Neoliberalism

« Retour à la gare de Lyon » 12 décembre 95 : quand Bourdieu soutenait les cheminots grévistes Il y a un peu plus de vingt-deux ans, le 12 décembre 1995, le sociologue Pierre Bourdieu prononçait un discours mémorable devant une assemblée de cheminots grévistes réunis dans la salle de spectacles du comité d'entreprise de la gare de Lyon 1. Ce discours semble retrouver aujourd'hui une remarquable actualité, au regard de la rafale actuelle de réformes structurelles qui visent à tranformer en profondeur la société française, et notamment une réforme du statut de la SNCF et des cheminots. Cette impression demande cependant à être analysée. Qu'est-ce qui, dans ce discours, nous parle encore aujourd'hui ? Naissance du « tous ensemble » Rappelons d'abord le contexte. Le 12 décembre 1995, donc, défilaient dans les rues de France deux millions de manifestants selon les syndicats et un million selon la police. Rien qu'à Paris, la manifestation réunissait près d'un million de personnes selon les syndicats, la moitié selon la police. C'était en tout cas la manifestation la plus importante depuis le 13 mai 1968 et le point culminant d'un mouvement social exceptionnel. En jeu l'avenir du « Plan Juppé » présenté le 15 novembre par le premier ministre devant l'Assemblée nationale et qui prévoyait entre autres mesures la fixation annuelle d'un taux d'évolution des dépenses de santé, la hausse des cotisations sociales des salariés, l'allongement de la durée de cotisations retraites pour les fonctionnaires, à quoi s'ajoutait l'alignement des régimes spéciaux, dont celui des cheminots, sur le régime général des retraites. Le mouvement d'opposition à ces réformes d'une une rare ampleur se développe en décembre notamment dans les services publics et dans une moindre mesure dans le privé, mais avec un soutien massif de la popluation au point que l'on a pu parler alors de « grève par procuration ». Le 15 décembre le gouvernement Juppé retire la plus grande partie de son projet de réforme. Ce mouvement social de 95 est aussi un temps où la gauche s'est déchirée, partagée entre les « réalistes » qui, avec la revue Esprit et la direction de la CFDT soutenaient des mesures « rationnelles » et 1 Le disocurs sera publiée dans Libération le 14 décembre sous le titre « Je suis ici pour dire notre soutien » et plus tard dans Contre-feux, Raisons d'agir,1998, sous le titre « « Contre la destruction d'une civilisation ».

The university is often celebrated as a site for critique where intellectual
laborers, protected by academic freedom, may address the pressing social
issues of their time and thus contribute to public opinion and to the
advancement of knowledge. As the public university increasingly adopts
neoliberal practices, however, such as shifting its governing power to private funders and by emphasizing its marketable versus non-marketable benefits to wider society, critical university studies (CUS) argues that academic freedom—the bedrock of the U.S. university system—is under threat. This project contributes to CUS scholarship by examining how academics who are committed to advancing social justice and who actively engage with broad audiences, experience the protection of academic freedom while employed at U.S. public universities. Are faculty members who publicly critique systemic injustice protected by academic freedom? More specifically, using in-depth interviews, I inquire: 1) What are the motivations for, and experiences of scholars when exercising their academic freedom in politically controversial ways? 2) To what extent do economic, racial and gendered politics, as well as faculty members’ institutional status impact public universities’ commitment to academic freedom? I draw on 31 in-depth interviews with publicly-engaged
scholars from three Research One public universities who reflect a diverse range of academic ranks and disciplines as well as racial and gender positionalities in order to better understand what it is like for those who consistently take stands on controversial political issues. This project reveals that, in general, academic freedom is a stratified freedom drawn across academic-rank lines, reflecting the racial and gender hierarchies of larger society. This research argues that while the culture of the academy encourages conformity rather than ethical risk-taking, the university is still a space of edifying possibilities. By examining the effectiveness of academic freedom and the commendable dissidence of activistscholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to higher education accountability
efforts that seek to reinforce the academy’s connection to, and responsibility for the public that it is tasked to serve.

