Learning Under Neoliberalism | Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education

As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice. These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

Susan B. Hyatt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at IUPUI and founder of that department’s MA program in Applied Anthropology. From 1996-2004 she served on the faculty of Temple University. She is the author of several articles on urban policy and grassroots activism in the US and the UK.

Boone Shear is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is on the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, a member of the Community Economies Collective, and the author of several articles that lie at the intersection of academic engagement, economic subjectivity, and development.

Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University, and founder of the research program EPOKE (Education, Policy and Organisation in the Knowledge Economy). She is co-editor of Policy Worlds (Berghahn, 2011), author of numerous articles on higher education, and co-editor of the journal LATISS (Berghahn).