Neoliberalism,education policy and the life of the academic: A poetics of pedagogical resistance

Abstract

The papers in this special issue on the spaces of pedagogy speak to the failures of neoliberal thinking when applied to education. Their pedagogical critique of neoliberalism contributes to a considerable body of work focused on challenging the driving discourses of education (or more accurately, school) systems. The source of the tensions between four decades of policy-supported educational marketization and the accompanying objections, rejections and warnings, require careful questioning in terms of what the very debate reveals about education, learning, school, pedagogy and so on. In this paper, these questions are asked in relation to neoliberal thinking about indigeneity, knowledge and the individual. The idea of what to do, how to approach things differently, draws together these critiques of neoliberalism in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to amplify the collective critique of neoliberalism. Analyses and challenges to educational relationships that deploy neoliberal thinking are positioned to keep in question the nature and purpose of neoliberalism.

Introduction

The papers in this special issue on the spaces of pedagogy speak to the failures of neoliberal thinking when applied to education. Their pedagogical critique of neoliberalism within a sociology, politics and philosophy of education contributes to a considerable body of work focused on challenging the driving discourses of education systems. As the abiding discourse in higher education, neoliberalism poses a challenge due to its very ‘potency’ – a potency that derives from its effective employment of social, economic, technological and political thinking (Peters et al., 2000). The source of the tensions between four decades of policy-supported educational marketization, and the accompanying objections, rejections and warnings, require careful questioning in terms of what the very debate reveals about education, learning, school, pedagogy and so on. In this paper, these questions are asked in relation to neoliberal thinking about indigeneity, knowledge and the individual.

The idea of what to do, how to approach things differently, draws together these critiques of neoliberalism in higher education. The focus for this special issue is the collective and shared stories of active pedagogical resistances in and through various roles and contexts in higher education – each of which, in different ways, speaks to a poetic response to policy. The purpose of this paper, as a recognition and response, is to amplify the collective critique of neoliberalism. The challenges to the neoliberal drivers of educational relationships are positioned to keep in question the nature and purpose of neoliberalism. In so doing, the papers in this issue offer alternatives to the possibilities of participation in higher education.

The problem of the local

I believe that the only way education can truly change for the betterment of our kanaka maoli and minority students, and for all students, is through Hawaiian culture based practices, what I refer to here as Hawaiian ways of knowing, that incorporate the cultural values, ways of knowing and ways of relating in our classrooms (Ikeda, 2018: 870).

The idea of a global and growing knowledge economy in the 21st century, an idea that features strongly in 21st century higher education rhetoric, brings to bear new tensions for communities whose knowledge has been the object of marginalising policies through pre-21st century European colonisation projects. The ‘old’ and the ‘local’ ways of knowing are engaged in two largely contradictory relationships or problems. The first, and more familiar, involves an intervention at the site of local knowledge in order to replace local techniques of government with neoliberal techniques of government. The second operates seemingly at odds to the first, looking to maintain local practices and knowledge. While neither are new challenges for communities (Ikeda, 2018; Kupferman, 2018), their continued pervasion in all spheres of life requires ongoing and sustained resistance.

The first tension is evidence of the essence of neoliberalism as distinct from liberalism and is a critical paradox in neoliberal thinking in relation to the role of centralised governance and education policy. The very purpose of education, as a global phenomenon, is subjected to a unifying discourse of the ‘learning’ society (Biesta, 2016). In the learning society, education and school are spoken of as if the same thing (Kupferman, 2018). Kupferman’s (2018) concern with this conflation is a neoliberal reiteration of the colonial agenda, layering further impediments to the understanding of knowledge as local, and to the legitimisation of the project of colonization through the erasure of the history of school as colonizing (Kupferman, 2018). Neoliberal thinking tends ‘towards a form of political sovereignty which would be a government of all and of each, and whose concerns would be at once to “totalise” and to “individualise”’ (Gordon, 1991: 33). Hence, there is no rationale for maintaining any roots of local knowledge within the neoliberal ‘hegemonic discourse of western nation states’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 314). And this despite the observed localised manifestations of neoliberal thinking and practice evident in the development of nation state economic and public policy since the formation of the Mont Pélerin Society in 1947 (Denord, 2015). In other words, neoliberalism has many local narratives to tell, but has evolved into a highly globalising discourse – a discourse without borders, and without apparent alternatives. It is the model that defines ‘one size fits all’ (Ball, 2012: 18).

