Applied Linguistics in the Neoliberal University: Ideological keywords and social agency

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marnie Holborow

AbstractNeoliberalism and neoliberal ideology has only recently begun to gain attention within applied linguistics. This paper seeks to contribute to this development with a focus on neoliberal keywords in official texts. The ideological content of these keywords can best be understood within the political project of neoliberalism and within the political economy of contemporary capitalism. Studies which have highlighted the marketization of institutional discourse have analysed this phenomenon from a discourse-based perspective, rather than seeing neoliberal ideology in language as a contradictory manifestation of wider social relations in periods of social crises. The appearance of ideology in language, this paper holds, is unstable, unfinished, unpredictable and dependent for meaning on what Dell Hymes characterised as the “persistent” social context. The ideology of neoliberalism, for all its apparent hegemony, is not guaranteed full consent, and this applies also to its presence in language. The question of social agency is crucial to understanding the social dynamic and unpredictability of ideology in language, both in terms of who produces neoliberal keywords and how they are received and understood. This paper argues that international think tanks, articulating the interests of capital, act as powerful keyword standardisers and their influence will be examined in the production of texts in the Irish university context. However, neoliberal keywords, in certain conjunctures, will also be contested, as will be shown. The paper concludes that applied linguistics is uniquely placed to both critique and challenge neoliberal keywords in the university and that such a challenge has the potential to find wider political resonance as governments, amid continuing economic recession, recharge the ideology of neoliberalism.

Author(s):  
Luana Faria Medeiros

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE MINERAL SECTOR: the legislative propositions that impact the management of the territories with mining in the state of Pará – 2011 to 2016GEOGRAFÍA POLÍTICA Y EL SECTOR MINERO: las proposiciones legislativas que impactan la gestión de los territorios con la minería en el estado de Pará – 2011 a 2016O presente trabalho tem o objetivo de resgatar o campo da política na Geografia, no contexto da atividade mineral no estado do Pará, principalmente diante de vários entendimentos de que os conflitos de interesses nas sociedades e nos territórios se resolvem também pelo viés político; partindo de uma leitura teórica do conceito de território, poder e política, onde essa tríade será determinante para o entendimento das proposições legislativas dos anos de 2011 a 2016 voltadas para a mineração, e da análise da gestão política e territorial no setor mineral paraense e seus impactos na sociedade a partir das políticas públicas. A relevância da pesquisa está no aspecto político que envolve a tomada de decisão que é essencialmente importante nas relações sociais de poder do Governo do Estado do Pará que, materializadas, causam impactos no território com mineração, sobretudo na utilização da taxa mineral, instrumento regulador de ação no território.Palavras-chave: Território; Poder; Política; Mineração.ABSTRACTThe present work aims to redeem the field of politics in geography, in the context of the mineral activity in the state of Pará, mainly faced with various understanding that conflicts of interests in societies and territories also resolve by bias Political; Starting from a theoretical reading of the concept of territory, power and politics, where this triad will be decisive for the understanding of the legislative propositions of the years of 2011 to 2016 focused on mining, and the analysis of the political and territorial management in the mineral sector Pará and Its impacts on society from public Policy. The relevance of the research is in the political aspect which involves the decision making which is essentially important in the social relations of the Government of the state of Pará that, materialized, cause impacts on the territory with mining, especially in the use of the mineral rate, Action-regulating instrument in the territory.Keywords: Territory; Power; Policy; Mining.RESUMEN El presente trabajo pretende redimir el campo de la política en geografía, en el contexto de la actividad minera en el estado de Pará, frente principalmente a diversos entendimientos de que los conflictos de intereses en sociedades y territorios también se resuelven por sesgo Política. A partir de una lectura teórica del concepto de territorio, poder y política, donde esta tríada será decisiva para la comprensión de las proposiciones legislativas de los años de 2011 a 2016 se centró en la minería, y el análisis de la gestión política y territorial en el sector minero de Pará y Sus impactos en la sociedad de la política pública. La relevancia de la investigación está en el aspecto político que implica la toma de decisiones que es esencialmente importante en las relaciones sociales del gobierno del estado de Pará que, materializadas, causan impactos en el territorio con la minería, especialmente en el uso de la tasa mineral, Instrumento de regulación de la acción en el territorio.Palabras clave: Territorio; Poder; Política; Minería.