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers won the 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic work with migrant grandmothers caring for the elderly in Italy and California and their adult children in Ukraine, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers investigates how migrant grandmothers built the “new” Ukraine from the outside in through transnational networks. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different migration patterns—one a post-Soviet “exile” of individual women to Italy and the other an “exodus” of families to the United States—Dr. Solari exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia with implications for the global world order. This global ethnography explains the larger context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

This essay focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin's acclaimed science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past (also known as The Three Body Problem). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. These questions revolve around the way in which the type or the figure plays a crucial role in the construction of the nation-state. As quintessentially modern social institutions, both the regime of translation and the institution of literature converge around aesthetic ideology, in which the figure and the type play a paramount role. This is not just any figure, but rather the figure of the human, configured through the logical economy of genus, species, and individual. As a kind of abstraction that is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life (or what Marx calls a "real abstraction"), this "logical economy" is most evident in that experience of identity peculiar to modernity: being an individual who belongs to a national community within that community's membership in a larger, single species among other species. Together, these two institutions form an inherently comparative biopolitical infrastructure that I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference.

Prolongeant ses travaux sur la répression, Vanessa Codaccioni analyse et dénonce les ressorts de « la société de vigilance ». Surveillance massive, appel à la délation, légitimation de la répression : une nouvelle servitude volontaire est insidieusement imposée aux citoyens qui deviennent des acteurs incontournables de cette dynamique sécuritaire.

Prolongeant ses travaux sur la répression, Vanessa Codaccioni analyse et dénonce les ressorts de « la société de vigilance ». Surveillance massive, appel à la délation, légitimation de la répression : une nouvelle servitude volontaire est insidieusement imposée aux citoyens qui deviennent des acteurs incontournables de cette dynamique sécuritaire.

El presente estudio se avoca a estudiar las causas y las dinámicas de conflicto por el agua en Guanacaste y su relación con las características del estilo de desarrollo allí implantado. El estudio concluye advirtiendo una problemática que, si no es controlada pronto por entidades estatales en conjunción de otros actores políticos, se arriesga a un impacto ambiental irreversible sobre los recursos hídricos en la provincia, al tiempo que a una elevación notable de la conflictividad regional.

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

I INTRODUCTION In recent years, the legal academy has begun to tell itself the story of how and why legal theory was marginalized in the wake of critical legal studies and the theory debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the volume of work written on the subject and the many anxieties expressed about the (im)possibility of critical legal theory's revival, the narratives of what led to this juncture are deeply conflicted. There is even debate about what precisely has been lost. Some argue that it is just the very visible, radical critical legal studies movement that has passed from the legal theory scene. (1) Others contend the leftist project more generally has run out of steam. (2) And still others assert that theory has been marginalized within the humanities and social sciences as well, making the disappearance of legal theory just one instance of this larger trend. (3) What seems beyond dispute is that "legal theory is out." (4) Comparing the current intellectual...

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

¿Continúa siendo el reformismo y sus formas de organización y reivindicación una opción válida para generar Progreso, entendido como ampliación de los derechos y la igualdad?
El reformismo fue útil para generar Progreso en el viejo Estado Constitucional donde existían las condiciones para ello, que en este libro se describen en forma de tres pluralismos. Sin embargo, a lo largo de las últimas décadas y con el paso al Estado neoliberal, hemos transitado a una sociedad donde tales condiciones están siendo eliminadas y sustituidas por un nuevo escenario. Una realidad, caracterizada ahora por la existencia de tres monismos, donde se han eliminado los instrumentos y alternativas a través de los cuales los ciudadanos podían presionar o intervenir para generar igualdad desde y por el Estado.
Ante tal situación, donde ya no hay alternativas de Progreso posibles dentro del Estado neoliberal, la única opción de reconstruir la democracia es una estrategia rupturista en forma de Poder Constituyente, redefinido y adaptado a nuestros espacios y tiempos.