A discourse without borders drives economic, super-powered, globalisation (Ball, 2012). Globalisation is however, according to Olssen and Peters (2005), a phenomenon that would be recognisable within alternative technological and economic structures. Olssen and Peters (2005: 314) argue that ‘neoliberalism can be understood at one level as a revival of many of the central tenets of classical liberalism, particularly classical economic liberalism’. These tenets include assumptions of: the individual as self-interested; the free market and free trade as the best mechanisms to distribute resources; and with any government role limited to protecting the self-interested individual, free trade, and the efficient operation of markets for goods and services – including public goods and services traditionally associated with education (Apple, 2004; Ball, 2012; Denord, 2015; Tribe, 2015). These tenets construct a ‘busnocratic rationality’ (Peters and Marshall, 2004: 109) that drives a wedge between the academy and its social responsibility and educational imagination (Sojot, 2018).

The role of government is the critical difference between classic and neo forms of liberalism, and it is this role that is most evident in the concerns of academics in relation to their role and contributions as public and active scholars. In classic liberalism, as noted above, the state doesn’t so much as intervene as make sure interventions don’t occur that would impinge on and hence make less effective the ideal conditions of the market. This view is supported by the understanding of the individual as naturally predisposed to work within those ideal conditions (Tribe, 2015). It could be argued that this would result in an elevation in academic autonomy. In neoliberalism, no such idea of the inevitability of the forces of nature abide. Effective markets do not occur naturally and neither do self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals. ‘In neoliberalism the state seeks to create an individual that is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 315). The state then operates in ‘the nexus between regulation and midwifery… setting limits to the market, while at the same time creating conditions within which the market can flourish and expand’ (Ball, 2012: 17).

For Peters et al. (2000: 317) neither the autonomous individual in liberalism nor in neoliberalism can be understood as free ‘because forms of rationality and the laws within which the free market will be required to operate and function will shape people as particular kinds of subjects so that they will choose in general ways’. The rights to local and/or individual autonomy are only apparent. In the words of Jacques Donzelot (1979: 103), ‘the more these rights are proclaimed, the more the strangle hold of a tutelary authority tightens’.

Consistent with 20th century structuralist thinking, neoliberalism offers an ‘approach capable of explaining all human behaviour’ (Gordon, 1991: 31) based on a belief that observation of behaviours in some contexts are taken to describe the whole. This view was expounded by Hayek, whose thinking has been regarded as critical to a shift from liberalism to neoliberalism (Olssen and Peters, 2005; Tribe, 2015) and the belief that education not only could be, but also should be subjected to the economic theories of the market developed around the sovereignty of the individual (Peters et al., 2000).

Neoliberalism draws in part from Hayek’s theorisation of the efficacy of the market and makes clear the limitations of a centralised economic intervention (Tribe, 2015). For Hayek, a ‘spontaneous societal order such as a market order can utilize practical fragmented knowledge in a way which a holistically planned order cannot’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 318). In this sense the local ‘self-organizing and self-replicating structures emerge without design’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 318).

Hayek’s work is significant because elements of his thinking, notably his views on the primacy of the local over the central, are clearly rejected in the rise of neoliberal policy. The pervasion of new forms of neoliberal government has arguably relied on the failure to distinguish between a liberal and a neoliberal agenda. In the United Kingdom and Aotearoa New Zealand, for instance, the rise of the new right was led in part by the old left, with the promise of decentralisation of conservative government power and structure.

While Hayek argued for the importance of markets for the regulation of private-business conduct, it was James Buchanan and his collaborators that argued for an extension of the market as a mechanism for the institutional regulation of public sector organizational contexts (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 317).

Public choice theory, led by Buchanan, clearly abides the marginalisation of local knowledge to centralised ‘education’ agendas. This is not to suggest, however, that the rise of liberalism through the 18th century did not have a clear centralised agenda for the efficient functioning of the state (Arendt, 1963).

