CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

States of Containment: Culture and Pedagogy in the Neoliberal Order

Organiser: Kenneth Saltman

Saltman, Kenneth (DePaul University, USA) TEACHING WAR: CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION AND MILITARISM FROM SCHOOL TO SCREEN
Military generals running schools, students in uniforms, metal detectors, police presence, high-tech ID card dogtags, realtime internet-based surveillance cameras, mobile hidden surveillance cameras, security consultants, chainlink fences, surprise searches - as U.S. public schools invest in record levels of school security apparatus they increasingly resemble the military and prisons. This paper shows how the rising militaristic language and logic of public schooling articulates with a broader public discourse in the U.S. that cannot be viewed as merely a response to either the Columbine shootings or 9-11. Rather, militarized education in the U.S. needs to be understood in relation to the enforcement of global corporate imperatives as they expand markets through the material and symbolic violence of war and education. This paper demonstrates how militarism pervades foreign and domestic policy, popular culture, educational reform discourse, and language - educating citizens in the virtues of violence and the market. It concludes that the movement against militarism in education must challenge the many ways that militarism as a cultural logic enforces the expansion of corporate power and decimates public democratic power.

Goodman, Robin (Florida State University, USA) CHALLENGING THE FEMINIZATION OF TEACHING AND LABOR IN TH NEOLIBERAL ORDER: THE UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY OF BESSIE HEAD
Alongside sweatshops, service provision, childcare, nursing, care for the elderly, and the like, the feminization of teaching is part of a broader public discourse creating unequal distributions of wealth, power, and value in the workforce. This paper shows how some feminist educational theory which calls itself critical has neglected a serious consideration of how feminism can build a vision of a non-gender-exploitative alternative to the present. I criticize some educational theory which, under the name of feminism, upholds a "politics of caring" as a methodological imperative while neglecting how this same "politics of caring" sets in place political ideas about labor and property which are detrimental to women. In contrast, I offer a reading of a feminist text that considers education's central task as transferring control over the means of production to laboring people, including women. South African novelist and educator Bessie Head's ethnographic study Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) presents the history of a community in Botswana as it constructs a school to train workers towards an independent, postcolonial economy. Rather than providing a critique of the ideologies and operations of an oppressive capitalist system, Head offers a vision of how the future can be otherwise and documents the construction of a school as an alternative to profit motivation, exploitation, or the earning of surplus to benefit people not involved directly in production.

Macrine, Sheila (St. Joseph’s University, USA) IMPRISONING MINDS: THE VIOLENCE OF NEOLIBERAL EDUCATION
This paper illustrates how neoliberal ideologies regulate, control, dominate, and ultimately oppress and silence students, teachers, and schools through privatization, entrepreneurialism, the use of surveillance and assessment, and managerialism. The economic insecurity of neoliberalism requires a smaller yet more repressive state. The paper considers how the neoliberal state with its standardizing and homogenizing tendencies reinvents school culture on a corporate model that is itself both repressive and often compatible with forms of cultural conservatism that are hostile to difference.  The paper concludes with a consideration of strategies of teaching and other culture work for interrupting rightist reform.