The great civilizational crisis of 2020 has shown the bankruptcy and impotence of the last half-century of neoliberal economics and politics in the face of challenges it is not well equipped to face. Trade wars, a viral pandemic, rising inequality,… Read More ›
neoliberalism
The Making of Bullshit Leadership and Toxic Management in the Neoliberal University, John Smyth
My over-arching argument in this article is that both academics and students in universities have been afflicted by a set of relations that Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘cruel optimism’ (2011). Cruel optimism according to Berlant, constitutes the holding out… Read More ›
Open Access and Neoliberalism, Martin Paul Eve
It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their article, ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’ (2019), Holmwood… Read More ›
Action and ‘Civil Death’ in the Securitised University: A Comment on Jana Bacevic’s ‘Knowing Neoliberalism’, Lakshmi S. Bose
I read Jana Bacevic’s article, ‘Knowing Neoliberalism’, shortly after completing a series of challenging interviews with Turkish academics, recently fired or under investigation for signing the Academics for Peace petition … [please read below the rest of the article]. Article… Read More ›
Epistemic Institutions: The Case for Constitutionally-Protected Academic Independence, Oliver Milne
By these means the American Founding Fathers endeavoured to defend the independence of their judiciary, and because of these defences the present partisan state of that country’s Supreme Court is a result, not of pressure exerted on the judges by… Read More ›
The Perils of Radical Subjectivity: A Comment on Antonio’s “Ethnoracial Populism,” Regina Queiroz
Robert Antonio’s association of authoritarian ethno-racial nationalism with neoliberal adventure capitalism, and the broader matter of how neoliberal democratization opens the way to rightwing populism and illiberal capitalism (Antonio 2019, 280), seem particularly pertinent. The recourse to Hayek’s political theory… Read More ›
The Uncomfortable Transformation of Discomfort in the Neoliberal Higher Education Context, Emma Craddock
The neoliberalisation of Higher Education has led to the creation of a landscape where students are increasingly perceived by both university administration and themselves as consumers of a product, while metrics are sought to quantify teaching quality in the form… Read More ›
The Neoliberal University and the Common Good, Raphael Sassower
The intense “audit culture” and digitally enhanced monitoring of faculty’s production resembles the “pre-neoliberal” or “feudal university” as much as the neoliberal university (Cruickshank 2019). Is higher education no different from other institutions plagued by the neoliberal regime of economizing… Read More ›
Geographies of the Knowledge Economy on the Semi-Periphery: The Contradictions of Neoliberalisation and Precarity in Portugal, Adam Standring and Simone Tulumello
The recent special issue of Social Epistemology (33.4, 2019) and the ongoing debates in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) point to many of the challenges faced by universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination situated both… Read More ›
The Accident of Accessibility: How the Data of the TEF Creates Neoliberal Subjects, Liz Morrish
The stress occasioned by constant demands for academics to submit to evaluation has been well documented (Loveday 2018, https://bit.ly/316NfXU; Morrish 2019, https://bit.ly/2XQD8Jr), nevertheless the bureaucratic appetite for surveillance is fed by the ease of accessing quantifiable data. This post looks… Read More ›