The Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP) is a peer-reviewed, biannual, scholarly journal of contemplative cutting edge research and practice on subjects related to human social flourishing and peace.

Editor: Dr Jeremy A Rinker

Executive Editor: Abhijit Mazumder
Associate Editor: Nilanjan Dutta

ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Amii Omara-Otunnu • Dr Ashwani Kumar • Dr Bandana Purkayastha

Dr Jacint Jordana • Dr John Doyle • Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi • Ms Michelle Ndiaye

Dr Rahul Mukherji • Dr Shankari Sundararaman • Dr Vandana Shiva

JTPP (https://jtpp.uk), bringing together peace practitioners and academics, fills an important transdisciplinary gap that exists in current academic literature.

JTPP endeavours to support scholarship that highlights

○ the human potential for transformation,

○ a holistic and collaborative approach to complex systems,

○ the transdisciplinary nature of solutions to wicked social problems, and

○ a shared sense of purpose in human transnational activism for positive change.

JTPP thus provides a dynamic forum for sharing information and experiences primarily catering to academics, and activists particularly in the disciplines of Peace and Conflict Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Human Rights, History, as well as professionals, policymakers, organisations, institutions and individuals who nurture a firm belief in peace and human rights.

JTPP invites SUBMISSIONS from academics, scholar-practitioners, and social activists. Please see: Author’s Corner (https://jtpp.uk/authors-corner/) for Submission Guidelines.

JTPP follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

For SUBSCRIPTION, please see: https://jtpp.uk/subscription-plan/

Published by Frontpage Publications Limited (https://frontpagepublications.com), Level 2, 13 John Prince’s Street, London W1G 0JR, in both print and online versions, in January 2020.

In association with Peace and Justice Studies Association (https://www.peacejusticestudies.org).

ASSOCIATES at: Delhi, Honolulu, Istanbul, Kampala, Kolkata, London, Madrid, Norwalk

All articles published in this journal are copyright protected.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study or review,

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List of Contributors

ATAY, AYÇA DEMET is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Journalism, Near East University, North Cyprus. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Turkey; a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from the University of Bradford, UK, and a PhD in Communication and Media Studies from Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus. Prior to her academic career, Atay worked as a professional journalist in Turkey. Her research interests include political communication, communication for peace, peace journalism, rights-based journalism and ecological journalism.

COLE, JOE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Duke University, USA. Cole is a trained facilitator and supports communities, eco-villages, and non-profit organisations in developing cooperative skills, nonviolent communication, collaborative governance, and conflict transformation.

CUNLIFFE, RACHEL HALFRIDA earned her PhD in Special Education and Rehabilitation at the University of Arizona, USA. She is an Assistant Professor in Conflict Resolution Programme at the Portland State University, USA. Cunliffe’s research interests include teaching, restorative justice, and programme evaluation. Cunliffe consults on restorative justice capacity building. She is Chair of the Restorative and Community Justice Section at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and recently published on both restorative justice and on careers in peacebuilding as peace education.

DAWKINS, SUSAN is a PhD candidate in the Social and Comparative Analysis of Education (SCAE) at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Her research focuses on acculturation processes of Bhutanese refugee youth in the US. Dawkins is also an engagement coordinator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where she promotes connections with the city of Pittsburgh.

DOMÍNGUEZ, MARTHA QUIÑONES is Professor of Social Sciences, Research, Economics and Statistics of the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo; she is also the Acting Director of the Department of Social Sciences. A Master in Economics and Planning, Domínguez obtained her PhD from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She is an environmentalist, feminist, community developer and is the Chairwoman, Barceloneta Cultural Center besides being consultant, adviser and researcher in matters of environmental and social planning, social ecology and community work.

FRIETERS-REERMANN, NORBERT is a Post-Doctoral educationist, Master of International Humanitarian Assistance, and Professor at the Catholic University of Aachen (KatHO), Germany. He was a Scientific Assistant at the Rhine-Westphalian Technical University Aachen in Sociology with a specialty on gender and life course research. Frieters-Reermann consults and trains in civil conflict management and development cooperation. His research focuses on social work in the context of migration, peace and conflict education, and global learning.

GORMAN, JUNE is a 35+ year educator and former alternative middle school director, co-founder of the Transformative Education Forum (TEF-Global), Board Project Director of Outreach for the International Model United Nations Association (IMUNA) and serves as a member of the UN Education Caucus and UN Commons Cluster. Currently, she still teaches in CA schools and is a Learning Research Associate with the Schumacher Institute (UK), advocating international sustainability education models incorporating new neuroscience and full brain education. Gorman’s greatest honour is still to be called, ‘just a teacher’.

HARMON, JUSTIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community and Therapeutic Recreation at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA. He obtained his PhD in Community Development from the Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences at Texas A&M University, USA. Harmon’s primary threads of research focus on the role of music in life course development and recreation interventions post-diagnosis of cancer. He serves as a board member for The Academy of Leisure Sciences.

LANGLEY, STEPHANIE is Programme Leader of the MSc in Social Work at the University of Winchester, UK. She holds an MA in Advanced Social Work Studies from the University of Reading, UK and is a Registered Social Worker. She developed modules relating to critical reflection on the Step Up to Social Work Programme. Langley works with children and young people who are forced migrants and is part of the University of Winchester’s Forced Action Network.

PORTER, MAUREEN K, PhD, graduated from Stanford University, USA in International Educational Policy. She is an Associate Professor of Social and Comparative Analysis of Education (SCAE) at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and Associate Director of the Institute for International Studies in Education. As a feminist anthropologist of education, Porter composes multi-media ethnographies to study culturally-responsive and place-based education, with an emphasis on indigenous communities, global exchanges, and peacebuilding in multicultural democracies.

REERMANN, ANKE holds a Diploma in Educational Science. She serves as the Diocesan Coordinator of the initiatives of Mission, a Pontificial Mission Society and with World Church issues. Reermann is the Coordinator and Mediator for Capacitar Germany, and gained additional expertise in Nonviolent Communication after Marshall Rosenberg.

RHODES, DANIEL is the Director of the Undergraduate Social Work Programme at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNC-Greensboro), USA. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies with a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from the UNC-Greensboro in 2008. Before this, Rhodes obtained his Master’s in Social Work from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1996 and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Rhodes has been engaged in community-based work for over 20 years, working in mental health, therapeutic foster care, and working with immigrants and refugees.

RINKER, JEREMY A, the Editor of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis, is Assistant Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Peace & Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA where he researches the intersections between narrative and nonviolent social change. Rinker’s research interests revolve around the centrality of justice discourse, trauma awareness, and collective resilience in movements aimed at transforming social conflict, historical injustices, and structural violence. His book, ‘Identity, Rights, and Awareness: Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices (Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Asia)’ (Lexington) was published in 2018.

SCOTTY PETERSON is pursuing his Graduate Degree in Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) at University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG), USA. His Bachelor’s Degree is also in PCS from UNCG. Scotty is a Graduate Research Assistant/Programme Coordinator for the UNC-Greensboro/City of Greensboro’s joint Landlord-Tenant Dispute Programme. His research interests include exploring the revival of intrapersonal agency through the creation of a community development programme at Open Door Ministries Men’s Shelter in High Point, NC.

SHAH, GAURAV is an Assistant Professor in Mass Communication at the School of Management Sciences, Varanasi, India. He is pursuing his post-doctoral research in Political Communication from Malaviya Centre for Peace Research, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), India. Shah earned his PhD in Mass Communication from BHU, and his PhD thesis has been published in the form of a book. Shah has also written several e-modules on Mass Communication.

Disclaimer

While the information contained in this journal is believed to be true and accurate at the time of publication, neither the authors, editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors and/or omissions that may have been inadvertently made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the materials contained in this journal.

Editor’s Welcome and Introduction

Welcome to this exciting third issue (Vol. 2, No. 1) of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP). It is with great pleasure and an almost giddy anticipation that I welcome you to the journal and this important third issue focused on exploring the limits of our current neoliberal capitalist ethos and cultural mindset. Although the complex transdisciplinary dynamics of neoliberal norms and practices deserve a focused critical attention that would require many volumes, we are confident that this issue represents a set of novel ways to exploit the cracks that have begun to appear in the façade of our modern eras’ omnipresent neoliberal ideology and discourse. Unlike racism or sexism, the term neoliberalism is neither well understood nor framed in the public consciousness. The term may be misleading for some, implying both freedom and progressivism. But the concept of neoliberalism is much more complicated than some implied ‘new’ personal freedoms and is more imbricated in our daily lives than it first appears. Our call in this issue to foster exciting, innovative, and novel solutions to the wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973) of the incessant creep of neoliberalism as a discourse, set of practices, and cultural ideology has not gone unheard. The articles in this dynamic issue of the JTPP complicate our understanding of neoliberalism in an attempt to make the hegemonic influences of neoliberal ideology and practice both clearer and more pliable.

Arguably the most important justice-facing concept in the contemporary world, the concept of neoliberalism is rarely deployed outside the political economy of policy analysis and/or local ideological contexts. Yet, neoliberalism impacts all levels of human interaction—from interpersonal to international relationships. Neoliberal ideology is a value system, political statement, and economic model all-in-one. Naomi Klein (2007) calls the ideology of neoliberalism a ‘shape-shifter’ (Klein, 2007: 14) in that it is adaptable to the needs of corporate elites and easily deployable by them in times of crisis or disruption. Henry Giroux describes neoliberal practices as ‘moral sleeping pills’ (Giroux, 2002: 448), signalling the complex ways that neoliberal norms and practices, wittingly and unwittingly, impact real people’s lives. As a rigorous denial of collective responsibility, public good, and government regulation in the economic market, neoliberalism is a pernicious and all-encompassing political, social, and cultural ideology. It is so deeply imbedded in our ways of thinking that we often deploy its individualistic and consumerist language to describe it, without even being aware (Harmon et al., pp.155-177). While the turn to neoliberalism was not an immediate or uniform global phenomenon (Klein, 2007; Harvey, 2005 and Wolin, 2008 among others), this slow shift in global economic orthodoxy has had profound and lasting downstream consequences for those with less economic power and status mobility. In short, neoliberalism has alienated us from others and ourselves.

From the editor’s vantage point, this third issue comes at a precarious time for global peace praxis. At the start of 2020, increased authoritarianism, isolationism, and naked power, ostensibly unrestrained by the vicissitudes of cyber-laden public opinion, seem to be the norm around the globe. From the United States, to South America, to the Europe and India, neoliberal ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1991) hold sway. As in previous issues on environmental degradation (Vol. 1, No. 1) and the human costs of conflict (Vol. 1, No. 2), this third issue is aimed at both global thought leaders and peace practitioners. In balancing works that speak to academic transdisciplinary collaboration, as well as, pragmatic activist solidarity, the JTPP continues its unique, nonconventional, and inclusive approach to engage peace praxis. This third issue, in boldly challenging the reader to see the long tentacles of neoliberal norms and practice and how they impact states, institutions, and those that are outside the powerful global elite, builds on the successful foundations of prior issues of the JTPP. We continue to believe that peace is forged in the collaborative relationship of sustained social action. While we are still a new journal, we pride ourselves on maintaining a cutting-edge approach towards peace research and practice––one that solicits distinct, and often marginalised ways of researching and knowing. The origins of the JTPP lie in the frustrations that the editor had with limited, or superficial, research on the ‘wicked problems’ that impact our contemporary world. What you will find herein continues the JTPP tradition of critically reflexive scholarship and theory-informed practice, which foregrounds pragmatic social analysis aimed towards real and lasting change. In the words of the late Paulo Freire, praxis is ‘reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed’ (Freire, 1970: 126). In the spirit of Freire’s praxis sentiment, this third issue aims its attention towards the ‘predatory global phenomenon’ (Giroux, 2014: 1) of neoliberalism in a way that remains simultaneously objective, dialogic, and critical.