Normative implications are derived from public choice theory which carry with them an approach to institutional reform. To the extent that voluntary exchange is valued positively while coercion is valued negatively, public choice theories favour market-like arrangements and/or the decentralization of political authority (Peters and Marshall, 1996: 81–82).

The question, and largely the difference between the classical and the neo forms of liberalism, is of how much to intervene, and hence also how much to trust in non-intervention. Local, indigenous forms of knowledge are irrelevant to a neoliberal agenda because this agenda requires educating communities as to how they are expected to behave. The justification of these forms of interventionism is provided in the idea of the global economy and the associated rise and fall of apparent economic success and failure. A global economy is a necessary condition of neoliberalism. With the global holding sway over the local comes the apparent foreclosure of alternative conceptualizations of education (Kupferman, 2018). It is a neoliberal expectation that there be no alternatives in education in the sense that alternatives create messiness and uncertainty – characteristics that education policies are designed to eliminate. Hence, there is no space for asking questions about different languages of education. Neither is there space to ‘rework or resist a set of dominant space-bounded binaries such as university/community, intellectual/practitioner, private/public, and theory/practice that are invoked quite comfortably in both contemporary mainstream and progressive education scholarship’ (Tavares, 2018: 881).

The idea that education is the very task of questioning such binaries undermines the idea that the learner’s task is irrefutably to understand themselves as human capital and at the same time as an autonomous rational consumer whose relationships are determined by the ability to maximise choices in their own interests. As such the performance of neoliberal policy in education ‘denies’ local and indigenous educations through efforts to argue that education is a neutral, depoliticised space – that the market is the only fair educational mechanism because it operates based on a universal nature that is unhampered by ideologies. In this sense, neoliberal education agendas both forget and reject their own liberal colonial past. However, the marketization of education and in particular of higher education requires new knowledge in order to maintain a stimulated market. This turns the critique of neoliberalism to the next problem: the problem of local knowledge.

Knowledge and capitalism

While neoliberalism can be seen, above, to intentionally marginalise local and indigenous ways of being, including ways of being associated with learning and education, the neoliberal university at the same time has an interest in local knowledge as a resource. Local knowledge is exploitable. The discourse of ‘partnerships’ is a mechanism to exploit such knowledge. Tavares’ (2018) analysis of university–community partnerships recognises the growing discourse of partnership and argues that it presents a series of problems – not the least the perception of a gap to bridge, or a separation to recover. Evidence of separation requires a particular kind of thinking.

The politics of academic work is up for debate here, focused on seeing competing roles for research and community engagement within the academy. Certainly, there are significant distinctions in terms of the ways in which these roles are governed and valued, and in part this is a difference forged in a relationship with other ‘partners’ – the publication industry. The rise of partnerships is then primarily responsive to a need to generate marketable knowledge, and so the value of local knowledge is as knowledge capital to appropriate and exploit for the interests of the university and the careers of academics (Brady, 1997). Within a competitive education market, academic research fuels ‘economies … strongly dependent on knowledge production, distribution and use’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 334).

In order to explore this exploitative relationship, it is helpful to look at how the university machine processes and produces the raw ideas from its partnering communities. Kupferman (2018) uses the metaphor of disfigurement and argues that positivism in the form of science is the central agent in this process. It is perhaps unhelpful to conflate science with a ‘disfiguring’ positivism just as it is unhelpful to conflate education with school. It might be helpful to consider whether science and other typically vilified disciplines might look different and feel different without the crushing demands of neoliberal economic drivers focused on singular solutions that yield maximum efficiency of outcomes. A concern for the impact of outcomes on the experience of higher education brings us to the question of permitting only what can be measured as working (Biesta, 2009; Chang, 2018); and only what can be inclined towards economic efficiencies (Sojot, 2018). Just as we need to be careful with the language of education, we need to be careful with the language of science, and of scientific measure. The rise of the measurement culture in higher education, the testing of the culture of an institution, does not come from science, it comes from quite particular interpretations of the nature and purpose of knowledge observed in knowledge capitalism.

