Browsing by Subject "neoliberalism"
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Item The ‘Coloured Question’ and the University of Pretoria: Separate Development, Trusteeship and Self Reliance, 1933-2012(2018-12) Thumbran, JanekeThis dissertation is about a historically white university’s engagement with what is called the ‘coloured question.’ It explores how the University of Pretoria (UP) grappled with the question of where ‘coloureds’ belonged politically, socially and economically in apartheid South Africa – specifically through the disciplines of sociology and social work. In doing so, this institution produced knowledge that would shape and inform this racial category – not only through writing, teaching and curriculum development – but also by appropriating the segregated and local township of Eersterust as a site of disciplinary intervention, from the time of this coloured community’s creation during apartheid in 1962, to the post-apartheid and neoliberal present. In the post-apartheid period, these forms of knowledge have re-emerged through the university’s recently established mandate of community engagement, which was accompanied by a disciplinary shift away from the social sciences, towards the material discipline of architecture. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the various ways in which the disciplinary reason of the university informed, shaped and converged with the instrumental reason of the apartheid state to produce forms of racialized subjection, using the University of Pretoria’s appropriation of Eersterust as a particular example. In addition, the purpose is to problematize and historicize the persistence of apartheid’s racial categories – like the ‘coloured’ category – and forms of knowledge production in post-apartheid universities. This project’s purpose not only ties in with widespread calls to decolonize the university made through recent student protests in South Africa, but asks how we might begin to envision a university ‘after’ apartheid, by calling attention to a form of subjection that lies at the heart of apartheid’s racial premises: that of the ‘coloured’ subject and its instrumentalization in the practices of university disciplinesItem Contending Purposes of Pre-Kindergarten: A Comparative Case Study of Early Childhood Education Policy in Minnesota(2022-05) Klapperich, AlexandraPolicymakers predominantly represent Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as an investment in children’s human capital development. Despite the dominance of this policy discourse, limited research explores how it operates as a policymaking strategy or compares the perspectives of policymakers, children, parents, and educators regarding ECEC. This dissertation research addresses this gap through a Comparative Case Study of ECEC in Minnesota, where investment discourse is pervasive. I apply a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Minnesota ECEC policy texts to explore how policy actors privilege investment discourse in legitimating ECEC reform. Through this CDA I highlight the assumptions regarding children’s subjectivity that underlie Minnesota policy actors’ use of investment discourse. I apply Critical Race Theory to explore how Minnesota ECEC policy actors’ engagement of investment discourse reinforces racist assumptions regarding inequality in education.Additionally, this dissertation examines the perspectives and priorities of key social actors in ECEC practice, including children, a pre-K educator, and parents. I draw on school-based research that I conducted in a pre-K classroom in the greater Minneapolis, Minnesota area. I describe how two parents and a pre-K educator emphasize the importance of children’s social-emotional learning in pre-K, and pre-K’s role in readying children for future schooling. I also outline how these participants negotiate investment discourse as they make choices for their children’s and students’ education. Meanwhile, the pre-K students who participated in this research valued opportunities to engage in free play and artistic endeavors, and to visit their playground and the gym. They also emphasized rules regarding safety, as well as strategies to negotiate relationships with peers and process their feelings. I contrast students’ narratives regarding pre-K with policy actors’ prioritization of ECEC as a means to ready children for academic success and eventual economic productivity. I show how students’ priorities are at risk as a result of the heightened academic expectations in ECEC. Drawing on the New Sociology of Childhood, I argue that engaging children in this dissertation research offers emancipatory possibilities for destabilizing investment discourse’s dominance and forging justice in ECEC.Item Diversity sieves: Cultural centers as sites of successful subject production in higher education(2017-07) Hoffman, GarrettHigher education yields individual and collective benefits, to include higher earnings, increased civic engagement, and national economic growth. While social and democratic benefits are included in the expansive lists of positive outcomes, economic benefits, both for the individual as well as for society, remain at the forefront of national conversations about higher education’s importance. However, gaps in postsecondary degree attainment and, therefore, related benefits between various demographic groups persist. This dissertation explores how the privileging of neoliberal constructions of success impacts minoritized students’ lives and subjectivities. Specifically, I examined how neoliberal discourses of successful college students work through one institution’s cultural center to shape the subjectivities of minoritized students. Using a qualitative case study design, and textual, observational, and interview data collected from one institution, I conducted a discourse analysis to understand how one institution constructed successful students. Second, I conducted a narrative analysis to understand how minoritized students negotiated these constructions of success. I show how neoliberal constructions of success produce norms to which minoritized students measure themselves and how these norms support institutional assertions of a multicultural, inclusive campus community while maintaining existing hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. The cultural center and diversity programming, then, become in service of the institution, which eschews attention to social justice and minoritized students’ own goals and constructions of success for themselves and their communities.Item Engineering Kinship: Genetic Technologies, Economic Speculation, and the Queer Body(2017-06) Mathiason, JessicaLinking the critical humanities to the biological sciences, this dissertation investigates how progressive, queer, and anti-racist techniques and technologies of kinship emerge in Progressive Era eugenic cinema and return, reformulated, in