The critical aperture of this third issue is represented in the open and critical discourse of its contributors. Through the reflective and meditative tenacity of these social activists, peacebuilders, and educators it becomes possible to overcome the controlling discourse of neoliberal growth, individualistic choice, and the increasingly limited space for public good. As editor, I believe you will not be disappointed with the academic freedom and introspective creativity found in this issue. If Hannah Arendt is correct in claiming that praxis is the highest ideal of human life (Arendt, 1958), this will be made more obvious in your reading of this seminal issue of the JTPP.

Although neoliberalism is now ubiquitous in all our lives, creating the space and structure to interrogate its ubiquity has been both lacking and sorely needed. As JTPP continues to expand our readership and reach through welcoming members of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) among other outreach, we continue to see our mission as building peace through collaborative scholarly community. As those critically concerned with promoting future peace, we must exorcise ourselves of competition and the individualist orientation of the Western world and embrace nonviolent sharing and collaboration. It is in this light that I am so pleased to share this third issue of the JTPP with the world. In reading the pieces herein, please share them widely and encourage colleagues and fellow activists to submit ideas to future issues of the JTPP. Again, we are glad that you found us and hope that you feel in reading our journal that you have, indeed, found your people. Ours is a tribe that must be collectively nurtured to grow, and we believe the JTPP is an important place to do this.

The first article in this third issue, entitled Mobilising Shared Strengths for Collective Peacebuilding with Newcomers, exemplifies the collaborative and transdisciplinary aspirations of the JTPP. Drs Maureen K Porter, Norbert Frieters-Reerman, Stephanie Langley, Susan Dawkins and Anke Reerman, in highlighting their experiences in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany provide a critical view of trans-national asset-based approaches to helping newcomers navigate the neoliberal realities of life in a host country. They argue that ‘[b]y pooling our expertise across academic disciplines and professional fields, we enhance our ability to address entrenched issues that are conceptually impoverished by narrow neoliberal constructs of the person, value, success, freedom, and competition’ (Porter et al., p.36). As the opening article in this issue, this piece complicates simple conceptions of violence while focusing on multiple levels of analysis to see refugees as other than within ‘the limiting frames of homo economicus’ (Porter et al., p.36). The collaborative approach of these authors sets the table for the complex discussions that follow and engenders hope that we can overcome the insidious and hegemonic influences of neoliberal development and cultural assimilation.

In the second article, by Rachel Halfrida Cunliffe, a more personal reflection is developed. Her article, entitled A Pedagogy of Resistance: Reflections on Teaching Love and Indignation in a Neoliberal University, reflects the anxiety, angst, and demoralisation of teaching in an increasingly neoliberal public institution. Despite admitting that neoliberalism ‘was not in my lexicon’ (Cunliffe, p.40), the author becomes increasingly aware how her ‘own tenure track experience of third year review had perfectly enacted the power relations implicit and explicit in the neoliberal universities’ (Cunliffe, p.40) that she began reading about in a seminar she was attending about care ethics and neoliberalism. This experience leads to a critical reflection on her own pedagogies and how they ‘can promote effective strategies of resistance’ (Cunliffe, p.41). The process Cunliffe describes of going beyond ‘resistance to re-imagination, inventing, enacting and embodying a pedagogy and curriculum of love, dignity and democracy’ (Cunliffe, p.59), sets the stage for a further discussion about the neoliberal university in the journal’s concluding article by Harmon, Cole, Rhodes and Rinker.

In Ayça Demet Atay’s Transcending the ‘Neoliberal Self’ for Positive Peace: A New Balance between Individualism and Collectivism, the reader is treated to a creative exploration of questions such as: ‘Who is the “neoliberal self ”?’ and ‘How does she interact with society’ (Atay, p.65)? In Atay’s reading, one’s self-construal of self as either independent or interdependent, which she equates with individualism and collectivism, must be ‘deconstructed’ in order to reach a ‘dialectical synthesis between individualism and collectivism’ (Atay, p.65). Atay’s insightful and philosophical analysis holds out hope that there is something distinctive about this ‘new generation’ of ‘“autonomous” agents rejecting hierarchy who are yet connected to the common good of their collectivity’ (Atay, p.79). Like the other articles, this piece too finds some hope in the doom and gloom of neoliberal inequity and challenges the reader to think about what a ‘post-neoliberal positive peace’ (Atay, p.79) might look like.

In the fourth article in this issue, Gaurav Shah invites us to look at the concerning ‘state of affairs’ (Shah, p.83) in India. His article, entitled, A Social Media Study of Neoliberal Populist Hegemony, considers the ‘kind of counter-ideology’ that is needed to challenge the ‘hegemonic cult’ of neoliberal populism (Shah, p.82). He does this through a detailed analysis of India’s political divides as expressed through social media posts. In exploring the context of increased nationalism and the rise of the right-wing BJP in India, Shah concludes that, despite the right wing rhetoric of ‘rejecting “the others” (Muslims)’ and crying against a ‘common enemy––Pakistan’, to counter the diffusion of Hindu nationalism based on communal lines, counter-ideology will carry an emotional message of religious peace and harmony (Shah, p.83). Shah’s article flows nicely into Martha Quiñones Domínguez’s piece that is focused in a drastically different modern political context.

In taking us to Puerto Rico, Domínguez’s ‘We Are More, and We Are Not Afraid’—Puerto Rican Summer 2019 is a judicious interrogation of the neoliberal policies on full display in the political instability in Puerto Rico following hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Detailing the crisis and budget cuts in essential services that follow natural disaster, colonialism, and central government mismanagement, the paper outlines how the Puerto Rican people resisted historical oppression in new ways in the summer of 2019. As ‘an experiment of gradually applying neoliberal policies and adjustments’ (Domínguez, p.112), everyday Puerto Ricans resisted through peaceful demonstrations that were grounded in past agitations, but fuelled by the spread of online news and the arrest of officials on charges of corruption. This resistance was unique in that ‘this movement demonstrated a high level of tolerance to the coexistence of multiple forms of protest’ (Domínguez, p.115) and signalled a ‘colonial rupture’ (Domínguez, p.106-107,114, 118-119). Still while this rupture signalled something new it also exposed a ‘lack of a discourse that gives [the movement further] direction’ (Domínguez, p.119). From the vantage point of the Caribbean, neoliberal ideology is intricately tied to colonial history and, like in India, closely connected to nationalist discourse.

The sixth article takes us back to a more ethical and philosophical reading of the detritus of neoliberal norms and practices. June Gorman in her article entitled Excavating to Educate Under Hidden Neoliberal Value Systems digs deeply into neoliberalism ‘petty lies’ to expose the ‘emotionally, even spiritually, confusing hidden value systems’ (Gorman, p.130) implicit in neoliberal ideology and practice. Arguing that only through deconstructing the values of corporatised education and empathetic knowing can a ‘real chance to reconnect right-brain felt understanding to left-brain rational knowledge’ (Gorman, p.133) be achieved, Gorman challenges the ‘single-focused value system on money and power alone’ (Gorman, p.133). Gorman’s solution of developing an ‘emotionally, socially and culturally intelligent alternative education system’ that supports ‘one’s highest learning potential’ (Gorman, p.151), takes our inquiry back towards educational institutions, seemingly a critical player in any attempt at resistance to neoliberalism.

In the final article by Justin Harmon, Joe Cole, Daniel Rhodes and Jeremy A Rinker, intuitions of higher education are again the contextual focus. Like the second article by Cunliffe in this issue, these authors’ article, entitled Resisting the Neoliberal University: Situating Resistance in Critical Pedagogy, provides a critique of life and work in an increasingly neoliberal modern University. Choosing to come together out of ‘a growing concern for the state of public higher education and the encroaching norms of neoliberal thought and reason into its ranks’, (Harmon et al., p.157), these authors share sections of a wide-ranging transcription of their collective dialogue that is focused on the de-humanising experiences of neoliberalism in their respective disciplines. In feeling blessed [to] ‘have a safe forum to discuss the neoliberalisation of higher education’ (Harmon et al., p.175), the authors present a strong case for how neoliberalism marginalises critical thought and normalises ignorance as it simultaneously ‘promotes the endless loop of production and consumption as the default organising principles of American society, thus eradicating democracy from the public sphere’ (Harmon et al., p.176). As a call to arms, and to institutional resistance, this final piece is not intended to leave readers deflated, but rather hopeful that there is still the potential to take back the University for critical thinkers and those less powerful. As workers in institutions traditionally positioned with the important role of knowledge creation, all the authors in this issue speak to the current state and future needs for resisting the many negative effects, intended and unintended, of neoliberalism’s practices and norms.

Again, thank you for reading us––you too are part of this collaborative exercise! I am glad you joined us on this transdisciplinary and peace-focused journey to interrogate neoliberalism in our third issue. I remain convinced that this journal, and particularly this issue, represents a vital creative voice that is desperately needed in our neoliberal and individualistic world. As you turn the pages of our third issue, I hope the possibilities of inherent change remain pregnant in your being. May the deeper knowledge and wider understanding of neoliberalism, its causes and its effects, help guide your own peace practice and inform lasting social change. Again, I encourage you to share this new and creative knowledge with friends, colleagues, and fellow activists. I believe that the articles in this issue provide the hope, collective resistance, and informed dissent necessary to achieve change in today’s violent contexts. We wish you well in your work of peace praxis and welcome your feedback and continued support for our shared work.

With metta (loving kindness and compassion),

DR JEREMY A RINKER

Department of Peace and Conflict Studies

The University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA

Editor, Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP)

E: jarinker@uncg.edu

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958

Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum, 1970

Foucault, M, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, London: Penguin, 1991

Giroux, H A, ‘Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere’, Harvard Educational Review, 72(4), 2002, pp.425-463

Giroux, H A, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014

Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005

Klein, N, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan, 2007

Rittel, Horst W J & Melvin, M Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences 4, No. 2 (June 1973), pp.155-169

Wolin, Sheldon S, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008

Mobilising Shared Strengths for Collective Peacebuilding with Newcomers

Maureen K Porter, Norbert Frieters-Reerman, Stephanie Langley, Susan Dawkins & Anke Reerman

ABSTRACT

Peace is not simply the absence of violence, oppression, and marginalisation. Building peaceful spaces requires an integrative, culturally affirming response. Such a proactive approach is particularly pressing when designing welcoming and trauma-healing institutional support systems for new immigrants and refugees. Our transdisciplinary, trans-Atlantic approach to the praxis of peace combines an analysis of Galtung’s (1990) personal, structural, and cultural forms of violence, along with Cobb’s narrative violence (2013) with Yosso’s (2005) theory of community cultural wealth. Highlighting examples from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we critique how multi-layered, asset-based theories can counter the pernicious deficit-based frames underlying neoliberal constructs and conventions. Focusing on institutional, individual, community, and caregiver levels, we offer on-the-ground accounts of the work of universities, non-governmental agencies, and educators who can widen our repertoire of effective strategies for mobilising the shared strengths necessary for collective peacebuilding.

KEYWORDS:

Structural, personal, cultural, narrative violence; community cultural wealth

INTRODUCTION

Since the so-called German ‘Summer of Migration’ of 2015, public concerns about how best to respond to asylum seekers have intensified internationally at the crux of social, political, and structural debates. Whether characterised as ‘forced migrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘undocumented immigrants’, or even ‘illegal immigrants’, these newcomers face forms of violence at every new barrier. Populist fears and crisis-speak accompanying this trend have spread like wildfire across national borders, often outpacing the actual arrival of desperate people on the move. Bolstered by the ideological violence that stands ready to detain and dehumanise them, newcomers increasingly encounter vicious confrontations from key sectors in our radicalising host nations. Rather than finding sanctuary from the hate crimes and marginalisation they faced, they often encounter new systems of exclusion.