The most significant material change that underpins neoliberalism in the twenty-first century is the rise in the importance of knowledge as capital. This change, more than any, propels ‘the neoliberal project of globalization’ – an outcome of the Washington consensus and modelled by world policy agencies such as the IMF and World Bank – which has predominated in world policy forums at the expense of alternative accounts of globalization…. It also denies the capacity of local traditions, institutions and cultural values to mediate, negotiate, reinterpret and transmute the dominant model of globalization and the emergent form of knowledge capitalism on which it is based (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 330).

Analysis of educational discourses reveals certain rules regarding what can be said, and by whom (Biesta, 2007; Kupferman, 2018). A scientific educational discourse assumes ‘that the only relevant research questions are questions about the effectiveness of educational means and techniques, forgetting, among other things, that what counts as “effective” crucially depends on judgments about what is educationally desirable’ (Biesta, 2007: 5). It is important to recognise here the exercising of scientific knowledge within a management paradigm because managerialism and science, as with managerialism and technology, should not be seen as mutual. Rather, both science and technology emerge in quite particular ways when employed by neoliberal management discourse. This discourse comes from Agency Theory and New Public Management.

Agency Theory explains how organisations operate in terms of hierarchies of employment focusing on the role of the contract and ‘is concerned with problems of compliance and control in the division of labour between work relationships’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 320).

AT theorizes work relations hierarchically in terms of chains of authority and command which can be used to characterize authority relations at all levels of the management hierarchy. Hence, a single person will be principal to those further down the chain of command and agent to those further up. Central to its focus is how one gets an agent to act in accordance with the interests of the principal. Rather than specify a broad job specification based on a conception of professional autonomy and responsibility, it specifies chains of principal-agent relationships as a series of contracts as a manes of rendering the management function clear and accountable.

Where the purpose of governing higher education is efficient management of resources, the management of metrics creates boundaries for what counts as knowledge and how knowledge operates. Research partnerships between university and community are constrained by these boundaries.

With the idea of local knowledge as an exploitable commodity, it seems to have made sense to resolve educational questions through increasingly detailed systems of measurement. While the question remains as to whether educational behaviours lend themselves to metrics and indeed whether metrics applied in education are metrics at all (see, for instance, Klubeck, 2011), a measurement culture resides in higher education, maintained by a market imaginary in which institutions and academics compete (Cacioppo and Cacioppo, 2012; Marginson, 2009). Guided by Transaction–Cost Economics, the challenge for competitors in an education market is managing organisational uncertainties that limit knowledge production: for instance, how to protect against the problem of not being able to predict how an employee will act out their responsibilities. The idea that ‘metrics are dangerous’ (Klubeck, 2011: 304) is overlooked by academic executives who are not inclined to question an age of performativity (Ball, 2016) and whose strategic behaviour (Marginson, 2009) reinforces the function of higher education within the requirements of knowledge capitalism.

Any suggestion that higher education quality assurance metrics are fallible results in the business of buying better global metric systems (van Damme, 2002) because ‘the end goals of freedom, choice, consumer sovereignty, competition and individual initiative, as well as those of compliance and obedience, must be constructions of the state acting now in its positive role through the development of techniques of auditing, accounting and management’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 315, emphasis in original). While some argue that these would lead to more protection of the academic community, others regarded the community as needing the metric protection from the academy and its dangerous sense of entitlement to public purses (see, for instance, Palfreyman, 2007).

Tavares (2018) explores the positioning of the scholar in this knowledge economy, through the context of university–community partnerships and a critique of the possibility of a radical contribution to the public in a knowledge market. She asks, what does a call for a more public role for scholars of education actually mean (Tavares, 2018)? For Biesta (2009; 2014), as for Noddings (2003), this care is addressed through the very question of purposes and aims in education – in other words, inquiring into the nature of the public role for scholars is the public role of scholars. However, this requires a particular approach to questioning, recognising that, for instance, a so-called neoliberal question would be the kind of question that resulted in a measurable, simple and universally applicable answer. In Kupferman’s (2018) analysis of the language of education, this problem of questioning is recognised in his critique of the tendency to fixate on the root, or perhaps the cause, of words like education, school or curriculum:

It is common to revert to a default position of origins, in meaning and etymology, in order to discover any workable variance in the terms ‘education’ and ‘school’ … this search for origins – or more properly, original meaning or intention – does not offer anything of importance… Thus, here I am not engaging in attempts to define either of these terms. What matters, in the end, is how these terms are employed and what their effects are (Kupferman, 2018: 908).

