Search Results (53)

Brexit, the exiting of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU), has impacted socio-political relationships, both internally, and externally with other countries and economic groups. This has been especially true regarding international trade, and legal and market standards for food and food security. This paper examines how the enacting of Brexit has framed and underlined contemporary perceptions of the UK neoliberal food system, the relative importance of food standards, and the impact of policy transition on food security. Using a positional approach, perspectives and narratives within the literature are critiqued and synthesized, including academic sources, parliamentary debates, economic reports, and media analysis. The politico-economic effects of Brexit have altered food-related relationships, recalibrating trade interactions and changing the public funding that UK farmers receive. Through realigning extractive economic models, the pre-Brexit UK food system has been reset, and new perspectives about neoliberalism have emerged. Government intervention has steered away from traditional neoliberal framings towards neo-developmentalism. A dichotomy thus exists between recognizing the intrinsic right to adequate and nutritious food and maintaining existing cultural dynamics of food supply, and the use of agri-food policy as a politico-economic tool to drive higher economic growth. The implications of this policy change are stark for UK agri-food actors within food system transition post-Brexit. Full article

In this article, I analyse the complexity of the status of “migrant” in relation to myths of belonging and what we call “home”. I look at status labels that Iranian border-crossers embrace after migrating to the Global North and the ways in which they practice adaptability in accordance with the systemic and structural meanings associated with their migration status and their racial complexity. Ethnic and Racial labels adopted by Iranian migrants can include “Persian”, “Iranian”, “Middle Eastern”, “White”, or “Aryan”, and migration status labels range from “migrant” to “refugees and asylum seekers”, “exiles”, “expats” etc. Using a mixed approach of digital ethnographies, autoethnography and textual analysis, together with an intersectional and decolonial lens, I investigate the ways in which migration status such as skilled categories are associated with not only “fitting” into the neoliberal and capitalist systems of border crossing but also “blending” into racial hierarchies and maintaining class status post migration within White contexts. This article takes an empathetic approach to the lived experiences of minority and racially complex migrants and emphasises the epistemic value of their narratives and the ways in which these stories can inform us about the covert systemic structural and racially loaded bias that exists within migration economies of the Global North. Full article

A growing number of college students are nontraditional learners (age 21–65) who are people of color. These students face unique challenges in a higher education system increasingly shaped by neoliberalism and the ongoing context of institutionalized racism. In Oregon, policymakers have established ambitious goals to address racial disparities in educational attainment. In this study, focus groups and interviews were conducted with 111 Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) adult learners in Oregon to better understand their perspectives and experiences in regard to educational and career pathways. Participants included currently enrolled students, adults who had enrolled and left, and adults who had never enrolled in post-secondary education. Thematic analysis focused on support that facilitates educational access and persistence for these learners. Consistent with the existing literature, our findings revealed that support fell into three broad categories: economic, social/cultural, and institutional support. Recommendations focus on utilizing targeted universalism as a strategy for supporting non-traditional students of color to access and complete college through the expansion of economic support for students, shoring up relevant academic and career resources, and building more meaningful partnerships between higher education and communities of color. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed. Full article

In 2025, the English government will commence the roll out of a transformative new funding system for post-18 learners entitled the ‘Lifelong Learning Entitlement’ (LLE). This will be a single funding system for both higher and further education, which the government argues, will enable learners to pay for courses to develop new skills and gain new qualifications at a time that is right for them through full-time degree programmes, flexibly through part-time study, or by undertaking individual modules as and when they are needed. The focus is on training, retraining and upskilling at levels four to six (i.e., the first three years of a degree programme) and on high-value technical courses at levels four and five. Essentially, the LLE is a lifelong entitlement to access a loan fund to support higher level/higher education studies up to age 60. Some targeted maintenance grant funding will be provided to some students who require it to age 60 and beyond. The authors will provide a critical review of the LLE from a lifelong learning perspective. They will explore the complex multifaceted discourse embedded in LLE intentions, as presented in policy statements, some of which appear to be at odds with the claims made about the role of LLE, and identify the ways that it will need to be shaped to achieve the benefits sought by government. Using the critical themes underpinning this special edition of the journal, they will consider the role that education provided through the LLE ‘transformative agenda’ can play in enabling access by adult learners of all types and for multiple reasons. They will consider the interplay between these and neo-liberal values relating to the role of higher education in employment, training and skills-focused priorities. They will also reflect on the role that the HE sector will inevitably need to play in shaping course design and delivery to ensure that the LLE can deliver both the government’s goals and those of lifelong learners, particularly those from disadvantaged communities and backgrounds. Full article

