"Following the financial crises in 2007, we have seen the intensification of neoliberal policies in education, with radical and potentially irrevocable shifts in the educational landscape, promoted under the auspices of ‘austerity’. This book highlights the central features of neoliberal education policies, their origins, recent developments and also their inherent weaknesses and flaws. It provides insights into the day to day realities and negative impacts of recent policies on the professional practice and work of educators, demonstrating how the changing conditions have led to de-professionalisation, alienation and a loss of professional autonomy and identity. The book also provides a set of accounts that detail the new realities emerging as a result of ‘austerity’ policies and questions the degree to which austerity has actually been developed as an ideological ‘cover story’ for the further monetisation and privatisation of public services. The various chapters challenge the common assumption that the neoliberal project is a monolithic orthodoxy by highlighting its complexities, variations and contradictions in the ways policies are refracted through action and practice in different contexts. The book also challenges the common assumption that there are no viable alternatives to neoliberal education policies, and does so by presenting a range of different examples, theoretical perspectives, discourses and alternative practices. It is argued that such alternatives not only highlight the range of different approaches, choices and possibilities but also provide the seedbed for a reimagined educational future. The authors offer a range of conceptual and theoretical insights and analyses that highlight the weaknesses and limitations inherent within the neoliberal education project and also illustrate the dangers in following the prevailing hegemonic discourse and trajectories. It is postulated that alternative educational approaches warrant greater and urgent attention because history suggests that rather than having weathered the recent economic crisis, we may well be witnessing the long tail of decline for the neoliberal project.This book will be useful for educators, researchers, students and policy makers interested in the detrimental effects of neoliberal education, the range of viable alternatives, and the routes to resistance and ways of reimagining alternative educational futures."

The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.

George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it. “Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” —Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion “Fascinating, innovative...Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” —Adam Tooze, Dissent “The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” —Boston Review

Explains the surprising endurance of neoliberal policymaking over two decades in post-Communist countries, from 1989-2008, and its decline after the financial crash.

Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.

This book examines the multiple ways that popular media mainstream and reinforce neoliberal ideology, exposing how they promote neoliberalism’s underlying ideas, values and beliefs so as to naturalize inequality, undercut democracy and contribute to the collapse of social notions of community and the common good. Covering a wide range of media and genres, and adopting a variety of qualitative textual methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the chapters examine diverse topics, from news coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the NBC show Superstore (an atypical instance in which a TV show, for one brief season, challenged the central tenets of neoliberalism) to "kitchen porn." The book also takes an intersectional approach, as contributors explore how gender, race, class and other aspects of social identity are inextricably tied to each other within media representation. At once innovative and distinctive in its illustration of how the media is complicit in perpetuating neoliberal ideology, Neoliberalism and the Media offers students and scholars alike an incisive portrait of the intersection between media and ideology today.

This book explores the impacts on personal and professional, local and global forms of belonging in educational spaces amidst rapid changes shaped by globalization. Encouraging readers to consider the idea of belonging as an educational goal as much as a guiding educational strategy, this text forms a unique contribution to the field. Drawing on empirical and theoretical analyses, chapters illustrate how educational experience informs a sense of belonging, which is increasingly juxtaposed against a variety of global dynamics including neoliberalism, transnationalism, and global policy and practice discourses. Addressing phenomena such as refugee education, large-scale international assessments, and study abroad, the volume’s focus on ten countries including Japan, Sierra Leone, and the US demonstrates the complexities of globalization and illuminates possibilities for supporting new constructions of belonging in rapidly globalizing educational spaces. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and educational policy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and cultural studies within education will also benefit from this volume.