dominance of rhetoric of performance, efficiency and standards together with conviction that schools should operate as excellent corporations that bring profits through routine activities, procedures, diagnosis and evaluation. In this context one can ask the question: is it still possible, to believe in emancipatory function of education?
This article reflects on working in eight universities in Finland, Sweden, and the UK, along with many transnational research projects. These are analysed within the framework of what might be called neoliberal universities, neoliberal trans(national)patriarchies, and neoliberal masculinities. Importantly, these are reflections from the global North, being transnationally located there, rather than glossed as ‘global’ or simply assumed as nationally contextualised. This discussion is located within the burgeoning literature on neoliberalism, and then proceeds to examine, first, experiences in the UK, before those in Finland and Sweden. The final section focuses on the transnationalisation of these neoliberal processes in academia – for example, through transnational research development, projectisation of research, and language use, performance and performativity. In such ways multiple connections are drawn between the greater organisational ‘autonomy’ of universities, contradictions of transnationalisations of academia, and the construction of ‘autonomous’ individual(ist) academics.
The article presents selected aspects of the discussion about the conditions and consequences of global economic crisis in Polish sociology. The author argues that the relatively limited debate on the nature of the current crisis can be explained by two factors. Firstly, it is the consequence of the dominance of modernisation paradigm in the analysis of the Polish social transformation as well as the marginalisation of two sociologies: critical labour sociology and economic sociology. Secondly, drawing on research carried out by the author on working-class life strategies in the 2000s, the limited debate is the outcome of social “normalisation” and “adaptation” to crisis experiences in the Polish society. Despite the symptoms of collective “demobilisation” in the face of successive crises, adaptation to crises has its social limits. The discourse of global economic crisis contributes to new forms of collective mobilisation in the sphere of work and politics regardless of the dominance of individualistic coping strategies inherited from the first decades of transformation. The “counter-movement” taking place in Poland is expressed in trade union radicalisation and mobilisation of radical-nationalist movements. Both processes are interpreted by the author with the reference to Karl Polanyi’s work as the manifestations of self-defence of the society against the expansion of socially uncontrolled market mechanisms.
The aim of the text is to put on some light onto the problem of the contemporary situation of philosophy. Nowadays, exists the wide spread recognition that philosophy has come to its end because of the fact, that modernity has exhausted its momentum. This situation puts philosophers into the weird position of being forced to defend their right to exist. At the same time, the development of global civilization creates the agenda for questions that only philosophy can define and try to answer. Not only the facts created by contemporary physics and mathematics, but also the problems of a new phase of neoliberalism should be conceptualized in terms of traditional disciplines of philosophy. That is why, philosophy, as the socio-economical situation of modern world is far from being transparent, looks as the area of fruitful and inspiring insights.
This article argues that South African universities experience a variety of constraints upon their freedom to teach and conduct research. These restrictions affect all academic disciplines, including women’s and gender studies. The hegemony of neoliberalism affects the formation of collective and individual subjectivities. Its cultural operations possess the power to privilege and promote concepts that serve its monetary goals, while suppressing those that do not. Unfortunately, the managerialist turn in universities has meant that courses and units that are perceived as profitable receive funding, while those that are perceived as unprofitable do not. Women’s and gender studies tends to be a casualty of the neoliberal approach to higher education, with university managements allocating some funding to its operations, but frequently not enough to allow these units to flourish. This often becomes a self-reinforcing situation, where the university management claims that the unit in question is not successful, and then cuts funding, which further curtails operations. Consequently, women’s and gender studies units in South African universities remain marginalised, despite their potential to destabilise heteropatriarchal hegemonies.
The authors analyse the discourse of Green Ways (GW), a company using multi-level marketing where women comprise the majority of distributors. The article shows that however multi-level marketing is advertised as a highly flexible form of employment suitable for those who want to combine family life with work, it is rather a way of marketing than an employment opportunity. A significant role in this business is played by women on parental leave who earn self-esteem based in the neoliberal values of self-reliance and entrepreneurial success, rather than financial income. The analysis links their ways of describing the character and benefits of selling GW products with the ideology presented in GW manuals for distributors. Using Bourdieu’s theory, the authors point out how GW constructs the symbolic oppositional binary in line with the neoliberal notion of an efficient individual.