This concept paper builds upon nascent research analyzing disability and the practice of videogame livestreaming on Twitch.tv. While a growing amount of scholarship analyzes the structure and organization of Twitch as a platform more broadly, with some attending to the platform’s marginalization of women and BIPOC streamers, few studies investigate the challenges that Twitch’s features and structures present to disabled streamers. This paper addresses this gap in the literature, considering the ways in which Twitch offers disabled streamers unique economic and community-building opportunities through its monetization and identity tag features while simultaneously presenting barriers to disabled streamers through these very same features. Utilizing a critical disability studies perspective and drawing upon forum posts made by disabled streamers and interviews with disabled streamers from online gaming news websites, I argue that Twitch reifies forms of neoliberal-ableism through its prioritizing of individual labour, precarious forms of monetization that necessitate cultures of overwork and ‘grinding’, and targeted harassment, known as hate raids, against disabled and other marginalized streamers to ultimately create a kind of integrative access where disability is tolerated but not valued. Full article

This article intends to examine debt as a basilar political–theological device acting in favor of the neoliberal ethos. The Papal Encyclical Laudato Si affirms in paragraph 52 that debt today serves the control over the poor peoples in the world. In this article we demonstrate how debt can be seen as a political–theological device that works as an instrument of this specific ethos, aligned with neoliberal principles. We intend to show how these elements are related using three analytical movements. In the first, we present how we understand political theology as a critical reflection about the forms of political power. We observe that power, in its form and in the way it operates, replicates the theological–political power status prior to modernity, operating an excluding inclusion machinery. In the second movement, we analyze the political theology machinery that impacts individuals in the operation of an “excluding inclusion”. Under the political–theological machinery, individuals, groups, or populations are considered as a part of the machinery; they are included because they are incorporated in the new organism as they are excluded from their original content—language, ethos, culture, and their constitution as subjects. Then, in the third, we present the notion of the device, explicitly, a device constituted by a web of odd components and flexible relations that, when isolated as independent elements, act in the subject’s formation. In these terms, debt as a device of the political–theological machinery works to form individuals; it is a device that operates the excluding inclusion to make subjects more and more adapted to the market rules and habits. The very sense of debt in the post-productive era is challenged. We present how the possible exits from this machinery involve not only the debate on the forgiveness of foreign debts, but also how they are intrinsically linked to the creation of a new ethos, new ways of life created by relations outside the orbit of debt control. The conclusion intends to show how necessary it is to restore to people new forms of control over a way of life that is not regulated and ruled by debt. The methodology employed analyzes arguments that originated from works and articles concerning this theme. Full article

Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method to mediate contemporary art to primary and high school students inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s process philosophy and new materialist theory–practice. What kind of roles can the method of Concept Play Workshop create for the participating body and how can it challenge neoliberal tendencies in museum and gallery education? In the workshops, children and young people create philosophical concepts with contemporary art, dialogue-based practices and artistic experiments in the exhibition space of Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. I argue that the method can create philosophizing, critical, uncomfortable, resting, dictatorial and protesting bodies. Representational logic becomes challenged, and discomfort and resistance become educational potential. The method creates multiple and overlapping roles for the participating body, shifting the focus towards multiplicities instead of the passive/active binary. Humans are not the only participating bodies, but attention is given to agential matter, contesting human-centeredness. The study is a contribution to the field of post-approaches in gallery and museum education. Full article

Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position in contemporary art. Edwards offered nuanced relationships between interior and exterior at a moment when concepts of “interiority” and “self” were under the most strain in contemporary art practice. If we consider this turn away from interiority—and toward surface, emptiness, system, and dematerialization—to be, in part, a symptom of the pressure exerted by the commodity form on art viewers’ sensibilities after 1955, then the stakes of Edwards’ choice not only to use found metal objects, but to compose them around an active rather than empty center, feel higher. By comparing the sculpture Mojo for 1404 (1964) with the Bichos (1960–1965) of Lygia Clark, the distinctiveness of Edwards’ project emerges even more strongly. Clark responded to the crisis of interiority with shiny metal sculptures whose interiors were constantly being flipped inside-out. By contrast, Edwards’ art was motivated by the struggle for racial justice, and it persistently spoke its desire for grounded, scarred personhood in an aesthetic language that required viewers to recall their own interiority. Full article

This paper shares findings of a qualitative study on professional learning with in-service teachers during COVID-19. From 2020–2023, the authors facilitated comprehensive literacy professional learning with in-service teachers from 40 schools in the Midwest U.S. Our work aimed to center teachers as experts and be responsive to teachers’ social, emotional, and professional needs. Drawing on framework for adaptability, we analyzed formative assessments, interview transcripts, and written reflections to understand teachers’ perspectives on professional learning and their praxis during COVID-19. Data revealed that participants perceived an increased need for professional learning on differentiation and focus on growth and joy. Against the backdrop of a neoliberal fixation on teacher accountability that increases stress among teachers on top of a traumatic global pandemic, we attempted to center teachers as experts and attend to teachers’ socioemotional needs by offering flexible pathways with online options and offering in-person sessions for cultivating community. Future research on teacher education for in-service teachers can provide greater insight into teacher perceptions of their professional learning needs post/COVID-19, as well as how we center teachers as knowledgeable professionals in order to challenge hierarchical power structures and deficit discourses in ways that promote their professional, social, and emotional wellbeing. Full article

