Comfort radicalism and NEETs: a conservative praxis

Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people's lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion and it is feared that they will become a 'lost generation'. This paper(1) draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging that these issues have a much wider purchase. The notion of NEETs rests alongside longstanding concerns of the English state and middle classes, addressing unruly male working class youth as well as the moral turpitude of working class girls. Waged labour and domesticity are seen as a means to integrate such groups into society thereby generating social cohesion. The paper places the debate within it socio-economic context and draws on theorisations of cognitive capitalism, Italian workerism, as well as emerging theories of antiwork to analyse these. It concludes by arguing that ‘radical’ approaches to NEETs that point towards inequities embedded in the social structure and call for social democratic solutions veer towards a form of comfort radicalism. Such approaches leave in place the dominance of capitalist relations as well as productivist orientations that celebrate waged labour

Gender in the neoliberalised global academy: the affective economy of women and leadership in South Asia

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore women’s engagement with leadership in HE in South Asia. A potent affective economy was discovered. Leadership was associated with affects such as competitiveness, aggression, impropriety, stress and anxiety, in ways that were intensified by highly patriarchal and corporatised HE cultures. Indeed, its difficulties and toxicities meant that leadership was rejected or resisted as an object of desire by many women. We illuminate how different forms of competition contribute to the affective economy of HE leadership. The research also raises wider questions about the possibilities of disrupting dominant neoliberal constructions of HE if those who question such values are excluded (or self-exclude) from leadership positions

The promises of creative industry higher education: An analysis of university prospectuses in Malaysia

In the context of economic growth policies that stress the importance of a ‘creative economy’, and the expansion of private universities, there has been an enormous growth in the number of creative industry degrees offered by Malaysian HEIs. This paper provides a critical discourse analysis of the promotional materials used by two private institutions, Multimedia University and Limkokwing University, to persuade students that these degrees will offer them a desirable future as employable ‘industry savvy and tech savvy’ creative graduates. We explore the structures of feeling that promotional material seeks to engender in potential students as it promises them future success in a globalised, high-tech world

The quantified self: what counts in the neoliberal workplace

Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and wellbeing in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalized the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing, entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces

The government of migrant mobs: Temporary divisible multiplicities in border zones

This article engages with the production and government of migrant multiplicities in border zones of Europe, arguing that the specificity of migrant multiplicities consists in their temporary and divisible character. It is argued that there are three different forms of migrant multiplicities: (1) the multiplicity produced due to migrants’ spatial proximity; (2) the virtual multiplicity generated through data; and (3) the visualized and narrated multiplicity that emerges from media portraits of the ‘spectacle’ of the arrivals of migrants. It is claimed that multiplicities are made to divide and partition the migrants and thus prevent the formation of a collective political subject. In the concluding section, the article deals with the ambivalent character of the term ‘the mob’, addressing the twofold dimension of migrant multiplicities: these are in fact generated by techniques of power, at the same time exceeding them and representing potential emerging political subjects

Conjuring optimism in dark times: Education, affect and human capital

This paper analyses how the discursive construction, valuation and subjective experience of human capital is evolving in parallel with crises of capital as a world-system. Ideology critique provides tools for analysing policy ‘fictions’ that aim to sustain investment in human capital through education. Foucauldian analytical tools enable analysis of how human capital has become a project of self-appreciation and cultivation of positive psychological traits. We argue that the work of Lauren Berlant provides an important complement to these approaches and enables us to analyse how crises of capital are being lived as the cruelling of optimism about social mobility through investment in oneself as human capital. The paper points to an educational politics and pedagogy for living through infrastructural breakdown in darkly uncertain historical times

Cultural economy and the creative field of the city

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labor market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The paper ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global

New Keywords: Migration and Borders

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity