Responsible Muslims and Normalizing Islam

In this paper a critique of neoliberal regimes within universities is developed. Neoliberal discourse is deconstructed and the dangers of it for intellectual work are considered. Neoliberal subjects (those subjected through neoliberal discourses) are defined and guidelines for thinking about education within (and against) neoliberal regimes are developed.

There is often a substantial gap between ‘vision’ and ‘execution’ in neoliberal governance, yet this gap is rarely acknowledged within neoliberal discourse. In the realm of environmental governance this has manifested in increased reliance on neoliberal conservation strategies despite mounting evidence concerning their common failure to perform as intended. This paper seeks to explain this contradictory situation, drawing on Foucaultian as well as Lacanian theorization via Žižek to suggest that neoliberal conservation's ‘virtualistic’ vision commonly necessitates antineoliberal regulation, for the deeply flawed understandings of human behavior and social action in which it is grounded frequently compel intervention contrary to free market principles in order to preserve the goals that market mechanisms are intended to achieve. I contend, further, that neglect of the characteristic disjuncture between vision and execution in neoliberal conservation may take the form of ‘fetishistic disavowal’, functioning as a ‘public secret’ (something generally known but not generally articulated) in terms of which explicit identification of the disjuncture, paradoxically, intensifies its obfuscation. This analysis is illustrated through discussion of prominent conservation strategies in Latin America, particularly ecotourism and payment for environmental services, which are commonly described as neoliberal market mechanisms yet in practice operate quite differently.

From “cartoneros” to “recolectores urbanos”. The changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies in neoliberal Buenos Aires

We suggest that while Indigenous languages are threatened by capitalist and neoliberal encroachments, responses from applied linguists in the academy can be misguided. To make our argument, we must first define neoliberalism, and examine how the broader neoliberal discourses of choice, competition and the free market have percolated and distilled into local Indigenous language contexts, impacting languages, cultures and identities. We ask ourselves what identities are currently available, adopted and valorized by and for Indigenous language speakers, and how positions like Indigenous language speaker, academic/linguist, activist and teacher are altering in response to available neoliberal subject positions? We suggest that neoliberal discursive regimes position Indigenous peoples who do not speak their heritage languages as “victims needing recognition and redress.” The result is that they have become trapped in colonizer ideologies viewing Indigenous peoples as unfit to govern themselves. Colonized now by neoliberalism, Indigenous language speakers forced to live within neoliberal regimes must adopt identities of resignation, meaning engaged in a permanent struggle to accommodate themselves to the world. Instead, we posit that their positions are better framed and respected as identities of refusal, everyday actions of refusing enclosure.

This article employs a Foucauldian discourse analysis of UK social policy on work and retirement from the austerity measures of 2010 to 2019, to explore the emergence of older femininity as a key site to articulate and justify a neoliberal governmentality in old age, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Feminist Cultural Studies' scholarship has remarked and critiqued the centrality of work in contemporary cultural discourses of female emancipation and empowerment, highlighting how the celebration of female workplace success has been employed to sustain the social, cultural, and economic project of neoliberalism. However, this academic field has focused predominantly on young women and women up to childbearing age, failing to account for the way older femininity is being increasingly included in neoliberal discourses through the encouragement to work in old age. Through the dialogic relationship between ‘entrepreneurialism’ and―what I call―‘gendered anti‐welfarism’ in old age, the UK social policy draws on a feminist vocabulary to offer ‘the older entrepreneurial woman’ as its ideal subject, characterized by capacity and willingness to work, personal and job‐market flexibility, responsibilization and individualization of risk, and―but only for the more privileged few―choice. Ultimately, the article illustrates how contemporary cultural discourses that place work as central to female empowerment and emancipation are not limited to younger women, but extend to older femininity through the normalization of the figure of the older entrepreneurial woman, with the articulation of a ‘neoliberal feminism in old age’.

