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.
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