He goes on to argue that what matters is our failure to recognise the ways in which the use of metaphors can erase distinctions (Kupferman, 2018). Erasure then is the key concern in the neoliberal suppression of diversity and narrowing of possibilities (Sojot, 2018). This suppression is not just an issue of diverse knowledge of the world, but of diverse ways of knowing. Hence, when Kupferman (2018) employs the Suess story Hooray for Diffendoofer Day, the problem of the neoliberalisation of know-how is revealed.

‘We’ve taught you how to think’ is an encouragement given by the teacher of Diffendoofer School. However, in the race to appear the most 21st century of educational systems, even teaching children how to think becomes a form of disciplining, and perhaps one that is even more dangerous than being told what to think. The task of the teacher, going back to Heidegger, is not to teach the child to think, but to teach that thinking can happen, to let thinking happen. The ‘know-how’, the instrumental, prescribes all future ‘know-whats’ in a way that teaching ‘know-what’ cannot possibly hope to achieve.

Yet, at the same time, knowledge capitalism focuses on ‘local knowledge creation through research and development and building upon indigenous knowledge’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 335). This problem is addressed by Tavares in her analysis of the academic as a ‘subject of history’. She asks:

Can the expertise or special knowledge of education research and scholarship provide the public with a correct understanding of educational phenomena, its contradictions, and its attendant problems? Can education scholars move the public toward a more just society? What unstated assumptions are being made about the social and political power of scholars in education and the knowledge of the social and educational sciences to know and to right in an imperfect world (Tavares, 2018: 880)?

More than this, Tavares (2018: 880) argues that it is unhelpful to imagine higher education and higher educational research as being in any way unitary or having, in Derrida’s words, ‘one sole memory’. In neoliberalism, unity is a value associated with certainty. In the age of knowledge capitalism, as noted above, uncertainty is a problem to be solved by managing knowledge in particular ways. This process is recognised by Tavares (2018: 882–883) as a ‘drive toward a static form of social unity or enforced consensus’ – in this context ‘forces such as discord, uncertainty, disagreement, and dissention’ are not recognised for their productive possibilities (Tavares, 2018: 883).

Tavares (2018) warns that the differences between community and academy can be oversimplified, but that at the same time this act is so prevalent that its influence must be addressed. This point is critical to the nature of community when engaged in partnerships – the way in which neoliberalism drives higher education will also drive the way in which a community understands itself as a community. The knowledge that is of importance here is a knowledge of self – but not the individuated autonomous self, rather of the self of community.

Ikeda (2018) puts out the challenge that while academics continue to regard local knowledge as valuable, communities are not convinced that their knowledge is being taken seriously and nor is it being understood. This neoliberal model of higher education presents a series of problems and questions for the role of the scholar that the authors in this special issue recognise and take care to address. For instance, Tavares (2018) presents an argument for continued questioning of academic–community partnerships. Tavares (2018) notes that these partnerships require systematic examination of the relationships that make partnerships possible and that structure their experiences. She challenges that researchers acknowledge and then let go of their agendas of finding data in community spaces to be mined, and consider what ‘contemporary social theories and philosophies that had invigorated my thinking over the years could have implications in other spaces and could be responsive to the education and pedagogic needs of different publics’ (Tavares, 2018: 885).

Individualism, professionalism and performance

Ikeda (2018) explores the responsibility of higher education in addressing the marginalisation of indigenous communities through attention to her own felt and lived responsibilities as an academic. With reference to her own university’s policy regarding Hawaiian language, history and cultures, she says:

If I feel the weight and possibility of this policy, does it then become my responsibility? As a kanaka maoli or indigenous Hawaiian faculty member, am I interested in working for a university ‘that embraces its responsibilities to the indigenous people’? Uh, yes! And with my resounding yes, I am also saying that it is my kuleana to enact this policy at this time, in this place that I occupy (Ikeda, 2018: 867).