From the beginning, public discourse and media coverage have taken on an oppositional tone that reflects capitalist neoliberal assumptions about newcomers as competitors for scarce jobs in a global economy. These are symbolic at their base, but result in tangible barriers for even minimal inclusion, much less for a sincere welcome. Alternate metaphorical constructions of this ‘flow’ or ‘flood’ of newcomers or even an invading ‘caravan’ headed northward towards the United States, reveal aspects of a neoliberal construction of the essentialised ‘Other’ as an imminent threat to existing citizens’ life, liberty, and prosperity. Whether a ‘deluge’ or ‘invasion’, either metaphor rests upon narrative constructions of these new arrivals as a threat that must be ‘contained’ or ‘stopped’ at the imperilled national boundaries with walls, both figurative and literal.

Cobb (2010) talks about the legitimating and world-building power of public narratives to exacerbate or to contain violence. She writes,

Narratives matter. They shape the social world in which they circulate, reflecting and refracting the cultural limits of what narratives can be told, in what setting, to whom. From this perspective, they structure how we make sense of ourselves, as members of a community, but they also structure how we understand right and wrong, good and evil. (p.296)

Whether we encapsulate newcomers inside a simplistic storyline of invading opportunists or whether we acknowledge key mitigating circumstances, ones to which we might also be vulnerable, stories matter. We need a wider set of practice-based narratives about how to better respond to public expressions of aggression against new arrivals.

At the same time that spotlight-grabbing tweets are picked up and excessively circulated in global media markets, each country also produces more complex counter-narratives that are generated by dynamic, grassroots movements that understand the real situation on the ground. While these correctives are frustratingly denied top billing, each of the authors knows that, at home, more balanced perspectives actually are the more widely circulating and more broadly endorsed. Unfortunately, they seldom are the stories that top the news cycle; as a result, we only hear misleading and superficial reports about one another, rather than the truths about effective interventions.

Many of these proactive, home-grown movements focus on the needed assets that newcomers bring. People in motion carry within themselves transportable forms of cultural wealth that can enrich their host nations. Our challenge, as professional peacebuilders, is to prominently speak back to public discord, built on, as Galtung (1990) identifies, implicit structural and cultural forms of violence and which in turn provoke explicit forms of personal violence. We need to counter the pernicious deficit-based frames underlying neoliberal constructs and conventions that legitimate these forms of aggression. As trans-Atlantic social scientists and activists working in many disciplines and professional fields, we need to coordinate a sea change that shifts the social construction of newcomers as being the problem to the way that we see our inadequate responses to mobility and integration across the world as being the underlying problem.

Our challenge, as professional peacebuilders, is to prominently speak back to public discord, built on, as Galtung (1990) identifies, implicit structural and cultural forms of violence and which in turn provoke explicit forms of personal violence.

In the search for constructive alternatives, Amster (2019) notes that we will need to directly confront the conditions that create conflict and engage in ‘concerted action, the mobilisation of collective resources, and the leveraging of political will’ (p.82). He notes that this transformative conceptual and practical

[M]ove from peacemaking to peacebuilding is a subtle one in some respects, but the implications can be profound. What we seek are tools for confronting and transforming violence in all of its forms—direct and systemic—coupled with a sense of robust interdependence and a willingness to resist inevitability through common purpose. Sharing stories is a good start; so, too, is promulgating methods for turning them into action. (Italics original, p.82)

Candidly acknowledging the violence inherent in nationalist discourses of exclusion and repulsion has been a poignant aspect of our recent work to generate energy for peacebuilding in each of our countries. The stories and exemplary programmes that we feature can be sources of shared momentum.

As a set of authors, we represent the disciplines of comparative education policy, social work, anthropology, psychology, and several applied fields of social justice activism. While in the USA and the UK scholarly work on complex social issues that impact youth, families, and communities may be anchored in a professional School of Education, in Germany we have found that some of our best allies and colleagues come from the Catholic University (KatHO) who address the same issues under the auspices of social work. We work in divided societies with grassroots movements working on reconciliation and right relationship: German colleagues who are celebrating thirty years of a reunited country after the fall of the Berlin Wall; British colleagues who are, at the time of writing this article, still enmeshed in Brexit negotiations; and US American colleagues who mourn the one year memorial of the massacres of our neighbours at the Tree of Life synagogue. We seek new ways of being what our street signs in Pittsburgh proclaim: ‘Stronger Together’. Whether or not we embrace the potentially militaristic overtones of ‘mobilising for peace’ or not, we need to be aware that counteracting discourses of hate require us to marshal formidable intellectual as well as practical resources.

To these ends, we assembled under the auspices of the KatHO’s Social Glocalisation Conference (Frieters-Reermann, 2019) as a panel of scholar-practitioners who are interested in transdisciplinary approaches to reducing violence and enhancing more humane forms of active peace. Our exchange mirrors the five principles of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999) that assert that by offering new models, narratives, and modes of exchanging best practices, we inherently reshape the socially constructed world of what is possible. Our task was to share theories for countering the neoliberal practices and discourses that we each find counterproductive and socially divisive. We identified two theoretical frames that recast peace praxis as proactively enhancing assets rather than defensively mitigating extant violence. We also shared narratives that have been effective in providing support for the complex needs of traumatised newcomers to our cities and universities. Cobb (2013) notes that critical awareness of such contested narratives, including slogans about (im-)migration, can offer new ways for people to speak candidly about intergroup violence without further inscribing it as legitimate or assuming it to be an intractable feature of global mobility. Moreover, through this panel and subsequent exchanges, we identified priority spaces for action at institutional, individual, community, and caregiver levels. These enable us to be both more resilient in the face of neoliberal pushback and to be more hopeful that the sum of small, in-person interventions indeed would make a cumulative difference, both for newcomers, as well as for our professions.

The University of Pittsburgh and the KatHO are celebrating more than five years of fruitful exchange connecting institutional leaders, faculty, non-governmental (NGO) partners, professional study tour participants, and student interns. Extended, multilingual exchanges have enabled us to make explicit some of the cultural Weltanschauungen (worldviews) that underlie neoliberalism in each of our nations. From these discussions, the crux of the issues is that neoliberal institutions divest central governments from much responsibility for families and workers, vesting those in the voluntary care of employers or even the for-profit private domain. Workers are seen as increasingly expendable in global flows of capital and production. Global capital sets the pace, assuming inherent benefits of unrestrained growth and conspicuous consumption, regardless of the social or environmental cost. Success and one’s social values are primarily...

A Pedagogy of Resistance: Reflections on Teaching Love and Indignation in a Neoliberal University

Rachel Halfrida Cunliffe

ABSTRACT

An abundance of scholarship addresses the impact of neoliberalism on higher education. Alongside this literature is a second series of explorations of the impact on the lives of academics. This literature speaks of pedagogies of resistance and hope, of ‘poetics’ which allow individuals to navigate the shoals of neoliberal subjectivity both in terms of the pedagogy to which academics must respond for promotion and validation of their worth in academia, and in terms of the expectations of the new student whose purposes in higher education are transformed by debt and precarity to being those of consumers. This paper explores these literatures in order to clarify a personal path to a pedagogy of resistance supported by an ethic of care.

KEYWORDS

Neoliberal, higher education, pedagogy of resistance, care ethics

INTRODUCTION

For many White liberals and socialists, Brexit and the election of Trump in the US came out of the blue. Grappling with the subsequent dismantling and reversals of ‘progress’, we thought we had made towards diverse democracy, and social justice has brought further shocks. White supremacy has surfaced not just as the subculture of a fringe element which can be judged and dismissed, but as a serious ideological lens through which to look at our own complicity with the dominant systems which, it now appears sure, put us in the position in which we found ourselves in 2016 and the cascading impacts since. Speaking for myself, I found that I became profoundly demoralised. This was partly as a function of my age and the limited time I have to build anew what I have spent nearly four decades helping to construct; partly because of the revealed flimsiness of what I had thought so strong; but mostly as a function of my shame at the chastening revelations about my own denial, the insulated bubble my privilege had allowed me to inhabit, and the ways in which my labour had been used to help advance a project which, now I could see it more clearly, I abhorred. What was clear was that our democracies had failed (Grayling, 2018), and that was an indictment on education. How had I been duped? How had I not seen what was happening? And how could I now put on the brakes? More to the point, how could I make amends to those I had led along the path with me? And how could I—and should I—engage in active resistance as a public educator in a public university in the US as I go forward?

During this time of sadness, embarrassment, and bewilderment, I was attracted to a small seminar offered by an emeritus professor and a director of a programme to which I had tangential connections. The seminar was directed to faculty and was to focus on care ethics and neoliberalism. For some time, I had been exploring the implications of care ethics for pedagogy in higher education, and during this same quarter, I was honoured to take up a fortnight length fellowship at an institute for ethics and leadership at another university.

Neoliberalism, however, was not in my lexicon. If I had thought about neoliberalism at all before that, I thought it was an economic system for the wealthy and, as I did not feel particularly a part of that group, I did not consider it relevant. I doubt I had ever read anything with ‘neoliberalism’ in the title, at least, not on purpose.

Introduced to Butler, Brown, Giroux and many others during that fall, I found myself returning again and again to texts that were in a language I struggled to comprehend. The press of other commitments and requirements of my tenure track efforts forced me to set those articles and books then piling on my home office floor to one side. But the following summer, while I was off contract, I immersed in the literature for an extended retreat intended to guide me in pedagogical and curricular transformation of the classes I teach. It no longer felt acceptable to continue as I had been doing. I felt a duty to engage a ‘pedagogy of hope’ (Freire, 1999). I wanted to check in with myself; take inventory of my beliefs, values and practices in the light of these new readings and thoughts, and see how I could improve and infuse with more integrity my approaches to my relationships with students as both curriculum and pedagogy.

My first article on this effort was rejected without comment or hopes other than to say that the publication was not interested in a resubmission. Feeling the ‘toxic shame’ of which Gill (2010) speaks, I spent the following year reflecting and ruminating and stumbling through various efforts to be more transparent and mutually accountable with students. A call for papers on neoliberalism prompted me to review my draft and, initially, attempt to ‘flesh it out’, repurpose it. In revisiting the literature, however, I became more aware of how my own tenure track experience of third year review had perfectly enacted the power relations implicit and explicit in the neoliberal universities I was reading about. The literature helped re-politicise what had been a totally depoliticised and individualised narrative of suitability and evaluation. My experiences in the intervening year had granted me new sensitivities to the literature and radically advanced and focused my initial critique. This paper aims to establish a foothold on a journey. Here I make an attempt to clarify neoliberalism as it pertains to public higher education, to describe the micropolitics of that implementation in terms of the relations of faculty to the institution, students to their own education, and the implications of that for pedagogies and curricula, and to discuss how these formulations can promote effective strategies of resistance.

I make an attempt to clarify neoliberalism as it pertains to public higher education, to describe the micropolitics of that implementation in terms of the relations of faculty to the institution, students to their own education, and the implications of that for pedagogies and curricula, and to discuss how these formulations can promote effective strategies of resistance.

Accounts and models of neoliberalism and its effects abound (Giroux, 2010; Newfield, 2008). They are dominated by system level analyses that speak of globalisation and which may focus on specific institutions and their reformation in the neoliberal project. However, these overarching narratives obscure the lived experience of neoliberalism in workplaces and in the everyday affairs (Cannizzo, 2018; Gill, 2010). To answer this lack, a literature has run alongside these analyses, interweaving with them, which offers insights and glimpses into ‘points of insubordination’ (Foucault, 1982). For those of us a little further behind, these accounts are signposts on a path of resistance (Barcan, 2013; Blackmore, 2015; Kenway, Boden & Fahey, 2015). Taken together, they are a form of ‘performative assembly’ whose varying voices and strategies emerge as a unity of refusal (Butler, 2015).

