Neoliberal Fatigue: The Effects of Private Refugee Sponsorship on Canadians’ Political Consciousness

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110649
Author(s):  
Emine Fidan Elcioglu
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Cognitive Outcome ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Private Sponsorship ◽  
Structural Nature ◽  
Global North

Private sponsorship has become a primary way that refugees access resettlement to Canada. Key in this program are the private Canadians who volunteer their money, time, and labor to sponsor and support refugees. Drawing on 25 interviews, this article examines the insights that these privileged citizens of the global north gain as they help refugees struggling with the marginalizing consequences of neoliberal austerity in their new hostland. While sponsors learn about the challenges facing working-class racialized newcomers (otherwise obscured to sponsors by their racial, class, and citizenship privileges), the program robs sponsors of the time and mental bandwidth to reflect on the structural nature of these challenges. Consequently, sponsors rarely understand refugees’ struggles as public troubles necessitating broader intervention, including modest policy reform. I call this cognitive outcome neoliberal fatigue. I conclude by discussing how this fatigue thwarts social change and reinforces neoliberal capitalism.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

The Ruse of Repair

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Stuelke
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. The reparative turn has traveled far beyond the academy, influencing how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. In The Ruse of Repair, Patricia Stuelke locates the reparative turn's hidden history in the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. She shows how feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist liberation movements' visions of connection across difference, practices of self care, and other reparative modes of artistic and cultural production have unintentionally reinforced forms of neoliberal governance. At the same time, the US government and military, universities, and other institutions have appropriated and depoliticized these same techniques to sidestep addressing structural racism and imperialism in more substantive ways. In tracing the reparative turn's complicated and fraught genealogy, Stuelke questions reparative criticism's efficacy in ways that will prompt critics to reevaluate their own reading practices.

scholarly journals Making Rebels: The New Zealand Socialist Party, 1901-1913

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Dunick
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
National Organisation

<p>The New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP) was the first radical socialist party in this country. The decade in which it existed was a time of rapid social change. The NZSP began in 1901 as a reaction against the Liberal Party which dominated New Zealand politics at the time. In its first five years the party had two main branches in Wellington and Christchurch, but it grew rapidly after 1907 with the expansion of industrial unionism. The NZSP was overshadowed by the Federation of Labour and never developed a coherent national organisation. As the working class began to organise nationally to challenge the Massey Government, the NZSP failed to adapt to the new political situation and dissolved in 1913.  The party began as a group of marginal outsiders, but as society changed and class became an important political factor, the NZSP played an important role in spreading new ideas and educating a generation of socialists. When the NZSP ended in 1913 the ideas it had promoted were widely accepted among New Zealand’s organised working class.</p>

scholarly journals Working Class in Soviet and Russian Sociological Discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 86-92
Author(s):  
V. Gavriliuk ◽  
T. Gavriliuk
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Planning And Control ◽  
The Times ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
And Control

The Object of the Study. The correlation of class and stratification approaches in Soviet and post-Soviet sociology.The Subject of the Study. New working class in Russian sociological discourse.The Purpose of the Study. The objectives are to substantiate the necessity of actualizing of the class approach in the study of modern Russian society social structure; identifying the signs of a new working class.The Main Provisions of the Article. In accordance with Marxist ideology, in Soviet sociology a working class was regarded as a protagonist of social change and a center of attraction for the forces of social change. The contemporary integration of workers into the capitalist system, the transition to the economy of the sixth order, the defeat of socialism, the global transition to a postindustrial society require to comprehend the «working question» from a new prospective. The authors actualize the problem of revealing the content and structure of the «new working class», traditional and actual methods of its theoretical conceptualization. The features of class and stratification approaches to the allocation of the working class in the structure of society have been studied. It has been shown that the excessive specification of criteria, non-critical declarative positioning of the middle class into the basis of the Russian society structure, led to a high degree of uncertainty in the model of the social structure of the Russian society of the early XXI century. The author's definition of the concept of a new working class has been given. Defining “the new working class of modern Russia”, we mean a group of employees in all spheres of material production and services whose content and nature of work are routinized and segmented; not participating in management and not having the property rights to the enterprise in which they work. Most of the times, these are workers without higher education. Power and control in the organization do not belong to them, their degree of freedom and authority in organizational structures are limited, they do not influence on the planning and control of labor

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Saori Shibata
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Mode Of Regulation

This concluding chapter reflects on the trajectory of capitalism in Japan and the role of its precarious workers in that process. The key issues facing Japan are whether and how Japan's new labor movement will develop. It is only in studying this recomposition of Japan's working class that one will be able to understand and explain the trajectory of capitalism as it exists in Japan. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether a new mode of regulation emerges, and what role labor—either regular or nonregular, organized or disorganized—will play in any new socioeconomic regime. What is certain is that any attempt to undermine, sideline, or eradicate labor will ultimately be futile, as workers in Japan (as they do elsewhere) invariably continue to disrupt and resist—in different ways in different times and contexts—efforts to consolidate a model of global neoliberal capitalism that cannot be stable.

scholarly journals The hidden injustices of advancing solar geoengineering research

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie C. Stephens ◽  
Kevin Surprise
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
White Men ◽  
Climate System ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Elite Institutions ◽  
Global North ◽  
Solar Geoengineering

Abstract Advancing solar geoengineering research is associated with multiple hidden injustices that are revealed by addressing three questions: Who is conducting and funding solar geoengineering research? How do those advocating for solar geoengineering research think about social justice and social change? How is this technology likely to be deployed? Navigating these questions reveals that solar geoengineering research is being advocated for by a small group of primarily white men at elite institutions in the Global North, funded largely by billionaires or their philanthropic arms, who are increasingly adopting militarized approaches and logics. Solar geoengineering research advances an extreme, expert–elite technocratic intervention into the global climate system that would serve to further concentrate contemporary forms of political and economic power. For these reasons, we argue that it is unethical and unjust to advance solar geoengineering research.

An Ideology for Life?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dia Da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
And Performance

Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic creativity for neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, this chapter analyzes the historical, affective and political incitements and messy collaborations between ideological opposites. This middle-class troupe’s plays dedicated to working-class struggles confront the challenge and decimation of labor struggle through a life-long commitment to Marxian critique. Far from an ahistorical commitment, their ‘ideology for life’ responds to contemporary challenges, in part by memorializing the personal, subjective, and spatial deaths of ideal leaders and sites of worker struggle. Memorialization and nostalgia largely distances them from working-class lives, but it makes their politics and performance effective sites for contemporary constructions of progressive middle-classness in Delhi whilst generating an inadvertent embrace of creative economies discourse.

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