Can we address scholars with the same provocation regarding kuleana – explained by Ikeda (2018) as not just responsibility but also right, obligation and privilege? This section explores the conditions that shape the roles of academics in higher education. The focus here then is not to rescue for the academic an idyllic ivory tower of autonomous industry, but rather to amplify the calls, in this special issue, for an academic ownership of the concerns addressed above.

According to Ball (2016), neoliberalism has significantly altered the culture of the education profession (if there is such a thing) with a focus on measurable skills and outputs, altering the nature and purpose of education. In this sense, the effects of neoliberalism are not only ‘structural and relational: they are also ethical and discursive’ (Ball, 2016: 1049), enculturating particular ways to think of and manage one’s academic self (Sojot, 2018). Professional development programmes are an example of this intersection (Chang, 2018). Such programmes are accompanied with incessant policy making aimed at measuring and controlling every aspect of academic work. For instance, Chang (2018) observes a rise in health and wellbeing policies and a paradoxical decline in health and wellbeing, while Sojot (2018) critiques a culture of reflective practice in which the academic’s attention to professional development becomes a limp experience of going through the motions of reflection for the sake of the appearance of self-management. Here, a ‘flexible performance culture’ (Peters and Olssen, 1999: 193) presides in which the health of the academic is regarded as an uncertainty to manage in order to maximise performance. The neoliberal focus on technologies of performance is evident in these forms of quality assurance, standards, measurements, outputs and so on – all focused on productivity and growth – or ‘governing by numbers’ (Ball, 2016: 1054). A tendency to focus on policies and processes constructs the professional as technocrat (O’Neill and Jolley, 2004) with a ‘busnocratic, skills-based’ understanding of their professional role (Stratford and Brown, 2002: 8).

The outcomes of a neoliberal agenda for education has been an erosion of care – hence the paradox when considering the pervasion of health and safety policies. Care is eroded where there is a focus on performance because performance values predictability whereas care is associated with professional judgement (Ball, 2016). Managerialism amplifies hierarchies, the specification of outcomes, and the auditing of behaviours, in order to minimise the uncertainty of outcomes that are based on a professional trust model.

Under liberal governmentality, the ‘professions’ constituted a mode of institutional organization characterized by a principle of autonomy which characterized a form of power based on ‘delegation’ (i.e., delegated authority) and underpinned by relations of trust. Under neoliberal governmentality, principal-agent line management chains replace delegated power with hierarchical forms of authoritatively structured relation, which erode, and seek to prohibit, an autonomous space from emerging. This shift in regulative modality constitutes a structural shift likely to transform the academic’s role (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 324).

Olssen and Peters (2005: 325) argue then that ‘professionalism is systematically at odds with neoliberalism’. Academics focusing on their performance rather than on questioning education policy are being good academics given that any such political interference would be based on their own professional vested interests (O’Neill et al., 2004). The meaning and experience of freedom and individualism are then both a problem and a goal in neoliberalism. The ‘emotional individual’ is not free to discover her academic self but rather is subjected to an incessant and pervasive discourse of an individuated self who is the unquestioned manifestation of freedom (Ball, 2016: 1056). In taking part in this governing of self, the academic is responsible for ‘the transference of everything which had to do with the imagination, dreams, the ideal and utopia into a technical, operational reality: the materialization of all desires, the realization of all possibilities’ (Baudrillard, 2001: 51).

Conclusion: politics, aesthetics, poetry

Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end (Camus, 1991: 116).

This last section, in conclusion, explores implications for higher education policy drawing on Jacques Rancière’s distinction between police and politics, and on the poetic turn that is evident in the work in this policy futures special issue. Poetry is here a ‘language for education that is not trapped in the destitution of performativity’ (Standish, 2002: 165). Camus’ provocation sets this journey off on account of its reminder for policy makers to return to the liberal imagination – to leave things alone. The task of the academic is meanwhile to avoid losing contact with the unmeasurable (Chang, 2018) and at the same time recognising different approaches to measurement that are poetic in their meter (Heidegger, 1971). Camus (1991) makes evident the ongoing paradox that higher education is caught in, trying to exploit innovations that are made possible by diversity in higher education at the same time as managing all possible behaviours within the system. The technocracy of neoliberalism refuses to leave the mind alone and hence places the mind in chains. How then to break out?