Public universities are an excellent example of what neo-liberalised workplaces look like (Gill, 2010). Academics are fundamentally creative workers, passionate about our creations, and highly disciplined in our craft. For most academics, our identities are entangled in our intellectual pursuits in ways that make us vulnerable to the governmentality of neo-liberalisation (Cannizzo, 2018; Foucault, 1982). We are in many ways ‘model neoliberal subjects, with [our] endless self-monitoring, flexibility, creativity and internalization of new forms of auditing and calculating’ (Gill, 2010: 241). However, where the forces and pressures on us may be great, there are also opportunities to elude and flow around the attempts to fragment us (Barcan, 2013). The literature I discuss here has helped me to apply a new lens to my own experience, re-politicise my problems as in sync with those of other academics rather than a result of personal failings, and to begin to chart my direction.

It is not my intention to prescribe action for anyone else. I am aiming to reimagine my own relations within the neoliberal higher education institution of which I am a part. My goal is that my engagement resists and even disrupts the institution’s de-democratising and self-subjectivising tendencies in the cause of an agenda which would subvert the purpose of higher education from one of collective good to private advantage for students. In addition, I hope to more effectively challenge the emphasis on specific kinds of productivities for a knowledge economy built on contingent and insecure labour co-opted from me and my colleagues as academics. First, I explore the concept of neoliberalism and define its impacts on public higher education. Then I assert the purpose of public higher education and marshal examples and suggestions for how I can support that purpose through the pedagogy and curriculum of my relations as an academic.

DEFINING NEOLIBERALISM

Clear statements and descriptions of neoliberalism are hard to find. The literature cautions us that neoliberalism is variously expressed by diverse practices and approaches depending on where it is taken up culturally and institutionally (Cannizzo, 2018). Neoliberalism is defined by Phelan and Dawes (2018) as being a contended concept when applied to regimes and economies. However, they state that

Across its variegated articulations, neoliberal regimes are consistent with affirming the value of market competition in different social scales and contexts (the state, the organization, and the individual), and in treating economic efficiency as the primary calculus of public value. Political and cultural identification with other value systems is progressively eroded, as illustrated by social regimes . . . that lose any sense of coherent normative alternatives. Neoliberalism is therefore much more than an economic program; rather, it represents a political and cultural blueprint for constructing the very image of the social presupposed by neoliberal theorists and reconstituting the very meaning of “liberal democracy”. Politics is thus recast in a neoliberal frame—in an anti-political sensibility that is suspicious of any normative vision that threatens the (politically constructed) autonomy of market reason. (para 34)

Phelan and Dawes’ description focuses mostly at the system level although they...

Transcending the ‘Neoliberal Self’ for Positive Peace: A New Balance between Individualism and Collectivism

Ayça Demet Atay

ABSTRACT

Peace refers to a socio-economic, political and cultural order. In this article, along with Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation of ‘positive peace’, I define ‘peace’ as reaching a peace culture, where not only direct violence, but also forms of structural and cultural violence are overcome. As an alternative to the neoliberal ideology of global capitalism, which has come to dominate the common-sense understanding of ‘peace’, positive peace must be a horizontal, egalitarian, and classless society, a society of freedom, equality and solidarity.

In individualism/collectivism theoretical framework, freedom and equality are thought to refer to two distinctively different types of social organisation, namely, individualism and collectivism, based on two different types of self-construal, independent or autonomous versus interdependent or relational self. Mainstream social psychology presumes that autonomy and relatedness are mutually exclusive categories, which may not, however, be the case.

In the age of global capitalism, neoliberal ideology has dominated the common-sense understanding of ‘peace’. Former US President George W Bush’s following quotation provides the mantra of neoliberal peace: ‘We seek a just peace where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade’.

For reaching positive peace, we need a new balance between individualism and collectivism. In this paper, I argue that such a balance requires a relational ontology and a new form of self-other relationship, which encompass autonomy and relatedness. For this reason, I will first discuss the atomistic self-construal of neoliberalism and alternative indigenous traditions of relational ontology. I will then present the ‘autonomous-related self’ construal, which has emerged in urban centres of the non-Western world. This alternative self-construal points to an individual who is both autonomous and caring for her/his collectivity. This autonomous-relational self presents a dialectical synthesis between individualism and collectivism.

KEYWORDS

Positive peace, individualism, collectivism, relational ontology, autonomy, relatedness, neoliberalism

INTRODUCTION

Peace is a polysemic concept which seems to ‘mean all things to all people’ (Lynch, 2014: 46). Therefore, asking for peace is not enough; one needs to define what kind of peace one asks for. Peace refers to a socio-political, economic and cultural order. For the early Christian theologian St Augustine (1950) peace was tranquillitas ordinis, or the ‘tranquillity of order’. This definition that may seem plausible at first sight is actually deceptive, as ‘tranquillity’ may result from oppressive power relations that prevail in a society, indicating naturalised oppression.

In the age of global capitalism, neoliberal ideology has dominated the common-sense understanding of ‘peace’. Former US President George W Bush’s following quotation provides the mantra of neoliberal peace: ‘We seek a just peace where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade’ (Bush cited in Pugh, Cooper & Turner, 2008: 2). A functioning free market economy and representative democracy have been presented as the cures to the ills of repression, resentment and poverty. In reality, this hegemonic discourse has been nothing but a mask that attempts to hide the repression, resentment and poverty itself has created. The positive side of the same coin is that this hegemonic discourse has not reached the level of ‘tranquillity of order’, as its hegemony has been constantly resisted and challenged today.

In accordance with Johan Galtung’s concept of ‘positive peace’, this article refers to ‘peace’ as reaching a culture of peace where not only direct violence, but also structural and cultural forms of violence are overcome, and it mainly searches answers to the question of how to reach positive peace on the level of self-other relations. Reaching a horizontal, egalitarian, and classless society of freedom, equality and solidarity necessitate transformation not only on the system level, but also on the individual level of self-other relationships.

Who is the ‘neoliberal self’? How does she interact with society? Is transformation to positive peace possible with the neoliberal self-construal? If not, what shall be its alternative(s)? This article attempts to answer these questions with reference to relational ontology of indigenous cultures and the individualism/collectivism theoretical framework of cross-cultural studies. In individualism/collectivism theoretical framework, freedom is associated with individualism and equality with collectivism, and these two types of social organisation are thought to encompass two distinctively different types of self-construal, independent or autonomous versus interdependent or relational self. Autonomy and relatedness are presumed to be mutually exclusive categories, which may not, however, be the case. In this paper, I argue that for reaching positive peace, we need a new balance between individualism and collectivism.

In the following section, the concept of positive peace will be discussed, which will be followed by a discussion on relational indigenous ontologies, and then by individualism/collectivism framework. The article will finally present the autonomous-related self-construal that has emerged in the urban centres of the non-Western Majority World.

DEFINING ‘POSITIVE PEACE’

Johan Galtung defines ‘positive peace’ as reaching a culture of peace where all three forms of violence—direct, structural and cultural—are transformed. According to Galtung, direct violence is obvious; it is visible to the naked eye. But to notice structural and cultural violence, you must first lift the curtains that render them invisible. In his words, ‘Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters’, which ‘may be seen as about as natural as the air around us’ (1969: 173). Structural violence can be understood as a system of political, economic and social relations creating barriers for people that they cannot remove, affecting their lives negatively. The economic, social or political injustices caused such as poverty and gender discrimination can be given as examples of structural violence. By cultural violence, Galtung refers to those aspects of culture such as religion, ideology, language, art and science ‘that can be used to justify or legitimise direct and structural violence’ (1990: 291). Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence legitimate, right and, hence, invisible. In Galtung’s words ‘Direct violence is an event; structural violence is a process with ups and down; cultural violence is an invariant, a “permanence”’ (p.294). Galtung gives slavery as an example to structural violence, which was a process that ended with its abolishment; yet, cultural violence in the forms of racism and hate speech still continues.

Neoliberal capitalism entails a great deal of direct, structural and cultural violence. How should an alternative order of positive peace be like? If we are to draw a sketch, first of all, it must be an egalitarian order, where socio-economic class inequalities, constituting major sources of structural violence are overcome. Positive peace must be a horizontal socio-economic order, where not only the inequalities of class, but also forms of other hierarchies, such as gender, race or age, are transcended. Positive peace must be a cosmopolitan society which does not divide humanity into ‘us-versus-them’ categories with fictive constructions of ‘nation’. And finally, positive peace must be an ecological society which does not position humanity against or outside the nature, with the awareness that human beings can only exist together with all other living beings in a relationally ontological way.

Neoliberal capitalism entails a great deal of direct, structural and cultural violence. How should an alternative order of positive peace be like? If we are to draw a sketch, first of all, it must be an egalitarian order, where socio-economic class inequalities, constituting major sources of structural violence are overcome. Positive peace must be a horizontal socio-economic order, where not only the inequalities of class, but also forms of other hierarchies, such as gender, race or age, are transcended.

In short, positive peace must be a horizontal, egalitarian, and classless social order with no hierarchies that create forms of domination; it must be a society of freedom and solidarity. Can the subject of neoliberal capitalism reach this society? What kind of transformation is needed on the level of self-other relations to reach this end?

THE ‘NEOLIBERAL SELF’

Neoliberalism is not just a doctrine of political economy; it is a ‘principle of civilisation that shapes the socio-cultural makeup of people through socialisation’ (McGuigan, 2014: 224). As David Harvey notes, neoliberalism has become a pervasive hegemonic discourse, ‘incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’ (2005: 3). Put simply, in the age of neoliberal capitalism, we, as the subjects of our lives, make sense of the world and of our selves through the lens of neoliberalism.

The ideal type of the ‘neoliberal self’, in Foucault’s term, is the homo economicus, who is ‘an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings’ (Foucault, 2008: 226). Foucault asks the question of what it means ‘to form human capital’. The answer he gives is the following: ‘It means, of...

A Social Media Study of Neoliberal Populist Hegemony

Gaurav Shah

ABSTRACT

In recent years, global discourse on ‘neoliberal populism’ is becoming more and more noisy. Hayek’s doctrine of neoliberal ideology seen as a political-economic project¹ is being substantiated with the idea of populism.² Right-wing populist movements are being co-opted by neoliberal ideology.³ Neoliberalism has gradually developed into a political-cultural hegemony.⁴ This hegemony is the global domination of the ideology of neoliberalism. Mass media and now social media have further exacerbated the hegemony of neoliberalism. But at the same time, there are also counterhegemonic narratives within the domain of social media that questions and challenges the hegemonic cult created and diffused by neoliberal populism. This paper attempts to add to the idea of ‘counter-ideology’ (a term coined by John Schwarzmantel in his paper ‘Challenging Neoliberal Hegemony’)⁵ from the media perspective. This counter-ideology will be a force that will influence and mobilise public to oppose the tight grip of neoliberal populism. The paper tries to look for fake news and misinformation that encourage the populist hegemony and also explore the voices that denounce the supremacy of markets and populist ideas.

