CASCAIUAES2017 panel: Everyday neoliberalism

(RM-SPK09)
Everyday neoliberalism

Convenor
Robin Whitaker (Memorial University of Newfoundland)


Short Abstract
This panel will explore how neoliberalism's economic and cultural
dimensions intersect in various domains of everyday life, teasing out
the lived implications of the contradictory demands for risk-taking
and responsibility, as well the prospects for contestation.

Long Abstract
In Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism Miranda
Joseph follows the lead of Lisa Duggan to depict neoliberalism as a
diffuse cultural project, the key terms of which - privatization and
personal responsibility - play out in the most ordinary domains of
life, mundane arenas that we are increasingly impelled to inhabit as
entrepreneurial subjects, even if we do so in the mode of failure.
Likewise, Philip Mirowski argues in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to
Waste that we will not get to grips with how neoliberalism has
survived its evident failure as an economic program unless we address
the extent to which its sensibilities now constitute "the unremarkable
furniture of waking life," a way of being that he describes as
"everyday neoliberalism."

This panel will explore the intersection of neoliberalism's economic
and cultural dimensions in various domains of everyday life - domains
that are increasingly difficult to disentangle, as life more and more
becomes an arena for neoliberalism's contradictory demands of risk
taking and responsibility. Among others, these include universities
and (other) workplaces, home life, volunteerism, and recreation.
Papers might offer (auto-)ethnographic accounts of everyday life in
the aftermath of what is commonly called the global financial crisis
and/or address, among other topics: the social, cultural, economic and
policy architecture of lived neoliberalism and its gaps or cracks; the
paradoxes of attachment to the corporatized university; and prospects
for contestation.

More information:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/cascaiuaes2017/suite/panels.php5?PanelID=5445