Objective: This study investigates the issue of global imbalances by exploring, in a historical context, the interconnections between the United States current account imbalances and the processes underlying allocative inefficiency, financialisation and austerity politics. Research Design & Methods: A comprehensive review of published studies is the research methodology used in this article. Published secondary data from both governments and international institutions are presented and discussed. Findings: The study find that the deep nature of the current imbalances and economic crisis in the United States could adversely affect the rest of the world. Although the IMF and other institutions of global governance have now questioned the effectiveness of neoliberal policies, the severe measures the IMF advocates in response to current account deficits could presage yet another era of anti-growth austerity measures in the United States. Implications/Recommendations: There are features of the current account US imbalances situation that have the potential to exacerbate negative trends and to further fuel adverse economic and political outcomes. The study suggests that a coordinated, US-led international response to a future global recession could be even more deficient than the current response to climate change. Contribution: The paper makes a contribution to the literature on the failures of global governance and critically examines the economic risks of the current situation that are being compounded by the political approach of the Trump Administration, which characterises US trade partners as adversaries in need of coercion through tariffs and strident rhetoric.
We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality. This contemporary technology relies on State racisms and racial orderings manifested from earlier liberal and neo-liberal practices of biopower. As a proto-fascist technology, education policy, and school choice policies in particular, operate within a racial aesthetics that connects ultra-nationalisms with microfascisms of racialized bodies. We discuss historical examples of liberal school segregation and residential schools in relation to contemporary examples of chartered ethnic-identity schools to illustrate the complexities of proto-fascist education policy.
The contemporary investigations on power, politics, government and knowledge are profoundly influenced by Foucault’s work. Governmentality, as a specific way of seeing the connections between the formation of subjectivities and population politics, has been used extensively in anthropology as neoliberal governmentalities have been spreading after the 1990s all over the world. A return to Foucault can help to clarify some overtly ideological uses of ‘neoliberalism’ in nowadays social sciences.
This essentially polemical article questions whether the Bologna Process (BP) is necessary (and desirable) in the adaptation of universities to the new social conditions or whether it is a Trojan horse sent out to introduce neo-liberal changes in the field of higher education. First, it addresses the circumstances surrounding the origins of the Bologna Declaration, demonstrating that it enabled the instrumental logic of the marketization and commodification of education to pervade universities traditionally conceived of as cultural institutions of knowledge. It then investigates the eight declared objectives of Bologna and, finally, summarises the consequences that can be firmly established ten years after the event. These include the fact that three of the pillars of the BP can be interpreted as responding to the requirements of neoliberal New Public Management; namely, study structure (flexibility and market-driven profiles), credits (standardization, mobility and effectiveness) and quality assurance (external control). In conclusion, the paper suggests that the BP primarily represents a problem in understanding a situation that displays signs of the radical transformation of the social function of one dimension of societal life - higher education. Although it is clearly an adaptive reaction to the (neoliberal) transformation of society, it has also become part of the ideological games played by certain special-interest groups and, as such, we must make continual attempts to gain a deeper understanding of it.
Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has been constructed as a new site for educational, sociocultural, political, and economic investment. Coupled with such a growing and popular recognition of ECEC as a significant period of children's learning and development are critical issues concerning accountability, affordability, and accessibility to quality education and care for all. Highlighting the preschool education systems in Taiwan and Hong Kong as two examples from Asia, this paper aims to open up a discursive space for reconceptualizing the effects of neoliberal discourse and how such a system of reasoning reconstructed notions of inclusion/exclusion to limit the making of quality education and the provision of care for all.
The article discusses the changes that have occurred in the Polish system of higher education since 1989. The author points to the changes of law that organized the functioning of the sector, from Higher Education Act (1990) to the amendment to the Law on Higher Education (2011), pointing to different legal solutions to the trend towards the commercialization of the system and the consequent commodification of higher education.
The paper considers the question of relationship between Bernhard Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the alien and education. In the first part it presents the character of the experience of the alien developed by the German thinker, underlining its double structure – the stage of shock and surprise with the alien and the moment of response to its “demand”, which philosopher relates to a certain sort of ethics. In the second part, the article establishes the relationship between the Waldenfels’s experience of the alien and a transformative mode of learning understood as the one that makes a place for categories of unexpected and desired in education, allows for subjectivity formation and strengthens critical thinking. The last part of the text addresses a question of the place of transformative Bildung based on Waldenfels’s phenomenological analysis of the alien in the contemporary neoliberal landscape with its shift towards functional, instrumentalist and consumer-based modes of teaching.
The article discusses the changes that have occurred in the Polish system of higher education since 1989. The author points to the changes of law that organized the functioning of the sector, from Higher Education Act (1990) to the amendment to the Law on Higher Education (2011), pointing to different legal solutions to the trend towards the commercialization of the system and the consequent commodification of higher education.