KEYWORDS

Social media, neoliberal populist hegemony, right-wing movement, counter-ideology

INTRODUCTION

In India, inequality in the field of consumption, expenditure, income and wealth has been on a spike since the launch of economic reforms. It is estimated that income inequality in India is the second-highest in the world (Haque & Reddy, 2019). Not only income inequality, but other inequalities are also rising in India. India ranks 130 out of 189 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index.⁶ India has been ranked at the 103rd position among 119 countries on the Global Hunger Index⁷ and has joined the club of 45 countries that have ‘serious levels of hunger’. India ranks below Bhutan, Bangladesh, and even sub-Saharan Sudan in global health care (Yadavar, 2018). More than 732 million Indians still do not have access to toilets, and that too three years after the launch of the ambitious scheme of the government, Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan (Clean India Mission) (Sharma, 2017). Religious hatred in the name of nationalism and populism has also increased in the past four to five years considerably. Religious violence against minorities has gone up many folds after the current dispensation came to power in 2014 (Mander, 2018). India is ranked as the fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. It is behind Syria, Nigeria and Iraq (Bhattacharya, 2017). The condition of the economy of India is also in very bad shape⁸ with unemployment highest in the past four decades (Sharma, 2019). These figures are scary and present a grim picture of the country that dreams of an economy of five trillion dollars by 2024.⁹

The central argument of this paper is that a kind of counter-ideology is needed to challenge the hegemonic cult created and diffused by neoliberal populism. The counter-ideology will embrace all the sections of the population of the country. This counter-ideology will be a force that will influence and mobilise the public to oppose the tight grip of neoliberal populism. For that, the counter-ideology has to meet certain criteria. Firstly, to mobilise a mass constituency, it must adopt an inclusive form of nationalism that can challenge the aggressive form of nationalism practised by right-wing groups. Secondly, it should make people aware of the disadvantages of the spread of neoliberal hegemony and the rise of right-wing populism in India. Lastly, to counter the diffusion of Hindu nationalism based on communal lines, counter-ideology will carry an emotional message of religious peace and harmony.

Even the economists who once worked with the present government are worried about the state of affairs of the country. According to Raghuram Rajan,¹⁰ ‘Majoritarianism and Authoritarianism and populist welfare schemes launched by the Indian government are taking India down to a ‘dark and uncertain path’.¹¹ Neoliberal policies of the government marinated with aggressive populism certainly have not helped the common mass of the country. We are, therefore, faced with the following question: How to curb this neoliberal populism? Are there any voices in India that can take on this neoliberal populist hegemony? The central argument of this paper is that a kind of counter-ideology is needed to challenge the hegemonic cult created and diffused by neoliberal populism. The counter-ideology will embrace all the sections of the population of the country. This counter-ideology will be a force that will influence and mobilise the public to oppose the tight grip of neoliberal populism. For that, the counter-ideology has to meet certain criteria. Firstly, to mobilise a mass constituency, it must adopt an inclusive form of nationalism that can challenge the aggressive form of nationalism practised by right-wing groups. Secondly, it should make people aware of the disadvantages of the spread of neoliberal hegemony and the rise of right-wing populism in India. Lastly, to counter the diffusion of Hindu nationalism based on communal lines, counter-ideology will carry an emotional message of religious peace and harmony.

The idea of counter-ideology has been borrowed from John Schwarzmantel’s paper ‘Challenging Neoliberal Hegemony’ (2005). The counter-ideology will be formed from the narratives of the sane and rational voices of India that denounce the supremacy of markets and the rise of right-wing populism in the country—the voices that believe in secularism and inclusiveness of the Indian society.

METHODS

The views and ideas of those persons who have a voice in the society will be taken from their videos uploaded on social media site YouTube. The selection of videos will be as per convenience. Only those videos of the voices will be taken for the study that conforms to the criterion of counter-ideology that is chosen.

To address the first criterion of my counter-ideology, that is inclusive form of nationalism, the voices must be of the people who are known for their secular views, who are academicians, who have written research articles, who have written books, who are active on mainstream media as well as on social media. Out of the many videos on YouTube, I found historian Ramachandra Guha and political analyst cum psephologist Yogendra Yadav meeting my first criterion. Both Guha and Yadav are known for their strong secular views (Guha, 2018; Yadav, 2017). Both are read, seen and heard on various platforms of media. Ramachandra Guha¹² is a renowned historian and author. He has written extensively on various subjects ranging from environment, economics, politics, history, and cricket too. Yogendra Yadav is a noted political scientist, a psephologist and an activist.¹³ He has worked on the grassroot levels.

To meet the first part of the second criterion of my counter-ideology, that is to make people aware of the disadvantages of the spread of neoliberal hegemony in India, the voices should be known internationally as a critique of neoliberal hegemony. They should be academically proficient as well as should be known for their work on grassroot. For that, I selected videos of Arundhati Roy and Jean Drèze from the many available on YouTube. Both are intellectual and have been working at the grassroots for the poor and the marginalised. Also, they have been vocal against the neoliberal policies of the government. Therefore, their narratives are not based on their intellectualism only but also their experience. Arundhati Roy is an internationally acclaimed novelist and writer. She has been a fierce critique of the policies of the Indian government that encourages economic neoliberalisation.¹⁴ Arundhati has spoken and written extensively about the plight of the minorities in India. She is a voice that is heard by many. Jean Drèze, is a famous economist and activist. He is a visiting professor at Ranchi University, India. Drèze is a grassroots activist who works on various developmental issues¹⁵ that India is facing like hunger, famine and gender inequality.

To meet the second part of the second tenet of counter-ideology, which is to make people aware of the disadvantages of the rising right-wing populism in India, I needed a voice with experience in the field of academics and political journalism. To get a sense of how minorities are treated for populist advantages, I needed someone who has worked and written on communal conflicts in India. I found nationally acclaimed journalist Siddharth Varadarajan to be one of them. A political journalist, Varadarajan has written profoundly on Sikh riots 1984 and Godhra riots 2002.¹⁶ In one of his videos, he shows as to how the government is launching a populist scheme to instil fear among the minorities, especially among the Muslims. Apart from this, how social media is being misused by right-wing groups to spread right-wing populism to win elections was an interesting dimension for study. Therefore, Al Jazeera’s story on YouTube has been selected. To address the third criterion of counter-ideology, I have taken a fiction story inspired by the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots from a video on YouTube.

The article proceeds as follows: the first section deals with the concept of neoliberalism and how did it become one of the chief components of the ideology of right-wing groups in India. The second section is about the description of right-wing populism in an Indian context. The third section focuses on how right-wing groups cleverly combine populism and nationalism for their political gain. In the fourth section, different videos of the people who have a voice in society are selected. They are the voices that counter and question the hegemony of neoliberal populism. Also, one case study that gives the message of social harmony and religious peace has been selected. It has been selected to add emotional elements to the idea of ‘counter-ideology’. Emotional stories of religious harmony and peace, particularly between hostile religious communities like Hindus and Muslims in India, inspire the people to understand and challenge the aggressive nationalism of right-wing groups. The final or fifth section is the concluding section.

‘We are More, and We are Not Afraid’ — Puerto Rican Summer 2019

Martha Quiñones Domínguez

ABSTRACT

The ‘Summer of 2019’ is a scream of outrage at the neoliberal policies and capitalist crises. These crises are represented by the PROMESA Law, as well as by corruption and impunity that take away economic resources through adjustment and cuts policies in areas such as basic education, university education, health, housing, social security and other essential services. We have endured many years of oppression, sacrifices, institutional abuse, intense colonial status, followed by a hurricane that has transformed us; and we have also endured rampant corruption during a so-called economic crisis. They occur as a result of arrests on corruption charges at the federal level of senior government officials, as well as the dissemination of a chat of 889 pages on Telegram administered by the Governor himself. The level of citizen participation in the Summer of 2019 is determined by a colonial break with the existing political order and the repudiation and indignation that everyone has due to the comments of the elite of the colonial political power. That led the people to ask for participatory democracy in addition to the resignation of the Governor.

KEYWORDS:

Participatory democracy, corruption, PROMESA Law, colonial rupture, telegram

INTRODUCTION

The Summer of 2019¹ is a scream of outrage at the neoliberal policies and capitalist crises. These crises are represented by the PROMESA Law,² as well as by corruption and impunity that take away economic resources through budget cuts and adjustment policies in areas such as primary and secondary education, university education, health, housing, social security and other essential services to achieve quality of life and development. To this is added the national identity awareness that was created after hurricanes Irma and María in 2017 that taught us that neither the United States (USA) nor the central government was going to help us; it is only the solidarity of the people that rebuilds and raises the country. Therefore, the claims range from the resignation of the abusive political and economic elite represented by the Fiscal Supervision/Control Board (JCF),³ complaints against corruption and the petition for citizen inclusion through a new governance and participatory democracy. The protests in Puerto Rico must be understood in the context of the island’s colonial condition, where economic and political decisions are made from Washington and the government are colonial administrators.

It is different from the Arab Spring; it is a response to the crises of neoliberal capitalism, its adjustment policies, its crises and the colonial status. It is a manifestation of a popular and non-partisan political nature, not directed by external entities such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but directed instead by the people, without leaders.

It is different from the Arab Spring; it is a response to the crises of neoliberal capitalism, its adjustment policies, its crises and the colonial status. It is a manifestation of a popular and non-partisan political nature, not directed by external entities such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but directed instead by the people, without leaders. It is a cry of indignation at sexism, homophobia, the misogyny of a generation that is feminist, LGBTTQIA+, which has nothing to lose but fear.

According to Harvey (2014, 2005), neoliberalism is a political project of the financial bourgeoisie; in Puerto Rico, it is represented by the PROMESA Law and the imposition of the Fiscal Supervision/Control Board (JCF). The JCF must be understood as the corporate government, which arises in response to the accumulation crisis suffered by the capitalist class and its political project to dominate the State (Harvey, 2014, 2005) as an experiment to achieve cohesion, articulation and regulation of structures, dominating government policies, legal framework and institutions. The colonial rupture begins with the imposition of the JCF and the emergence of various protests that manifest in resistance to neoliberal discourse and question colonial power.

This work is designed to evaluate the hypothesis that the level of citizen participation in Summer of 2019 is determined by a colonial break with the existing political order (the Fiscal Supervision/Control Board) and the repudiation and indignation that each person had due to the comments of the elite of colonial political power. They unite with triggering events that led to the repression, persecution and imprisonment of the participants in the strike of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR-2010 and 2017), the events on the two previous 1st of May demonstrations (2016 and 2017), the outrage over the dramatic cuts in government budget imposed and neoliberal austerity policies of the USA-JCF since 2016. This same JCF, instead of curbing corruption and the economic downturn, has aggravated them sinking us further, with its labour reform (Alá, 2017), the lack of action against corruption, and the diversion of aid from hurricanes Irma and María (2017). This indignation and repudiation of a corrupt minority, elite of power in control of the government in Puerto Rico, raised a diverse united majority, which had been slowly transformed over time, and felt a mixture of impotence, contempt and fatigue. This colonial rupture occurred without using an armed fighting force or sacrificing lives, but they were shaping a country-nation project. The examples of violence in the chat and the arrests of six people linked to the government were enough to create repudiation and outrage that respond to a rejection of decades of mishandling by ‘leaders’ who have always seemed to benefit while Puerto Ricans continue to suffer and are unable to tolerate mockery, vulgarity and corruption any longer. The grievances have accumulated during the 12 years of the economic recession, a debt crisis that has caused layoffs and cuts in public services and the failed response to Hurricane Maria in addition to the diversion of aid. The article examines the implications of Summer of 2019, the struggle of the people to liberate themselves from the control of elites and their neoliberal policies in a colonial context and the response of young people in a peaceful revolt, but in resistance, challenging repression and demobilising discourses answering the questions: What? How? What is this for? Why? What is its influence and what effects does it have?

What pushed the Puerto Rican people from passive resignation into fighting and how did it happen? We have endured many years of oppression, sacrifices, institutional abuse, intense colonialism and it took a hurricane to transform us, while we were facing rampant corruption during a so-called economic crisis. This occurred as a result of the arrest of senior government officials on charges of corruption at the federal level and internal problems within the political party in power after the son of a former Secretary of the Treasury revealed corruption directly related to Gov Ricardo Rosselló, as well as the dissemination of a chat of 889 pages in Telegram managed by the Governor himself. This chat was leaked and published in parts by the Centre for Investigative Journalism for Press Freedom. The document went viral because it was loaded with vulgar and intolerant expressions (misogynist, homophobic, hateful comments against journalists, artists, the JCF and local politicians and foreign politicians, and towards politicians of Puerto Rican descent in the USA) on the part of the Governor and a dozen men close to his administration, which they called the blue pack. They talked about how they bought the press, how they granted contracts, revealed and shared state secrets and strategies of administrative deception and manipulation of public opinion. Both the arrests and the chat provided the key to understand the reasons for the inequalities that afflict most Puerto Ricans in and outside the country. The legitimacy crisis allowed us to question the credibility of the current and, I believe, any previous government.

