“Strictly an act of street violence”: intimate publicity and affective divestment in the New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting

On May 12, 2013, two men opened fire on a Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. This essay attends to discourses from public officials and news media following the shooting that reified what we describe as affective divestment from the suffering of historically marginalized bodies and communities. Specifically, public discourse characterized the shooting as an episode of “street violence” that did not warrant sustained national attention. Affective divestment is the consequence of rhetorical maneuvers that signal a pushing away from certain bodies by intimate publics—an estrangement at the symbolic level that has naturalized or rationalized the neglect of certain forms of suffering. Such estrangement, we argue, is a function of neoliberal logics that devalue and, at times, necessitate the suffering of disposable populations.     

Towards a critical re-conceptualization of the purpose of higher education: the role of Ubuntu-Currere in re-imagining teaching and learning in South African higher education

ABSTRACT

The 2015–2016 South African higher education students’ movement proved historical for our country in bringing to our dinner tables: issues of higher education transformation and decolonisation; institutional culture(s); curriculum reform; the need to foreground and make inclusive assessment in education; the coloniality in our knowledge production, and more. Influenced by the emergence of the student movements and the critique they have brought to South African higher education, we bring to the fore the often silent critical reflections on the purposes of higher education in general, and in South Africa especially, as they relate to teaching and learning. We propose that the purposes of higher education in relation to teaching and learning ought to respond to (1) context, (2) democratic difference, and (3) cosmopolitan perspectives. We argue that discourses, phases and logics about South African higher education have tended to disregard and, at times, blur the context and differences as well as cosmopolitan perspectives. Using the notion of Ubuntu-Currere, we re-imagine how teaching and learning could respond to context, difference and cosmopolitanism with examples from the South African higher education experience.     

Media Framing of Integration in Belgian Newspapers

ABSTRACT

I deconstruct the distinctive facets of mediated framing of integration through a textual analysis of Flemish newspapers. Using Entman’s framing theory, I identified four primary integration frames: Fortress Europe, Streamlined Labour, Solipsistic Representation, and Competing Integration Frames. Specifically, I describe the ambivalence of media framing, which intertextually borrows from dominant representation of (im)migrants. The papers simultaneously frame integration as an assimilative social contract to be agreed to by (im)migrants and as a responsibility of the host society to integrate (im)migrants. Counter-framing, present in all four media frames, is critical to both dismantling systemic marginalization and ameliorating processes of integration.     

Neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality and ‘sustainable seafood’ consumption: storying environmentally responsible action

This article invokes a neoliberal and disciplinary governmentality lens in a political ecology of education framework to analyze educational programming at Long Beach, California’s Aquarium of the Pacific. I begin by briefly describing governmentality as Foucault and neo-Foucauldian scholars have theorized the concept, followed by a discussion of the emergence of green governmentality and environmentality in political ecology. Next, I invoke a political ecology of education framework informed by neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality to analyze institutional and teaching practice at the Aquarium. In this analysis, I demonstrate how the institution’s funding structure, placement within the entertainment markets of the southern California area, and commitment to ocean conservation education all influence how the Aquarium conceptualizes itself and its work. I focus on the case of the Blue Cavern Show and the Seafood for the Future program, which work in tandem to define a problem (declining fish stocks; possible seafood shortages) and then structure a neoliberal solution through the market (sustainable seafood consumption). I conclude by discussing the implications of this research for environmental education, which include unpacking how neoliberalism impacts teaching practice, especially as it relates to notions of framing environmentally responsible action.     

Discourses,decisions, designs: ‘special’ education policy-making in New South Wales,Scotland, Finland and Malaysia

This comparative analysis investigates the influence of neo-liberal and inclusive discourses in ‘special’ education policy-making in New South Wales, Scotland, Finland and Malaysia. The centrality of competition, selectivity and accountability in the discourses used in New South Wales and Malaysia suggests a system preference for neo-liberal solutions to education policy problems. The focus on excellence with equity, together with proactive approaches to student support in Scotland and Finland, however, is representative of a more interventionist government approach grounded in social democracy. It is argued that an inclusive approach is conducive to the achievement of both excellence and equity in students’ learning outcomes, whereas countries that have pursued market-driven models involving competition for places in selective institutions tend to have poorer educational outcomes and wider levels of inequality.     

Neoliberalism inside two American high schools

This article examines ‘neoliberalism’ inside two American public high schools. The work of one leading critical theorist, Mark Olssen, is explained and examined. Particular attention is paid to Olssen’s concepts of ‘homo economicus’ and ‘manipulatable man.’ It is concluded that Olssen’s theories on neoliberalism accurately describe developments in public education in the West since the early 1980s. It is also believed that his theories could benefit from a study that ‘looks inside the black box’ and reveals what neoliberalism looks like inside schools. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 teachers and two principals at two public high schools in the American state of Louisiana. Analysis reveals that an educator’s sense of professional autonomy relates to students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. That is, educators at poor schools tend to have dramatically less freedom from local school boards than educators in non-poor schools.     

The Myth of “Migrants as Problems”: Public School in Neoliberal Times and the Construction and Contestation of “Migrant” Identity

This article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school’s neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the case school’s pursuit of exam-performance-based academic excellence, its official documents discursively constructed migrant students as being of “low quality,” and a problem for and potential danger to the school. However, the daily positioning practices of school administrators, teachers, and these students did not just reproduce this uniformly negative discursive construction; rather, they contested it in a complex and contradictory manner. This article offers further evidence showing the complexity of identity constructions in late modern urban schools, wherein professionals and students are all involved in a marketized education context that brings crises and dilemmas to institutions.     

Undoing diversity: knowledge and neoliberal discourses in colleges of education

In this article we analyze discourses of ‘diversity’ in colleges of education in Chile. We contend that the use of discourses of diversity, as reproducing the separation between mainstream subjectivities and those uncontained by the category of normal, is one of the ways universities align themselves with the rules of a democratic society, based on ideas of multicultural understandings and tolerant communities proliferated by inter-governmental institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and others. Our interest is to question the marginalization of cultural politics through the intensification of these discourses. At the same time, we explore the relations between the advancement of neutral discourses of difference and the value-free practices expressed in neoliberal educational agendas. We use discourse analysis to read interviews with future teachers. We understand students’ narratives as perpetuating normative ways of thinking and legitimating those knowledges promoted by institutional curricula.