Here, poetics attends to Camus’ idea of diversity in an absurd world of management and performance. A performative workplace orients our attention to substance. A substance orientation focuses on outcomes and production (Chang, 2018). The rampant and incessant individuation of academics through the systems of performance management creates false senses of self. In this self-auditing culture these forms of ‘self-identification…underestimate the fundamental disunity of the self’ (Tavares, 2018: 884). For example, in a tired culture of academic behaviour management, rewards for productivity require academics to misunderstand the always relational and shared nature of their work and to amplify an individuated presence in order to compete with colleagues.

The competition manufactured between academics is coupled with decreasing opportunities for, and recognition of, the functions of time and space for being collegial (Chang, 2018). Chang argues for more care in the ways in which academics are more or less artificially thrust into professional performances and turns to the idea of relational orientations in order to break out of the performative culture of higher education – a poetics of collegiality. Chang (2018: 855) argues for a stronger focus on the concept of ‘relationality’ through translations of classical Chinese philosophical texts that foreground ‘processual orientation that envisions the world as ongoing, subjective and changing, and people as developing through relationships…’. This presents a challenge to the individuation that is central to neoliberal thinking, through regarding individuals as ‘necessarily interdependent’ (Chang, 2018: 857).

In a consistent vein, Ikeda (2018) looks to the poetics of a greeting and/or an artefact in the spaces of the university, while Sojot (2018) questions the subjectivity of the academic as relational and transitional with a focus on space. Sojot (2018) explores Winnicott’s notion of transitional space in order to explore the dynamics of teaching and learning. Sojot looks to Ellsworth’s idea of a pedagogical hinge, a way of exploring the poetics of pedagogy in the lived spaces of higher education. Following Sojot, this approach provokes attention to the impact of managerialism on classroom synergies – for instance on how teaching to the test works in the acting out of learning in the classroom space. Citing earlier work, Sojot (2018: 901) explains:

Within the experience of pedagogy’s hinge, I am becoming unstable. My whole preconception of what it means to learn, to know, to be a student, to be a teacher, is purposefully flipped – and not for the sole purpose of destruction, but rather to awaken my kinetic epistemological and ontological self into the possibilities of the moving sense of knowing. This idea of turning, of moving – but not according to the linear path espoused by accepted notions of being – frees the subject from the structural restraints operated by the educational assumptions.

The work in this special issue shares awakenings, turnings and movements in order to question and think beyond structures of higher education that are stark reiterations of colonisation. The authors in this special issue show a collective commitment to making space for sanctuary and a safe place (Ikeda, 2018) in the structures of higher education both theoretically and literally.

In his critique of the neoliberal marginalisation of indigenous knowledge, Kupferman (2018) also looks to the idea of unveiling. His method focuses on language and in particular metaphor. This unveiling works through a turn to Nietzsche and the conflict between Dionysus and Apollo (Kupferman, 2018). Music is the poetic turn in Kupferman’s work – a reminder to look past the bland language of performativity to explore the deeper questions concerning the essence of the university, of scholarship and of the academic.

These provocations resonate with Rancière’s (2010) reading of politics. His exploration of the symbiotic relationship between police and politics emphasises the very essence of neoliberal policy as a totalising of voices within the discourses of management, accountability and performativity. Policy makers have the task of ensuring that everything said about, by and in the university must be said in the same way. The political, on the other hand, is the utterance of that which is not to be heard, and the appearance of that which should not be seen. To be political the academic has to let loose his or her voice and intonate the poetry of his or her work. The scholarship of these authors presents examples of the lived reality of neoliberalism in higher education. They contribute further richness to understanding the impact of neoliberalism in higher education. More than this, each paper provides examples of how each author responds to the lived tensions of life in higher education. Each paper is then a narration of practices of resistance, of the very politics of public academic responsibility.