We can trace the change of consciousness in the various struggles against indignation and resistance that have taken place in the twenty-first century to the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. What happened after the hurricanes taught the people not to depend on the USA or the Government of Puerto Rico to receive help; and that only the solidarity of the people is what raises and rebuilds the country. Little by little, a nation-building project has been created in the face of the crises (economic, social, environmental) that we have faced and that puts the country’s existence at risk (Cotto, 2018; Dalmau, 2015; Rivera, 2015; Farinacci, 2014), where it is recognised that the crises we face are due to the irresponsibility of the different colonial administrations, which were negligent and unable to govern. For years ‘the accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2005) has been manifested in the embezzlement of pensions and labour insurance, the commercialisation of social rights, privatisations and the change of a state of rights to one of subsidising capital. The project seeks to raise the quality of life and strengthen the power structures in the face of the inability or unwillingness of the USA government of being able to resolve the political status.

In this Summer of 2019 we hear complaints that go from the perspective of gender and integration, the fight against rampant corruption, social and economic inequality, the denunciation of the austerity policies of the JCF, the cuts in education and the UPR, within the so-called ‘economic and fiscal crisis’ of the country, the so-called labour reform that takes away rights and enslaves us.

That is why in this Summer of 2019 we hear complaints that go from the perspective of gender and integration, the fight against rampant corruption, social and economic inequality, the denunciation of the austerity policies of the JCF, the cuts in education and the UPR, within the so-called ‘economic and fiscal crisis’ of the country, the so-called labour reform that takes away rights and enslaves us. That is why the claims range from the resignation of the Governor, the taking of the JCF, complaints against corruption and citizen inclusion into new governance. Chat phrases caused the young generations to be outraged—‘cogimos de pendejos hasta los nuestros’⁴ (we took assholes to ours)—and it led to the outcry of a generation of ‘Yo no me dejo’ (I don’t let myself) as the song performed by Resident, Bad Bunny and...

Excavating to Educate Under Hidden Neoliberal Value Systems

June Gorman

ABSTRACT

Educating in a world obfuscated by neoliberalism’s destructive value system, hidden by the argon, plastic lights of pornographically advertised psychosocial wounding that detours human emotional needs into empty hole-creating materialism, demands excavation down to the deepest rot under neoliberalism’s ‘pretty lies’. It is particularly true since these are emotionally, even spiritually, confusing hidden value systems that advertising itself was designed to artfully obscure and replace in capitalist, neoliberalism’s marketisation of all human ‘needs’: we are only what, and whom, we can buy.

Under the cover of Western Enlightenment’s left-brain-dominant education, based in intellectual rationalisation, neoliberalism easily hides this carving out of any moral core to create socially destructive, but very profitable, distracting aggressive competition, world conflict and ‘crises’. These crises pit humanity against its own cooperative sustainability, and ultimately the planet’s interdependent sustainability systems. Emotional intelligence then, rather than only rational cognition, is the sum of both spheres, actually the sum of whole brain connectivity across all areas, a sum subsequently much greater than its parts. But our education systems designed along Western patriarchal defined dominant intelligence models, increasingly demanding scientific and machine-like rather than psychological, empathetic human understanding of ourselves, ultimately reduces us to ‘things’ and our connection to each other to transactional only relationships. It results in a value-vacuumed marketplace in which we do not set the price or ‘rate of return’ and children, our future itself, become subsequently less worthy of an ‘investment’, except as future consumers. It is thus only in transforming education to understand and expose core value systems, that neoliberalism’s true venal and ultimately thanatotic corpse can be unearthed and understood.

KEYWORDS

Sustainable education, neoliberalism, multiple intelligences, equity

INTRODUCTION

Attack of the Neoliberals, Around the World

Today, the Kurds of Syria are undergoing a fierce, apocalyptic and potentially total people’s annihilation. This is what we like to call ‘genocide’ in that emotionally sterilised language that so easily cleans up all the blood scattered in horror around the former site of a peoples’ hope, even in Syria. But in Rojava (Keating, 2019), this latest atrocity by neoliberalism’s deep underlying violence-value system is destroying the very symbol of a peoples’ new beginning from ancient noble ruins. Rojava, in particular, is a symbol of people envisioning beyond the pathology of patriarchy and nihilistic values destruction. But this is neoliberalism’s founding prostituted premise where everything ‘sacred’, everything humans value in common connection, emotionally, spiritually, creatively and lovingly too, the very creative force of life called Eros, is up for sale or being assailed. This all takes place in a world-wide ‘free’ market, where all human transactions are ‘monetised’, and the costs of potentially millions in civilians’ and rebel fighters’ deaths do not even show up on neoliberals’ spreadsheets. Not even as a footnote of importance, on the ledgers of multi-billionaires’ bankrupt and obfuscated values, on which so many of us have been sold, or unwittingly bought into (Giridharadas, 2019).

This time in Northern Syria, most fittingly, it is caused by a US domestic tyrant at the home of neo-liberalism’s tentacle-birth (from which it spread to all the globalising world), easily embracing the Orwellian language of ‘loving’ and therefore emboldening another male tyrant to enact neoliberalism’s core tenet of rule by ongoing destruction and crises (Klein, 2007). Today’s crisis is initiated and driven by a narcissistic strongman in Turkey who has nothing but his own will-to-power over others to promote. It is the rule not of just men, but of the pathologised right-of-rule by violent and violating men, many openly blatant in their market pornography of human rights and values, while aligned to and falsely clothed in Far Right religions of deepest patriarchal control. Yet, many more around the world of all sexes have been seduced by the same poisoned premises, sold as ‘free’ markets and neoliberals’ ‘new’ Priced-Dirt-Cheap-Fire-Sale-on-values!, in a marketplace-based hidden transaction of the ultimate Faustian bargain: You too can have ‘it’ all—you only need to pay with your empathetic heart, your soul, and that of your children’s futures as well (Giridharadas, 2019).

Rojava, and Kurdish Syria are just the latest casualties, but these neoliberal fire sales burn all over the world, in differing degrees of violence. It is not just American style capitalism run amok, it is neoliberalism’s founding premises, creating crises of destruction to ‘innovate’ with neoliberal capitalism as the ruling but hidden value system of bankrupting morality and obscene profit making. It really is all about the money and its deeper corrupting pathology, the obscene power to control all that money gives. These ‘new’, old ruling ideas of power exhumed in the modern area by very angry, very white, very rich and very powerful men incorporating together to fight the legislative gains of the people’s movements in the US of the 1960s (Powell, Lewis F, ‘Confidential Memorandum, 1971’), have violently triumphed now, nearly everywhere. But how? That is the current question asked by too many mutely stunned and confused modern liberals, having lost their own emotional truth and thus moral clarity, but surprised at the authentic anger of their young, many of whom seem to have retained a deeply felt emotionally intelligent knowledge: it is their future, the future for all children and their children too, that has been bartered for ‘pretty lies’ and false riches hidden in the confusion by teaching materialistic values that are creating conflict and environmental exploitation of our world. Instead, we need to teach more equitable and sustainable values of nurturance of each other and the planet we must all share harmoniously. It is just possible that it was this potentially fatal direction driven by hidden thanatotic (Kli, 2018) narcissistic greed and an increasing need to subjugate the feminine creation principle of Eros in all nature and nature(s), that may have ultimately fuelled this last powerful violent grasp and gasp of a pathological and dying patriarchy. A direction which, if we do not wake up and see at the total systems level on which it was premised and strategized step by step to take control, may indeed take all of us down with it.

Nonetheless, if so, it was based on an actual rational and even reasonable sounding strategy. A strategy to turn commonly connecting human values on their heads, confuse our own essentially deeply rooted and precognitive knowing of Eros and the kind of love it thrives on, to replace it by costly material addictions, no matter how poisonous to that life premise? (Mate, 2008) And this was key, especially if the profit that ensued was obscene. It was not so much that the means justified the ends but that the so enriching ends justified any means. It was a religion, a cult literally, of money and power as the two headed, definitely male imaged, God. And it was backed by the religious fervour of those who had always worshiped that kind of patriarchal power, first and above all.

The hope remains though, that any constructed step-by-step anti-life strategy can be deconstructed to result in opposite, far more humane and sustainable outcomes. For those who can actually begin to see and feel and thus truly deconstruct the history and implementation of that well-funded strategy’s delusions, there may indeed ultimately be a path out in the opposite direction. If so, it is only by excavating deeply to the prostituted values that underlie the empty hole of materialism and the patriarchal will-to-power at neoliberalism’s core. That is the only way to reclaim the heart’s language of emotional intelligence, especially in education, and in all now necessary complex, interdisciplinary human and planetary problem solving for sustainable life. Only with that deep values’ deconstruction, denied in the neoliberals’ corporatised education and basic needs’ manipulation driven by machine communication and the destruction of empathetic knowing of human connection to all life, is there a real chance to reconnect right-brain felt understanding to left-brain rational knowledge and discover our way back, together. Fortunately, that deconstruction is aided by new neuroscience understanding of human intelligence(s) (Gardner, 1983), most necessary to that more emotional, social and shared human understanding. It is based in our need for and interdependency on each other, as innately social animals that will survive and thrive only in that ‘connection’ model. This is supported by increased neuroscience-based understanding: that when more culturally diverse multiple intelligences are developed, included and validated, can we truly become ‘better educated’ to create an education for humanity together to solve interdisciplinary, intra-cultural, complex existential planetary crises (CSD, 2017).

For those who can actually begin to see and feel and thus truly deconstruct the history and implementation of that well-funded strategy’s delusions, there may indeed ultimately be a path out in the opposite direction.

THE PUNISHING EDUCATION UNDER NEOLIBERALISM’S TRUE VALUES

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

—Aristotle

Twenty-eight years ago, in 1991, I wrote a manuscript entitled ‘Honest Lies: Education in a Denial Society’ as a teacher delineating the actual strategy of corporatised takeover of education, that I had watched for over 20 years by then. Concerned because of what I sensed I was actually seeing and feeling in those classrooms that most were denying, including the purposeful de-legitimisation of the ‘liberal’ university by newly established ‘think tanks’ spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation (Grossmann & Hopkins, 2016), I wrote these words:

The result of this single-focused value system on money and power alone, will result in ‘a potential national leader as venal and without character as Donald Trump’.
Gorman, June, ‘Honest Lies. . .’

Resisting the Neoliberal University: Situating Resistance in Critical Pedagogy

Justin Harmon, Joe Cole, Daniel Rhodes & Jeremy A Rinker

ABSTRACT

Concerned with the ever-encroaching market mentality into higher education, four faculty from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA sat down to discuss their concerns about the neoliberalisation of the university. Both in terms of how it has affected the student body, as well as their own pedagogy and scholarship, these professors address the contemporary use of ‘neoliberalism’, including the baggage it carries; the slow tide of students seeing themselves as customers over engaged learners; the alienating aspects of online ‘education’; and the general commodification and consumer mentality of the total college experience, where everything has a price—including the value of knowledge and the people who seek to build it. Permeating through the dialogue is the pressing concerns related to mental health for students, and the impact that market-driven ideology has on their wellbeing. The conversation seeks to stimulate others across the globe about the need to take back public higher education from the corporate orbit.