twenty-first-century sci-fi film and television. Drawing on research conducted at the Library of Congress, the Wangensteen Health Sciences Library, and the John E. Allen Archives, I contest the traditional narrative that American eugenics was an exclusively right-wing movement by revealing the surprising appearance of several radical elements—feminism, progressive economics, and social welfare reform—within this otherwise pernicious social project. I argue prominent figures as diverse as the African-American physician Dorothy Ferebee and the Sapphic writer Edith Ellis co-opted eugenic discourses to find support for their social struggles. Today, these progressive strands of eugenic ideology have been de-radicalized through the shift from state-sponsored eugenic projects to corporation-driven geneticism. The new genetics movement has adopted neoliberal theories of growth to overcome economic and ecological limits. Pairing ReGenesis and Orphan Black with an analysis of gene patenting cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, I argue this speculative future veers away from the progressives’ valuation of queer difference by employing technological means and legal strategies to compel domestic normativity. Divided into two parts, this dissertation offers a comparative analysis of the ideological inheritance left to what I call “New Eugenic Media” from its counterparts in the Progressive Era through a critical examination of two collections, separated by a century: the U.S. Department of War’s hygiene films from 1915-1922 and sci-fi film and television from 2000-2015.Item How Service Learning Constructs Ideal Citizens for the Nation(2019-09) Rost-Banik, ColleenPart of the mission of U.S. postsecondary institutions is molding citizens for participation in democratic society. Service learning is a popular pedagogy to enact this formation. This dissertation highlights how mechanisms of domination accompany the aims of democracy within service learning practices. I offer theoretical and practical insights of how democracy and domination—often considered contradictory powers—are mutually reinforced through contemporary civic engagement efforts. I find that the framing of service learning projects, and how students are positioned within them, influence the direction of racial formation and the augmentation and/or disruption of ideal citizenship. Through three service learning sites—an after-school tutoring program, a labor union, and a Native Hawaiian land stewardship program—I illustrate how societal messages, rhetoric from instructors and site coordinators, and the roles expected of service learners set parameters around democracy while fostering hierarchies of bodies and knowledge. The analytic focus of this critical ethnography is on the discourses and interactions that occur within the processes of service learning. Using a year of data from university service learning classrooms, community sites, and in-depth interviews with students, faculty, administrators, and site coordinators, I examine how these processes encourage characteristics of ideal citizenship that support the nation-state. Informed by theories of racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2015) and neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Raddon & Harrison, 2015), I illuminate how service learning relies upon and reinforces stratification as college students are hailed into civic responsibility, empathy, and individual transformation. Even when attempts are made to subvert the social rankings, other ones are strengthened, thereby demonstrating how challenging it is to untangle the twin forces of democracy and domination. This study addresses the dearth of service learning and higher education scholarship using critical ethnography. I invite scholars and practitioners to wrestle with whether and how the prized traits of citizenship taught through civic engagement projects sustain hierarchies and enforce social control as students learn to surveil themselves and others. I suggest that if scholars and practitioners desire social justice, we need to be overtly political, collectively join in solidarity with activist movements, and refrain from institutionalizing our efforts.Item Pathologies of Care: HIV Treatment and Prevention in Turkey(2023) Atuk, TankutThis dissertation investigates the ambivalent, elusive, and contradictory nature of care that produces abandonment and harm but dialectically gives rise to vital modes of belonging and carefulness. In Turkey, the number of HIV diagnoses has increased by 620%, and AIDS- related deaths have more than doubled over the last decade. Yet, formal regimes of HIV care block access to testing, condoms, and pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis; impose monogamy as a scientifically legitimate prevention method; deny (health)care to LGBTQI+s and people living with HIV; and refuse sexual health education. This dissertation draws on twenty months of embedded ethnography, public and private archives, medical records, newspaper articles, official government reports, and fifty in-depth interviews with governmental, nongovernmental, medical, and pharmaceutical sector workers. Through the concept of pathogenic care, this investigation uncovers how conservative and neoliberal ethics and mechanisms of public health aggravate the conditions of those living with HIV and increase the risk of transmission for others, especially the marginalized, who are socio- immunologically more vulnerable. In other words, this research demonstrates that HIV care has become pathological in Turkey by facilitating a joint epidemic of HIV and HIVfobi, i.e., status-based stigma and discrimination. By setting a sterile distance between themselves and the so-called “contagious others,” formal regimes of HIV care create zones of abandonment where particularly queer and trans communities are left vulnerable to HIV transmission and socio-medical discrimination. This study makes three central arguments with important theoretical and public health implications: (1) the Turkish HIV epidemic is not an inevitable result of dissident/terrorist sexualities, foreign lifestyles, or human immunodeficiency virus; (2) public health mechanisms, institutions, and actors in place to provide HIV treatment and prevention have become unexpected vectors of HIV transmission under neoliberal Islam; (3) the fear of medical and social contagion and the consequent impulse to immunize life against “risky” others lie at the center of Turkey’s failed public health response to the growing HIV epidemic.Item The Rock of the Republic: The Ten Commandments in American Life from World War II to the Culture Wars(2018-08) Haker, JosephThis dissertation examines the various movements to propagate and publicly display the Ten Commandments in the United States since the end of World War II, using that history as a window to better understand the nexus of