Embodied women at work in neoliberal times and places

In this article five women explore (female) embodiment in academic work in current workplaces. In a week-long collective biography workshop they produced written memories of themselves in their various workplaces and memories of themselves as children and as students. These memories then became the texts out of which the analysis was generated. The authors examine the constitutive and seductive effects of neoliberal discourses and practices, and in particular, the assembling of academic bodies as particular kinds of working bodies. They use the concept of chiasma, or crossing over, to trouble some aspects of binary thinking about bodies and about the relations between bodies and discourses. They examine the way that we simultaneously resist and appropriate, and are seduced by and appropriated within, neoliberal discourses and practices.

Meet the phallic teacher: curriculum design and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure that needs to be negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction.These observations are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Meet the phallic teacher: designing curriculum and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction. These observations made here are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Gendered experiences of industry change and the effects of neoliberalism

In a time of dramatic and rapid change in the global media industry and when technological advances and media concentration are shaping the way news is produced and consumed, little research has focused on how the producers of news are affected by such change. This paper explores narratives of confidence and cynicism as told to me by Australian print news media journalists. I am interested in journalists’ memories and experiences of personal change that arise from an intensified workplace and how neoliberal discourses affect newsroom culture. How do the journalists I interview experience and speak of changes in the newsroom? In what ways is being a journalist different now to when they entered the industry? In effect, how have journalists changed as a result of journalism's changes? The interviews with 17 print media journalists contain rich narratives with which to explore how participants remember and make sense of industry changes. This paper finds that the intensification of work practices, ethical constraints and gender bias, underpinned by neoliberalism, have aided in creating a cynicism among many of the journalists interviewed. Nevertheless, the majority of interviewees suggest that a career in journalism has increased their personal and/or professional confidence. There are, however, gendered differences in this experience.

Deconstructing diversity discourses in the fields of educationnal management and leadership

Discourses of diversity have supplanted those of equal opportunity or social justice in many Western democratic societies. While the notion of diversity is seemingly empowering through its recognition of cultural, religious, racial and gender difference within nation states, the emergence of this discourse during the 1990s has been in the context of neoliberal managerialist discourses that assume social action is fully explicable through theories of maximizing self interest. Thus notions of diversity, while originating in collective demands of social movements of feminism, anti racism and multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, have in recent times privileged learning and leadership as an individual accomplishment and not a collective practice. Thus the dominant discourse of diversity is more in alignment with the deregulatory aspects of the increasingly managerial and market orientation of schooling, decentring earlier discourses of more transformatory notions premised upon reducing inequality and discrimination and developing ‘inclusivity’ in and through schooling. This paper provides a contextual and conceptual framework through which to explore the intersections and divergences of discourses of diversity in schools and their practical application.

Surveillance, responsibility and control: an analysis of government and industry discourses about 'problem' and 'responsible' gambling

Background: Discussions of gambling have traditionally focused on ideas of “problem” and “responsible” gambling. However, few studies have examined how Institutions attempt to exert social control over gamblers in order to promote so-called “responsible” behaviour. In this study, we examine the way “problem” and “responsible” gambling are discussed by Australian governments and the gambling industry, using a theoretical framework based on the work of Foucault.

Method: We conducted a thematic analysis of discourses surrounding problem and responsible gambling in government and gambling industry websites, television campaigns and responsible gambling materials.

Results: Documents distinguished between gambling, which was positive for the community, and problem gambling, which was portrayed as harmful and requiring medical intervention. The need for responsible gambling was emphasised in many of the documents, and reinforced by mechanisms including self-monitoring, self-control and surveillance of gamblers.

Conclusions: Government and industry expect gamblers to behave “responsibly”, and are heavily influenced by neoliberal ideas of rational, controlled subjects in their conceptualisation of what constitutes “responsible behaviour”. As a consequence, problem gamblers become constructed as a deviant group. This may have significant consequences for problem gamblers, such as the creation of stigma.

Market subjectivity and neoliberal governmentality in higher education

Using an interpretive case study in a business school in India, this research examines student behaviour and offers an understanding of a marketisation process in higher education. The study deploys Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality and uncovers processes through which market subjectivity is fostered among students as they strive to become responsible, active, and entrepreneurial subjects. The subject position is attributed to several governmental discourses of peer pressure, abnormality, uncritical pedagogy, loan repayment, and elitism that prevail in the business school. The study further highlights the roles of English language and preference for western corporations which are unique to postcolonial India. Market subjectivity results in the prevalence of instrumental rationality, failure to develop a critical academic perspective, subordination of social concerns, and disenchantment and exclusion among some students.

Conflicts at the bottom of the pyramid: profitability, poverty alleviation, and neoliberal governmentality

This article adopts the concept of neoliberal governmentality to critically analyze public policy failures in a bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) marketing initiative. This research shows that e-Choupal, an Indian BOP initiative, is hampered by a divide between poverty alleviation and profit seeking, which is inadequately reconciled by the neoliberal government policies that dominate contemporary India. The initiative sounds good, even noble, but becomes mired in divergent discourses and practices that ultimately fail to help the poor whom it targets. This research helps explicate the problems with BOP policy interventions that encourage profit seeking as a way to alleviate poverty.

`I feel enlightened now, but...`: the limits to the pedagogic translation of critical social discourses in physical education

The emancipatory goal that underpins critical theories of teaching and learning is built on a theory of rational self-determination. In the context of physical education, critical educators believe that through a process of enlightenment teachers can recognize and transform elements of injustice and inequality that exist, albeit unwittingly, in their practice. However, despite the broad appeal of this orientation there are relatively few empirical accounts of how theories of enlightenment manifest themselves in the practice of emancipation. Propelled by the lacuna that clearly exists between critical theory and critical practice, this paper reports on the introduction of critical social discourses to a preservice PE program. It uses a case study methodology to report on two student-teachers' engagement with a range of critical social discourses during a year-long PE unit. The paper discusses some of the ways these students engaged with the theory and practice of a critical orientation for teaching and learning in physical education. Aspects of their experiences are then interpreted through Fay's (1987) critical but postmodern "limits to change" thesis. The paper concludes with tempered optimism about the potential for critical social discourses to guide preservice teachers in practical ways.

Tensions and dilemmas in community development: new discourses, new Trojans?

This paper begins by noting the range of contradictions and dilemmas facing those involved in community development today. It then draws on research into the operating frameworks that set the stage for much current community development activity. It discusses four key operating frameworks and how each framework can affect community development practice. The final section deals with the ways in which the frameworks, and the discourses associated with them, come together.