KEYWORDS:

Neoliberalism, higher education, critical pedagogy, resistance, commodification, corporate elite

INTRODUCTION

We do not just live, shop and dine here, we teach and learn here, too (See photograph on proceeding page). We hope that our students do more than simply consume knowledge, but instead both critically interrogate and create it. The authors, all four full time faculty at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG), USA could all be described as neoliberalism’s refugees, slowly being displaced, commodified, and/or ignored by the corporate creep of our individualistic, and increasingly top-heavy and administratively managed institution. All four authors have had personal experiences of alienation as we have struggled to adjust and climb our way to positions of increasing responsibility within multiple different institutions of higher learning. Considering that in 2016, 73% of all positions in US institutions of higher education were not tenure-track (AAUP, 2016), we believe this represents an important harbinger of a shift towards anti-democratic colonisation of public university space. AAUP reports that while tenured faculty positions have increased by 1% nationwide since the 2008 recession, contingent faculty positions have increased by 11%, with part-time positions having increased by 18% during this same period (AAUP, 2016). These concerning figures, and the sentiments they empower, are worrying to those inspired by the traditional role of the academy as a space for critical pedagogy and revolutionary ‘paradigm shifts’ (Kuhn, 1962) in public knowledge.

The newly built Spartan village student housing on the authors’ own University.
Photo: Jeremy A Rinker

UNCG, a school of over 20,000 students, many of them first generation, positions itself as a community engaged public research university. This is an ideal space where the work of critical pedagogy and research can have a direct impact on our community. Still, in such a space, we often find our love of critical teaching and learning are being undervalued. This is more than an angry rant from faculty who are feeling underappreciated. In the hierarchy of the institution, critical thinking and active learning seem to have taken a backseat to business efficiency and the commodification of learning. As colleagues, we chose to come together by a growing concern for the state of public higher education and the encroaching norms of neoliberal thought and reason into its ranks. We believe the time is now to resist, not revolt, and we believe that critical pedagogy and fostering active and critical self-reliance in our students is the best means available for this collective resistance.

The ideology and pervasiveness of neoliberalism has permeated colleges and universities over the last four decades. As faculty, all the authors of this article have noticed a growing trend in the way that students are perceived as first and foremost consumers, and education is seen as a simple commodity that can be neatly packaged and traded on the open market.

The ideology and pervasiveness of neoliberalism has permeated colleges and universities over the last four decades. As faculty, all the authors of this article have noticed a growing trend in the way that students are perceived as first and foremost consumers, and education is seen as a simple commodity that can be neatly packaged and traded on the open market. Having worked to build our academic careers during this increasingly neoliberal turn, we decided to come together to have a dialogue about our lived experience of the shifting landscape of higher education in the US context. The paper that follows is based on some particularly salient sections of the transcript of our informal dialogue.

The state of higher education nationally is in flux, but how do faculty and those who care about critical thinking take control locally of the rapid transformations on their own campuses? In some ways, the situation is akin to hearing an unwelcome sound coming from your vehicle: you may sense that you have a problem that may lead to your vehicle breaking down alongside the road, and you may even have some ideas about how to diagnose and fix the problem. But what can be done in the moment to ensure that you do not get stranded? This growing sense of unease may induce further stress, especially if you are in the midst of a long drive. As academics by career choice, we have that sense of unease in feeling like we are on such a long drive, not only for tenure or promotion, but for maintaining an academic tradition of critical scholarship and humanistic engagement that we fear is being lost. During this long drive, there is a sneaking sense that the sounds we are hearing are harbingers of a real breakdown.

We wish that we could be optimistic in our thinking and writing, but the last vestige of public dissent and resistance in the United States, the public institution of higher education, has long since given up the gate: the neoliberal ideology has infected the Ivory Tower and metastasised to every organ of its once strong body. The conversation that follows was born of concerns from each author about the sometimes covert, often blindingly obvious, infiltration of the market mentality and corporate culture into the bloodlines of the public university. Still, before we delve into that dialogue, we feel some words are needed to further situate neoliberalism.

SITUATING NEOLIBERALISM IN THE UNIVERSITY

Neoliberalism is a buzzword, though it is also a concept that is poorly understood and routinely mishandled in its application. While competing definitions exist, most scholars agree that, at its core, neoliberalism is the extension of market values into all institutions and social forums, erasing the boundaries between the public and private, the moral and the economic, and democracy and the marketplace (Brown, 2005; Giroux, 2002). Naomi Klein (2007) calls the ideology of neoliberalism a ‘shape-shifter’ (p.14), in that it is adaptable to the needs of powerful elites and easily deployable by them in times of crisis or disruption. The ‘language’ of neoliberalism has been said to be devoid of ‘human provenance’ as it is mechanical in its rationalisation and application (Davies, 2005: 1), putting front and centre the reality that the marketplace has no morals (Giroux, 2002).

Neoliberalism, a rigorous denial of collective responsibility, public good and government regulation in the economic market, is a pernicious and all-encompassing political, social and cultural ideology. But neoliberalism is not only an overreliance on free market capitalism; it is also upholding an individualistic and consumerist orientation to the world, the consequences of which are far-reaching in human institutions and communities. Neoliberalism promotes an ‘illusion of freedom’ that only exists alongside cutthroat market practices aimed at efficiency for efficiency’s sake with no concern for the people who become collateral damage along the way (Raaper, 2016: 187). The ‘freedom’ that is left over is the ‘freedom to purchase’ (Giroux, 2002: 446), and the only identity that citizens may cultivate and embrace is one as a consumer (Davies, 2005). Giroux (2014), in describing neoliberalism as ‘a predatory global phenomenon’ (p.1),...

Kaleidoscope

Profit off prisons

The detention of immigrants is not only increasing by leaps and bounds, but it has also become a money-minting machine for the private sector security industry. This is revealed by a new report titled ‘Prison by Any Other Name’ on the South Florida detention facilities. The report has been prepared jointly by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Americans for Immigrant Justice.

According to the report, the number of people held by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has swelled up to more than 55,000 from fewer than 30,000 five years ago. The United States has the largest immigrant detention system in the world. It alone has an allocation surpassing all the federal law enforcement agencies taken together. The concentration of these detainees is particularly high in Florida. ‘On a daily basis, ICE currently detains more than 2,000 noncitizens in the state’, the report says. South Florida has four immigration prisons. Not all of these are operated by ICE. The Broward Transitional Center is operated by the GEO Group, ‘a Boca Raton-based for-profit prison corporation’.

The GEO Group and CoreCivic operated private prisons that held over 71 per cent of detainees in November 2017. The report points out that private prison corporations not only profit from the incarceration business, but also influence immigration policy spending millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying. Stocks for CoreCivic and GEO increased rapidly after Donald Trump was elected president.

Despite the fact that immigrants are detained on civil violations, their detention conditions are similar to those held on criminal charges and are often worse. ‘Those detained report feeling stripped of any sense of personhood or agency, having to follow strict protocols’ the document mentions. Many detainees have reported being ‘locked away in segregation for nearly 24 hours a day’.

(Read more in: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/cjr_fla_detention_report-final_1.pdf;
http://www.aijustice.org/prison_by_any_other_name_a_report_on_south_florida_detention_facilities)

Para-economy

Coca-Cola and more than 50 other companies have been accused of funding the now-disbanded paramilitary organisation, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. Trade unions of these companies had been protesting about this for a long time and now the cases against the companies will come up for hearing before a transitional justice tribunal following the peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The unions have alleged that Coca-Cola had hired goons from the AUC to kill at least 10 labour leaders between 1990 and 2002 who were trying to organise workers at the soft drink giant’s plants.

Cases have also been lodged against the UK-based oil company BP for its alleged funding of AUC and involvement in kidnapping and human rights abuses. Other companies suspected of financial support to the paramilitary groups—commonly referred to as running a ‘para-economy’—include Colombia’s largest beverage company Postobon, cement company Cementos Argos, state oil company Ecopetrol and banana distributor, Chiquita Brands International. A lawsuit has also been brought against the latter in the United States by families of victims of the paramilitary groups.

(Read more in https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Coca-Cola-Accused-of-Funding-Colombian-Death-Squad-20160901-0005.html)

Disassociation

Walmart India has announced that it would retrench 56 of its employees—euphemistically called ‘associates’—eight of whom are in the senior management and 48 in the middle and lower management levels, as part of a ‘restructuring’ exercise.

The company is not in dire straits though: it opened six new best price modern wholesale stores, one fulfilment centre and registered a sales growth of 22 per cent in 2019, according to a statement issued by Walmart India President & CEO Krish Iyer.

However, layoffs have been reported at Walmart since it bought 77 per cent stake in e-commerce retailer Flipkart for about 16 billion dollars in 2018 to compete more effectively with its global rival Amazon in the Indian market.

(Read more in `https://www.rediff.com/business/report/walmart-india-sacks-56-including-from-senior-levels/20200113.htm)

Fire decimates wildlife

Huge wildfires in Australia have charred forests covering more than 27.7 million acres, killing an estimated one billion animals. Native wildlife such as koalas and rock wallabies suffered the most. Some of these were already endangered and are threatened with extinction. The victims also include livestock and domestic pets.

The Australian government has committed 50 million Australian dollars to fund an emergency wildlife recovery programme that would focus on, among other things, providing food and shelter to the surviving animals.

(Read more in https://thewire.in/environment/australian-bushfires-ecological-disaster;
https://grist.org/climate/climate-change-fueled-the-australia-fires-now-those-fires-are-fueling-climate-change/)

Unsettled

Even 10 years after a disastrous earthquake shook Haiti, at least 34,000 people are still living in displacement camps, according to media reports.

Initially, 1.5 million displaced people had been sheltered in over 1,500 camps and displacement sites following the 2010 earthquake. On these, 22 are still operating.

Besides, 3.7 million people are said to be facing food insecurity. Many young people are trying to migrate out in search of jobs. An estimated 1.5-2 million Haitians, which is about one-fifth of the population, are already living abroad. The majority of them are in Canada, USA, Brazil and Chile.

(Read more in https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/34000-Haitians-Still-Displaced-10-Years-on-from-Quake-20200110-0014.html)

Watch

Critical Moves: The 4th Industrial Revolution, Who Wins and Who Loses?

https://videos.telesurenglish.net/video/809016/jugada-critica-809016/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_8suzJ2JA

‘Democracy For Sale’: Cambridge Analytica & Big Tech’s History of Manipulating Elections

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/10/2020_election_digital_manipulation_cambridge_analytica

Curated by Nilanjan Dutta

Book Review

The Coming of the American Behemoth:
The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940

By MICHAEL JOSEPH ROBERTO

466 pp, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018
$20 (e-Book), $25 (PB), $95 (HB)

Reviewed by
DANIEL RHODES

Fascist is a term that gets bantered around in the political arena of the United States almost on a daily basis. With the prevalence of social media in our daily lives, doctored images and phrases converted into memes indict almost any political figure as the paragon of fascist ideology. The image that connects contemporary political figures with fascism and disseminated widely through social media platforms is often, of course, Hitler. Nazi imagery will also be used, but the connecting of your political rival to Hitler is an indirect way to reinforce how you perceive the political leader of the party you revile.

Of course, most Americans’ understanding of history is often myopic, and their understanding of fascist ideology is limited at best. Many will connect communism with fascism; based on the residue of Cold War propaganda that has filtered down over the past 40 years. This absolute misunderstanding of the two ideologies was comically pointed out in an episode of The Simpsons when the fictitious movie hero McBain was fighting the ‘commie-nazis’ in their latest instalment of the movie franchise depicted on the show (TV Tropes). This ‘commie-nazis’ connection was engineered in American society shortly after WW II as a way to create a common enemy that Americans could rally against with the same fervour as they did against the Nazis during WW II. It did not matter that the Soviet Union fought with us to defeat Nazi Germany during the war and end the spread of fascism. We needed the enemy to be seen as fascist, and so we created the interchangeable fascist-communist image with Soviet Russia evolving, alongside the enemies of WW II, as a viable threat.