Based on Hardt and Negri concept I analyzed function of the bioproductive university. The bioproductive university have three function: creating, détournement and management of subjectivities, social relations and commons. I analyzed those function in context of social capital.
Road to Exclusion – Neoliberal Discourse on Privatization of Schools and School Canteens in Warsaw The article deals with social influence of neoliberal discourse on privatization of schools and school canteens in Warsaw. In the light of social analysis of discourse, the term means social activities situated in the area designated by ‘understanding, communicating and interpersonal interactions, where the above mentioned phenomena are being a part of a wider context constituted by social and cultural structures and processes’. In Teun A. van Dijk’s understanding of the term, a discursive social activity takes place, when ‘the language users take part in communication not only as entities, but also as members of various groups, institutions and cultures’, whereas through their statements they create, they confirm or question the social and political structures and institutions. The city council and district councils are places where the speech not only mirrors relations of social ascendancy (the councilors are always first to speak before the inhabitants), but also this ascendancy is being ‘performed’ by ‘constituting’ their recipient at the moment of enunciation (for example the figure of ‘homo sovieticus’ often mentioned by the councilors). Councils are places, where the enuncia- ted social structure mentions and preserves the ascendant’s position. The aim of the article was to show how some of the macro-scaled problems (neo-liberalism, crisis of the representative’s democracy) reveal its violent nature in the micro-scale (Warsaw councilors’ policy towards schools and school canteens).
The aim of the study was to present the profile of the Polish economist and sociologist of labour relations Ferdinand Zweig, who was born in Cracow on June 23, 1896. The most important impact on the scientific interests of Ferdinand. Zweig was influenced by professor of economics Adam Krzyżanowski, founder of the Cracow School of Economics. He received his doctorate in rights on November 19, 1918. Since 1928 Zweig began to teach economics at the Jagiellonian University. In January 1929 he was appointed associate professor of political economy and in 1935 professor at the Faculty of Law in the field of economic sciences. In the late 1940s Ferdinand Zweig was a lecturer in economics at the Polish University College in London. From 1953 to 1956 he was a professor of sociology and labour relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from 1964 to 1966 at Tel Aviv University. Ferdinand Zweig died in London on June 9, 1988. It is worth noting that his theoretical and liberal views differed from the practical side, i.e. the real solutions. Ferdinand Zweig's second field of interest was sociology of work. His research and conclusions complement previous economic research.
The paper is interested in how the repositioning of organized labour in Europe in the last 20 years has affected its capacity to answer the current fiscal crisis of the state. While there is reason to expect a growing discontent among unions' core constituencies with the unequal way that the costs of the crisis are being distributed, unions don't seem to be able to organize this discontent, and turn it into a source of countervailing power against 'markets' and the state. In order to understand this outcome, the paper makes three arguments. First, it shows that European integration since the 1980s has at its core been a neoliberal project which has aimed at restoring capitalist power and institutionalizing permanent austerity. It then argues that trade unions have become integrated into this project in a paradoxical way: while their institutional representation has been enhanced, they have simultaneously experienced a significant loss of autonomy and capacity to achieve substantial gains for their constituencies. As a result, trade unions approach the current fiscal crisis of the state from a peculiar state-dependent position, which limits their capacity to organize the growing discontent in a sustainable way.
Ten years after the publication of 'Illusory Corporatism in Eastern Europe', the author re-examines his claim that tripartite arrangements introduced in the region after 1989 served chiefly as a façade for introducing neoliberal policies undermining labour interests. He finds that tripartism still produces meagre results, and that most of what labour has gained has come from better organisation, smarter use of resources, and increased militancy, not from tripartism. While 'illusory corporatism' is sustained in Eastern Europe, it is advancing elsewhere in the world. He looks at Latin America and Asia, which resemble 1990s Eastern Europe, as governments introduce tripartism at crisis moments in order to win labour commitments to cutbacks. As for Western Europe, where many scholars have seen an advancement of corporatism because of the signing of pacts in countries where the traditional preconditions were lacking, the author argues that this corporatism is 'illusory' because pacts are made to secure labour's acceptance to the corrosion of union power and a decline in labour conditions. Standards of corporatism have been systematically ratcheted down. Many scholars see 'corporatism' wherever agreements are signed, whereas an outcome-based approach, proposed by the author in his original article, leads to a characterization of 'illusory corporatism'.
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