This paper argues that the neoliberal consensus about education finance has broken down due to growing economic inequality. First, I use a comparative historical analysis of political alliances to examine patterns of world trade and nations’ policies for economic and educational development since World War II. The United States emphasized STEM-collegiate preparation for all students, while most countries continued the dual emphasis on technical-tertiary and higher education. Educational policy in the US and Pacific region also shifted towards a reliance on markets and student loans resulting in worsening economic inequality in access. Nations with dual technical and academic pathways in secondary and postsecondary education systems expand college enrollment rates more rapidly than the US. They also experience class conflict between the working–middle class and the new technological elite. Next, I examine how education policy shifted from national planning aligned with public funding to market-based incentives for institutional development, further exposing gaps in opportunity within nations. Finally, recognizing the variations in systemic causes of inequality, I argue that governments, education agencies, and civic activists can best promote equity by organizing to address barriers to opportunity for groups left behind in the wake of withering neoliberal education policy. Full article

Latin American liberation theology appears to be an obsolete phenomenon that is unable to speak about the realities of today’s world. Since the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published two instructions on liberation theology, the Vatican has been considered to have condemned it. Likewise, the Vatican of John Paul II and Benedict XVI focused on the reprobation of several liberation theologians attempting to silence their voices. However, liberation theology aimed at the realisation of justice in a world in which the injustice that gave birth to this phenomenon still prevails in new ways. This article establishes a relationship between liberation theology and critical thinking to offer an alternative to the future of liberation theology. We insist that, despite the end of the era in which both were born, they continue to challenge the present world. Using Adornian optics, we establish how critical thought constitutes a prophetic denunciation. Thus, liberation theology will be understood within this critical tradition and how it critiques the current reality, in which the logic of late capitalism prevails. Afterwards, the contemporary world will be studied from this point of view to try to discover the pending tasks of criticism. It is the question of discovering the tasks of critiques to challenge the present. Full article

This article brings together critical disability scholarship and personal narrative, sharing the author’s pandemic story of disruption, caregiving, grief, burnout, cancer, and post-operative fatigue. It offers critical reflection on the limits of the neoliberal academy and possibilities for practicing liberatory politics within it, posing two central questions: What does it mean to crip time and centre care as an arts-based researcher? What might a commitment to honouring crip time based on radical care do for the author and their scholarship, and for others aspiring to conduct reworlding research? This analysis suggests that while committing to “slow scholarship” is a form of resistance to ableist capitalist and colonial pressures within the academy, slowness alone does not sufficiently crip research processes. Crip time, by contrast, involves multiply enfolded temporalities imposed upon (and reclaimed by) many researchers, particularly those living with disabilities and/or chronic illness. The article concludes that researchers can commit to recognizing crip time, valuing it, and caring for those living through it, including themselves, not only/necessarily by slowing down. Indeed, they can also carry out this work by actively imagining the crip futures they are striving to make along any/all trajectories and temporalities. This means simultaneously transforming academic institutions, refusing internalized pressures, reclaiming interdependence, and valuing all care work in whatever time it takes. Full article

While early childhood education (ECE) in Ontario has always had a vibrant social activist community, it is characterized by tensions within and between individuals and institutions at the minor (childcare centres, post-secondary ECE programs) and major (mainstream media, public policy) levels. ECE activism is further complicated by the fact that it often feels impossible/unsustainable within our existing patriarchal, neoliberal political structure. In this paper we, four ECE activists and leaders, turn to feminist care ethics (FCE) to reflect on our own activism experiences and imagine a different way of doing and sustaining activism in ECE. We insist that activism be understood as a relational process that bridges major and minor spaces (and everything in between) in a way that cares about, for, and with all those involved. We enthusiastically invite other to join us on this journey, exploring and navigating the beautiful awkwardness, discomfort, tension, and possibilities in caring for and with each other in major and minor political spaces. Full article

Recent research has focused on a dialectical examination of neoliberalism and China’s inherent authoritarian regulatory regime and the planned economy tradition. In the same vein, this study examines China’s institutional reform and emergent goal-oriented governance since the early 1980s. It argues that China’s four decades of marketization and decentralization reforms are not toward neoliberalism, but have been accompanied by increased authoritarian regulation and state intervention. The reform aimed at complementing rather than dismantling the socialist planned economy through the localization of marketization and the adoption of a “small government” logic. A survey on the revitalization of an old industrial base in Lanzhou detailed the flow of power and its operation under the post-reform regulatory centralism. By delegating the power to formulate planning, the right to intervene in the land market, and the autonomy of policy innovation to the local governments, the central government can achieve precise intervention in local governance and land development, thereby achieving the strategic goal of national accumulation. Full article