Psychotherapy might be seen as a site of reproduction of neoliberal capitalist ideology. Unpacking therapeutic discourse affords the opportunity to explore neoliberalism in operation. We present a theoretical case for exploring neoliberalism in the therapeutic context. Specifically, we identify and illustrate three neoliberal discourses: the normal self, the improving self, and the productive self. We discuss how therapists might orient to these discourses and identify ways to challenge neoliberal ideology. Doing so will not dismantle power systems that yield oppression; however, it may help clients reclaim and negotiate preferred subjectivities within this system while also working toward broader social justice.

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.

This article comparatively analyses the cases of Mexico and Chile to understand how women's movements contest the meaning of citizenship in various national contexts. We also assess the consequences that different movement strategies, such as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘double militancy’, have for movements' citizenship goals. To explain the different outcomes in the two cases, we focus on the nature of the democratic transition, the internal coherence of women's movements, the nature of alliances with other civil society actors, the ideological orientation of the newly democratized state, the form of women's agency within the state, and the nature of the neoliberal economic reforms. We argue that a serious problem for women in both Chile and Mexico is the fact that governments themselves are deploying the concept of citizenship as a way to legitimate their social and economic policies. While women's movements seek to broaden the meaning of citizenship to include social rights, neoliberal governments employ the rhetoric of citizen activism to encourage society to provide its own solutions to economic hardship and poverty. While this trend is occurring in both Chile and Mexico, there are some features of the political opportunity structure in Chile that enable organized women to contest the state's more narrow vision of democratic citizenship. In Mexico, on the other hand, the neoliberal economic discourse of the current government is matched by a profoundly conservative ideological rhetoric, thereby reducing the political opportunities for women to forward a gender equality agenda.

In the era of knowledge capitalism, universities are consistently regarded as potential ‘engines' of capital accumulation and state prosperity. This article will argue that as regards their teaching and research functions – but with specific attention to the research function – universities can be seen to be enacting a type of neoliberal discourse/discursive practice that corresponds to the particular notion of ‘ raison d'état’ raised by Foucault in his 1978–79 Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism. The positioning of monetary accumulation and expansion in the rawest sense as the ultimate desirable goal of universities serves to enact the type of ‘limitation of self-regulation’ which Foucault describes as a function of the (new) liberal state, conditioned as it is to build itself, and condition all of its behaviour, on the principal goal of economic growth and accumulation, enacting a form of neoliberal governmentality, in Foucault's (and others') terms. Subsequently, a neoliberal conception of science as necessarily wedded to a narrow instrumental-economic idea of technology continues to animate public discourse both at the government and university levels, resulting in a complex – and at times contested – political terrain which revolves around a particular economic regime of truth predicated in growth and accumulation before any other consideration. In this context, universities must grow and expand, but particularly in the ways that are demanded by the particular regime of truth which is hegemonic at the time, which revolve around what is understood here as the neoliberal discourse of knowledge capitalism. This argument is offered with the example of Canada in mind in particular, but with cognizance of related trends active in other countries impacted by the ‘knowledge economy’ discourse in the OECD group of countries, for instance, and beyond.

This paper addresses some of the discursive practices of neoliberal government through which the subject is constituted as a subject of choice—subjects whose life trajectory is shaped by the imperatives of a labour market in which they will become mobile and flexible workers with multiple careers and jobs. Mobility among these multiple careers and jobs is secured through ongoing investment in education and training: an investment in lifelong learning. The paper analyses the ways in which neoliberal discourses of freedom and choice are mapped onto discourses of the market, and of the labour market in particular, and recognizes the centrality of education and training as sites and technologies for the production of mobile and flexible worker/subjects. Drawing on life‐history narratives of forty 18‐ to 65‐year‐olds, the paper addresses the discourses of choice, education and lifelong learning through which mobility within and adaptation to the labour market is understood as necessary, desirable and essential to successful negotiation of the multiple opportunities the participants believed were available to them now and in the future.