Podczas tego wydarzenia w ramach sesji Rady Klimatycznej UJ przedstawiona zostanie książka "Za pięć dwunasta koniec świata. Kryzys klimatyczno-ekologiczny głosem wielu nauk" pod redakcją Kasi Jasikowskiej (Instytut Socjologii UJ) i Michała Pałasza (Instytut Kultury UJ), która ukaże się  na wiosnę w wolnym dostępie. Zaprezentowane zostaną główne myśli 22 artykułów dotyczących różnych aspektów kryzysu klimatyczno-ekologicznego autorstwa ekspertów rozmaitych dziedzin nauk przyrodniczych, społecznych i humanistycznych, wśród których wielu związanych z jest z Uniwersytetem Jagiellońskim i Radą Klimatyczną UJ.

This article draws on the epistemologies of the south, namely decolonial theory, to point to the analytical and interpretive limitations of northern theories of globalisation. It gestures toward decolonial globalisation studies to provide an alternative reading of global justice movements, including university student movements in Latin America. Moreover, it maintains that situating university student movements geopolitically provides a valuable way out of the theoretical limitations of critical globalisation studies informed by northern perspectives. By adopting a geopolitical perspective, decolonial globalisation studies unsettles and provincialises the central myth of modernity, which portrays the emergence of modern institutions and globalisation as endogenous European and Anglo-American phenomena subsequently diffused to the Global South. Finally, this article addresses the need for decolonial globalisation studies to ground its theorisation in alternative sites of knowledge production.

¿Cómo pudo ocurrir que la institucionalización de los derechos de las mujeres posibilitara  la violación de los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres indígenas?  Esta tesis empieza con el establecimiento del PNSRPF 1996-2000 (Plan de planificación familiar) que fue parte de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer en el Perú fujimorista y causa de las esterilizaciones forzadas de más de  diez mil mujeres campesinas.  En esta tesis examino la memoria histórica del movimiento feminista peruano con el objetivo de comprender los factores que permitieron la vulnerabilidad de las campesinas dentro del marco de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer.  El movimiento feminista peruano puede mostrar tres dimensiones de los derechos humanos: los reproductivos y sexuales; los humanos y ciudadanos, y los derechos políticos.  Sin embargo, ninguno de estos  pudo responder a la condición interseccional de la identidad de las campesinas y a su exclusión inclusiva como ciudadanas.  Aun cuando se pensaba que  los derechos protegían a “todas las mujeres” o a “todos los peruanos” estos paradigmas aislaron los proyectos de derechos específicos que permitieron la invisibilidad de las campesinas.

La crisi dei tradizionali modelli e strumenti di cura deriva da uno squilibrio sempre meno sostenibile tra famiglia e lavoro? O ci troviamo di fronte a una crisi sociale, politica, economica e culturale assai più vasta e profonda, di cui la trasformazione della cura sarebbe solo un elemento, difficile da isolare rispetto ad altri? Attraverso la ricostruzione dei diversi momenti storici in cui la cura entra in crisi e dei movimenti politici che ne evidenziano le contraddizioni -- in particolare i vari femminismi -- Nancy Fraser propone la sua visione del capitalismo contemporaneo e del modello neoliberale di femminismo.

What is Sexual Capital? sets up an ambitious query and offers bold, illuminating answers. With historical evidence and incisive theoretical logic, Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz uncover the intricate neoliberal mingling of sexuality, economic worth, and social inequality. A compelling book that will inspire future research." VIVIANA A. ZELIZER, Princeton University This book does to sex what other sociologists did to culture: it shows that sex, no longer defined by religion, now plays a role in the economy and can yield tangible benefits in the realms of money, status, and occupation. How do people accumulate sexual capital, and what are the returns for investing money, time, knowledge, and energy in establishing and enhancing our sexual selves?

The notion of green growth has emerged as a dominant policy response to climate change and ecological breakdown. Green growth theory asserts that continued economic expansion is compatible with our planet’s ecology, as technological change and substitution will allow us to absolutely decouple GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions. This claim is now assumed in national and international policy, including in the Sustainable Development Goals. But empirical evidence on resource use and carbon emissions does not support green growth theory. Examining relevant studies on historical trends and model-based projections, we find that: (1) there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth, and (2) absolute decoupling from carbon emissions is highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. We conclude that green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies.