religion, nationalism, and capitalism. It demonstrates that such displays first emerged out of the impulses and needs of postwar liberalism, which sought to construct a broad and inclusive “Judeo-Christian” consensus, but were quickly seized upon by reactionary forces working to construct a more exclusionary form of nationalism. It then documents the role the Ten Commandments played in the politics and ideology of the Christian Right for whom they symbolized the foundations of a “Christian nation” that were under siege. This dissertation argues that public displays of the Ten Commandments, and the broader fusion of religion and nationalism they came to represent, helped to reconcile two contradictory impulses within postwar religious conservatism. Specifically, the embrace of liberal capitalism as a guarantor of freedom and prosperity on the one hand, and a deep aversion toward many of its material and social effects on the other. The Ten Commandments worked to displace concerns about structural changes onto individual moral failings or cultural institutions believed to shape individual conduct. For their proponents, the Ten Commandments offered a way of ameliorating social crises, arresting cultural liberalization, and reasserting traditional patriarchal authority without necessitating a broader systemic critique. This also helps to explain how conservative Christianity became reconciled with, or even necessary to, the functioning of neoliberalism.Item Romancing the Market, Rationalizing Nature: Transformations in Environmentalists’ Economic Thought, 1960-2014(2019-05) Maung, RebeccaThe purported stagnation of the mainstream American environmental movement has coincided with what many consider the rise of the neoliberal era. My project attempts to track the relationship between the two. Building from the cultural turn in economic sociology, this dissertation examines the American environmental movement: specifically, how environmentalists’ understanding of the relationship between environmental concerns and economic markets has changed between the 1960s and today. Through a mixed-methods combination of content and discourse analysis, I examine how voices presented in the member-directed newsletters of three major American environmental organizations have articulated the ecological advantages and disadvantages of various elements of a free, self-regulating market economy. I concentrate on moments of perceived crisis, including the Reagan administration’s explicitly pro-market and anti-environmental agenda and the specter of global climate change. While environmentalists’ faith in the market increases over time, I argue that perceived crises, both legislative and environmental, shape environmental actors’ acceptance or rejection of the importance of free-market principles.Item Unsettling Recovery: Natural Disaster Response and the Politics of Contemporary Settler Colonialism(2019-07) Kensinger, StevenThis dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the Christchurch Central City Rebuild. Following a series of severe earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand between September 2010 and February 2011, the central government declared a state of emergency and passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act (CER Act) in April 2011. This act mandated the creation of a new governing body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, to oversee the development and implementation of a recovery strategy and plan for the Central City to be developed in cooperation with the Christchurch City Council and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribal authority. I analyze the structure of power established by the post-earthquake recovery legislation through the lens of Rebuild discourse, a discursive regime comprised of multiple political projects that each engaged in recovery in particular ways to enact their specific vision of what future Christchurch ought to be. I argue that the passage of the CER Act and the structure of power it created in post-earthquake Christchurch drew on the legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history to enable the neoliberal settler state in its efforts to dispossess local Christchurch residents of access to their city while also maintaining the ongoing dispossession of the local indigenous group Ngāi Tahu in order to serve the interests of economic and political elites.Item “When There’s Good, There’s Good. When There’s Harm, There’s Harm”: Diverse Voices on Community Engagement(2021-05) Perrotti, CarmineService learning and community engagement, pedagogical strategies combining work in the community with academic learning, have become near ubiquitous across U.S. higher education. While scholarship has demonstrated positive student learning outcomes of community engaged pedagogies and practices, there has been unequal consideration towards understanding the experiences of communities involved. Calls for elevating community voices and perspectives in service learning and community engagement are not new but have all too often demonstrated lofty rhetoric without subsequent practical application. What is even more concerning is that critical scholars have argued that service learning has been shaped by white supremacy and neoliberalism. Yet, these racial and economic realities have rarely been discussed in detail and scholars also have neglected to consider these issues from the perspectives of communities. Because community perspectives have been largely missing from the community engagement scholarship, this qualitative inquiry, drawing on a case study research approach, as well as the analytic lenses of Critical Whiteness Studies and neoliberalism, aimed to engage a multivocal account of how one community described and understood their experiences with community engagement by one college. Specifically, this inquiry took me back to the college that I graduated from, Providence College (a regionally selective, predominantly White, Catholic, liberal arts college in Providence, Rhode Island that had an academically situated undergraduate community engagement program) and the Smith Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island (a predominantly lower-income, multiracial community that abutted the southeast corner of the campus) where I was first introduced to and participated in service learning and community engagement as a college student. Findings from this study revealed how a range of community members experienced Providence College’s community engagement work within Smith Hill as well as how community members described a perceptual harm imposed on the community by the college’s community engagement work. By listening to community voices and perspectives, this inquiry offers a key implication for practice and future research that more fully considers community members in the context of service learning and community engagement in higher education.