While fascism was brewing in Germany and Italy, the United States was incubating its own form of fascist ideology. Not as visually manifest as it was in Europe with uniforms, banners and other forms of loyal symbolism, fascism in the US was exerting itself in more subtle ways, through the ongoing developing relationship between corporate finance (capitalist ideology) and government support. Michael Joseph Roberto, retired professor of North Carolina A & T State University and political activist, elucidates this growing form of fascism in the US from the 1920s through the 1940s in his well-written book, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940.

Roberto really does his homework in this richly written text. In his book, Roberto excavates Marxist writers from the early 20th century, many of whom have been forgotten or purposefully left out of the historical dialogue about fascist ideology in the US. These theorists remain left out of our historical understanding precisely for their analysis of fascism in the US was so accurate. In detailing how our unique form of American fascism was forged through the marriage of corporate finance and government interest, these theorists went almost unheard. As Roberto himself notes, ‘Much of my work stems from the recovery of what I consider a ‘lost’ discourse on fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s’ (p.18).

Because of our indoctrination into fascism as being an ideology that happens only ‘over there’, we have missed how fascist ideas began to take root in the US during the 1920s and 1930s. Our tendency, through corporate owned media, is ‘To see fascism only from the standpoint of its Italian and German characteristics . . . violent mass movements led by men in black or brown shirts . . . ’ (p.178). Today we will see the images of self-identified Nazis here in the US, marching with tiki torches and chanting anti-immigration slogans while sporting Nazi imagery in a futile attempt to parrot the mass of Nazi movements in Europe. These images are frightening to see, but in many ways as comical and pathetic as their cartoonish ‘commie-nazis’ counterparts from pop cultural TV shows. These contemporary Nazis pose a threat in normalising fascist ideology among the few who subscribe to their beliefs, but as Roberto notes, real US fascism is a lot more insidious, ‘Based on its dominant position in the world-capitalist system, American fascism would differ from Italian and German forms because its level of capital formation was the most advanced, the highest in the world-capitalist system’ (p.17).

Fascism in the US did not need to take the same route as fascism in Europe, with the aesthetics and pageantry of Nazism. Instead of looking for a man with a little moustache riding down ‘Pennsylvania Avenue’, American fascism was more subtle (p.55). Roberto points out that through psychological engineering by individuals such as Henry C Link, the psychologist who helped create the ‘American Psychologist Corporation’, a form of ‘ “new psychology” of the 1920s served the needs of capitalists in their efforts to sustain the Great Boom’ (p.51). With this fusion of psychology and capitalism, ‘Consumerism replaced citizenship’ (p.45). So, whereas fascism was foisting itself onto the population in Europe with terroristic acts of jack-booted thugs, ‘It is here where the market mentality prevailed, where consumerism triumphed over citizenship, and where non-terrorist fascist processes based on persuasion, deception, and manipulation aimed at the domination of capital itself was forged’ (p.81).

Through this psychological conditioning, we began to equate consumerism with democracy and freedom. Patriotism and nationalism morphed into a perverted science of consumer style democracy. Corporate owned media was able to manipulate our understanding of society and create, as Roberto invokes Herbert Marcuse, a one-dimensional man (p.19). Through this social engineering, the average person in the US could buy into fascist ideology, not through threat of violence with Nazi soldiers marching through the streets, the ‘real American fascists were those who wrapped themselves in the Stars and Stripes, pronounced themselves as guardians of the Constitution and democracy, and promoted the ideology of 100 per cent Americanism’ (p.8).

In the early 20s, the American economy was doing well. Industrialisation had taken hold. In short, the country was doing well economically and technologically. Sure, there were pockets of poverty, racism, sexism and oppression, but the newly burgeoning and easier accessible media reinforced the good life. With this, as Roberto notes, ‘American capitalists were using material abundance as the basis for colonizing the minds of their citizens’ (p.96). Corporations needed to ensure they maintained dominance over the American citizenry, and that authentic democratic ideas did not take hold among the population. Business needed to work with the government to make sure that, ‘Educated businessmen would eventually control local and state governments and from there begin to change the political landscape of America. Leading businessmen would win elections and transform government by turning it into a business’ (p.125). As Roberto adeptly puts it: ‘In simplest terms, what was uniquely fascist in their view was the desire of the ruling class to establish a capitalist dictatorship within the framework of liberal democracy’ (p.9).

Roberto does not ignore the economic collapse of the Great Depression and the toll it took on Americans during this period. At a time when radical ideas could have taken hold and propelled the country in a more progressive trajectory, corporations worked very closely with the government to ensure that American style of fascism maintained its hold in the country. Roberto gives a cogent analysis on The New Deal, arguing that it was not the ‘now familiar liberal impulse to reform government to serve the interests of the people’ (p.219), but that it was established as a way to protect Big Business. Whereas some would have hoped that the Great Depression would have ushered in more radical, leftist political ideals, the New Deal was more ‘chameleon-like . . . in the service of monopoly-finance capital’. In other words, ‘The reformulation of liberalism in the New Deal brought recovery to Wall Street but not enough to Main Street’ (p.221).

Roberto’s book is well researched and written. He covers many theorists and ideas in a short amount of space and gives the reader a great deal to ponder about how economic ideology has formed in this country and how we cannot compare fascism in this country with the historical fascism we know of in Europe. Fascism in the US is an economic ideology that is inextricably tied with corporate and government interests. So why is it so important to go back in time and study these historical and economic theorists from the early 20th century? As Roberto notes in the beginning of his book, ‘Recognizing fascism’s embryonic forms in the interwar period provides a foundation and perspective for understanding American fascism in the present, now more fully developed with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in 2016’ (p.18). The rhetoric we hear Donald Trump using today in denigrating immigrants, refugees and the poor are the same rhetoric used when American fascism was brewing in the early 20th century. As Roberto notes, ‘Businessmen blamed the same public enemies but singled out immigrants for infecting American workers . . .’ (p.35). While the connections to the present are not the primary focus of Roberto’s book, or even fully outlined therein, the foundations of American fascism are certainly made clearer through a reading of his work.

While we may not have the same image of fascism projected in American culture as Germany and Italy did during the height of fascism in Europe, fascism is alive and well today. It is apparent in our highly enmeshed forms of economic policy and corporate-government structures.

REFERENCES

TV Tropes, 2019, retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CommieNazis on 17 January 2020

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism:
The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

By WENDY BROWN

264 pp, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019
$25 (e-Book), $25 (PB), $75 (HB)

Reviewed by
SCOTTY PETERSON

Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Theory, takes on a multi-faceted project to analyse the neoliberal impacts on the foundations of democracy in her astute book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Brown sets out, in the print version of the 2018 Wellek Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, to explore the ever-evolving neoliberal mentality that has led to the present-day anti-democratic rhetoric and response. However, though bred from the 2016 election, this book takes an approach stemming from an analytical focus, rather than a personally driven political critic. This is appreciated, as most popular discussions surrounding Western politics gets bogged down in the two extreme perspectives of either far-Left or far-Right, clouding analytical observations from those that are more evaluative. ‘It is a sign of the triumph of neoliberal reason that, in recent decades, the grammar of the social, including its importance to democracy, largely vanished from Left (and not only Right) visions for the future’ (p.53). Brown works hard, successfully I might add, to develop an understanding of neoliberalism that seems intensely exhaustive.

This historical and modern re-examination leads to the imagery of a hydra, where one contradiction within neoliberalism seemingly exposes two more. Brown’s creative manoeuvring of these contradictions, broken down to a much more manageable mapping, brings clarity of understanding to the neoliberal perspective. Brown begins by explaining the historical progression of neoliberalism and its most influential characters throughout the years. This foundational understanding is useful for anyone newly entering the sphere of neoliberalism and its expansive reach. Brown not only explains the origins of neoliberal methodology, but she also narrates the ever-evolving rhetoric over the years following its conception. Each chapter then traverses the breakdown of the primary rhetoric used by neoliberalism in an attempt to expand the underlying reasoning for the rhetoric. Throughout these chapters, Brown follows a pattern of analysing the origins of the viewpoint and moving through a historical timeline. In doing so, Brown exposes the evolution, and uses, of these rhetorical perspectives to the modern-day. All the while, these fears that are exacerbated by neoliberal rhetoric are effectively dismantled by Brown’s analysis and critical examination.

Brown also utilises this book as an opportunity to educate the reader on the methodology of democracy and its placement in direct opposition to neoliberal advocates’ goals. She exposes neoliberalism’s rhetoric though explaining ‘the critique of democracy and of the political is masked as a brief for individual liberty’ (p.64). Brown also summarises democracy being founded on ‘political equality’ (p.23). In other words, equality on topics of gender, sexuality, health care, wealth, etc. is the core of democracy. Liberty and equality are typically paired as supporting systems in Western values, but somehow appear to oppose the other suddenly with the onset of neoliberalism. Democracy, as well as the entire frame of society, is debated by supporters of a neoliberal perspective. Brown’s, for the most part, impartial examination lends the reader to develop a stronger understanding, as well as a legitimate argumentative stance against neoliberal claims, especially when considering dismissiveness towards social justice claims. An ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality, although often used by both the political Left and Right wings, is framed throughout this book as a means of explaining this competitive rhetoric of democracy, simultaneously empowering a market-driven and competitive neoliberal ideology.

This book, though appearing to be purely focused on politics, indeed, has insightful themes focused on communication and the power of rhetoric. Due to the lucid prose that Brown uses, this book will have a spread beyond merely the political realm. Brown’s dissection of complex ideas lends to examples of the powerful skills of negotiation, coercion, and communication. The manipulation, exposed through Brown’s detailed examination of neoliberal rhetoric, of populations through political debates has the potential to develop further understanding about the abilities and scope of language and the effects it can have for the future of Western populations. Any space that desires a discussion about the manipulative redirecting of attention in social settings will have a plethora of examples available in this book. As Brown explains, ‘as the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience, it vanishes from our visions of the future, both utopian and dystopian’ (p.52). This could, to some readers in fields focused around social topics, appear to be a warning from Brown. A need to focus readers in understanding the subtle powers of neoliberal rhetoric seems to be a strong desire in this book.

Brown’s examination of neoliberalism also lends an extra hand to the art of reframing. This book does not outright engage in aggressive or dismissive language instead, acting as more of a moderator, or mediator, Brown reframes response to neoliberalism to offer clarity and to include all perspectives. Even when Brown acknowledges that neoliberalism’s ‘lost entitlement to the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and nativism is then easily converted into righteous rage against the social inclusion and political equality of the historically excluded’ (p.48), I, as a reader who is afforded these privileges, did not feel personally targeted, or that there was malicious intent. The language and terminology, consistent throughout this book, contain a very controlled manner of thinking and speaking. This is a refreshing change of pace that provides the potential to develop understanding among those who may support neoliberal values to reconsider and reframe their original perspectives. Providing understanding from several perspectives, Brown brings about simplification through a transdisciplinary approach to examining the neoliberal phenomenon from its creation to the present. This allows an elevated discussion between democratic supporters to more acutely counter discussions with neoliberal supporters. Brown also provides an opportunity to relate, to an extent, with individuals who may be clouded by neoliberalism’s charismatic rhetoric.

This book, to an extent, can be seen as an individual’s (Brown) uncovering of how the magician (neoliberalists) ‘rescued’ the rabbit (liberty) out of the hat (democracy). With the tools, knowledge, and understanding provided by the book, a reader may apply this awareness in the social realm, reviving hope for equality and democracy. Exploring the hat from where the rabbit emerged, and you may be able to discover the secret compartment (freedom), hidden by the magician. The secret may be hidden, but as Brown appropriately argues ‘freedom without society is a pure instrument of power, shorn of concern for others, the world, or the future’ (p.45).

Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West is a book well worth the time to read, especially for the student of political economy that yearns to get past the complexity of neoliberal political rhetoric.