Politique agricole, relance économique, vaccin contre le Covid-19, législation environnementale, etc. : l’Union européenne joue un rôle essentiel et controversé dans la vie de ses habitants depuis des décennies. Sur toutes ces questions, trois modèles s’affrontent : l’Europe du marché, l’Europe solidaire et l’Europe puissance.
À partir d’archives inédites, Laurent Warlouzet revisite l’histoire du continent au prisme de la lutte homérique entre ces trois visions depuis 1945 : l’Europe du marché, souvent dénoncée pour ses dérives ultralibérales, surtout depuis la tragédie grecque du début des années 2010 ; l’Europe solidaire, celle des législations sociales et de la promotion de l’égalité hommes-femmes, qui a conduit la majorité des syndicats britanniques à appeler à voter contre le Brexit ; l’Europe puissance, enfin, évanescente sur le plan militaire, mais s’exprimant dans les projets de politique industrielle communautaire ou dans la lutte contre les GAFAM, et voulant s’imposer face à ses concurrents, États-Unis, Russie ou Chine.
Cette nouvelle histoire de l’Europe, vivante, heurtée et mouvementée, nous montre que l’organisation de l’Union ne suit pas une logique mécanique et univoque. En exhumant des projets abandonnés mais sérieusement envisagés, elle propose aussi autant de futurs possibles dont les Européens pourraient se saisir.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Investigations into the political economy of globalization usually concentrate upon three related developments—the expansion of international trade and the growth in transnational production, including the rise of transnational corporations;  the creation of a world-wide market for finance and credit;  and finally, the development of regimes and institutions of global economic governance.  By comparison, the role and significance of labour and labourers tends to be neglected in most studies. Yet, from its very inception, the process of globalization has been marked by the different methods of organizing work and organizing the activity of workers themselves.

This volume goes some way in restoring labour to a proper place in the globalization literature. The title 'Globalizing Labour' has a dual meaning. On the one hand it refers to increasing connectedness of workers and work as the globalization of integrated trade, financial and production systems merges economic activity from around the world. Labour is globalizing in the sense that it is connected to world-wide production and exchange structures. On the other hand, the title refers to the activities of workers themselves as their political and economic activities influence broader globalization structures. Labour is globalizing in the sense that workers are themselves building organizational links between different communities and are engaging global power structures whether they be globalizing corporations or international organizations. This volume introduces the subject of labour and globalization by examining four elements of the relationship. Firstly, the historical relationship between labour and globalization is briefly reviewed. Secondly, the condition of various forms of labour since the end of the Cold War is surveyed. Thirdly, the issue of labour, the state and regulation of globalizing corporations is highlighted. The volume concludes with some thoughts on key issues facing global labour in the twenty-first century.

Una versión reducida del texto “An Unexpected Twist of Ideology. Neoliberalism and the Collapse
of the Soviet Bloc publicado en "Praktyka Teoretyczna", núm. 5, 2012. Traducción de Luis Martínez
Andrade. Metapolítica: marzo 2013.
The full English version also at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/11798198/An_Unexpected_Twist_of_Ideology._Neoliberalism_and_the_Collapse_of_the_Soviet_Bloc

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain's relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of Empire and the rise of an Anglo-American 'New Right'. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history.

Disability studies scholars and activists have long criticized and critiqued so-termed ‘charitable’ approaches to disability where the capitalization of individual disabled bodies to invoke pity are historically, socially, and politically circumscribed by paternalism. Disabled individuals have long advocated for civil and human rights in various locations throughout the globe, yet contemporary human rights discourses problematically co-opt disabled bodies as ‘evidence’ of harms done under capitalism, war, and other forms of conflict, while humanitarian non-governmental organizations often use disabled bodies to generate resources for their humanitarian projects.

It is the connection between civil rights and human rights, and this concomitant relationship between national and global, which foregrounds this groundbreaking book’s contention that disability studies productively challenge such human rights paradigms, which troublingly eschew disability rights in favor of exclusionary humanitarianism. It relocates disability from the margins to the center of academic and activist debates over the vexed relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These considerations thus productively destabilize able-bodied assumptions that undergird definitions of personhood in civil rights and human rights by highlighting intersections between disability, race, gender ethnicity, and sexuality as a way to interrogate the possibilities (and limitations) of human rights as a politicized regime.
https://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472420916

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.