Harmoni ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-240
Author(s):  
M. Alie Humaedi

The relationship between Islam and Christianity in various regions is often confronted with situations caused by external factors. They no longer debate the theological aspect, but are based on the political economy and social culture aspects. In the Dieng village, the economic resources are mostly dominated by Christians as early Christianized product as the process of Kiai Sadrach's chronicle. Economic mastery was not originally as the main trigger of the conflict. However, as the political map post 1965, in which many Muslims affiliated to the Indonesian Communist Party convert to Christianity, the relationship between Islam and Christianity is heating up. The question of the dominance of political economic resources of Christians is questionable. This research to explore the socio cultural and religious impact of the conversion of PKI to Christian in rural Dieng and Slamet Pekalongan and Banjarnegara. This qualitative research data was extracted by in-depth interviews, observations and supported by data from Dutch archives, National Archives and Christian Synod of Salatiga. Research has found the conversion of the PKI to Christianity has sparked hostility and deepened the social relations of Muslims and Christians in Kasimpar, Petungkriono and Karangkobar. The culprit widened by involving the network of Wonopringgo Islamic Boarding. It is often seen that existing conflicts are no longer latent, but lead to a form of manifest conflict that decomposes in the practice of social life.


Author(s):  
Andrew Edgar

Born near Stuttgart, Germany, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who obtained his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt, is best known as a leader of the Frankfurt School, along with Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. From 1930 to 1958 (with a significant hiatus from 1934 to 1948), Horkheimer served as the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), founded in 1923 to promote multidisciplinary research in the social sciences with a particular focus on Marxian thought; along with his colleague Adorno, Horkheimer was responsible for developing the distinctive form of Marxist philosophy that framed this research through the methodologies of German critical theory. Instead of just describing social systems through "objective" means, critical theory would endeavor to uncover the social context and raise questions about truth and social justice, acknowledging also that critical theory cannot produce universal truths. At best, the critical theorist simply expresses the contradictions and falsehoods of the society within which they work. Critical theory was applied in a sweeping analysis of Western civilization in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), in which Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the progress of enlightened Western culture was simultaneously a regression into a new barbarism and an entanglement in myth. In modernist art, such as the work of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, Horkheimer identified a crucial source of resistance to the political and economic oppression of late capitalist society. Horkheimer, who was Jewish, escaped Nazi Germany and taught at Columbia University from 1935 to 1941; he lived in Los Angeles during the 1940s, but eventually returned to Germany where died in Nuremburg in 1973.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Alfeetouri Salih Mohammed Alsati ◽  
Al-Sayed Abd ulmutallab Ghanem

The current research aims at identifying and measuring the political knowledge of the students of the two universities of Al- Balqaa in Jordan and Omar Al- Mokhtar in Libya. The two communities are almost similar in terms of the social formation, Arab customs and traditions, the Bedouin values, the difference in the institutional age and the political stability.The study attempts to measure and compare the political knowledge in the communities of the two universities using the descriptive and comparative analytical method. The study uses a 400 random questionnaire of 30 paragraphs to measure eight indicators divided into internal and external political knowledge, and other aspects of knowledge: general political knowledge, knowledge of the political institutions and leaders, the political interest, the geographical and historical knowledge, and knowledge of the methods of exercising the political process. The study also attempts to identifying the most important sources and the role of the university in university students’ political knowledge.The results show that the level of the political knowledge is medium while its level in the sample of the Jordanian students is high. According to the samples, the internal political knowledge is more than the external knowledge with a lack of interest in the political matters. The samples do not consider the political matters as their priorities. The political knowledge as a whole needs to much effort to be exerted to confront the current circumstances. The variables of the place of resident, age and the educational level make big difference in the political knowledge. In contrast, the level of the parental education does not create big differences.


Africa ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 89 (S1) ◽  
pp. S189-S209
Author(s):  
Anne Heffernan

AbstractThe movement of school teachers to primary and secondary schools around South Africa and its Bantustans in the early and mid-1970s was an intentional part of the project of propagating Black Consciousness to school learners during this period. The movement of these educators played a key role in their ability to spread Black Consciousness philosophy, and in the political forms and methods they chose in teaching it. These were shaped by their own political conscientization and training in ethnically segregated colleges, but also in large part by the social realities of the areas to which they moved. Their efforts not only laid the foundation for Black Consciousness organization in communities across South Africa, they also influenced student and youth mechanisms for political action beyond the scope of Black Consciousness politics. This article explores three case studies of teachers who studied at the University of the North (Turfloop) and their trajectories after leaving university. All of these teachers moved to Turfloop as students, and then away from it thereafter. The article argues that this pattern of movement, which was a direct result of apartheid restrictions on where black South Africans could live, study and work, shaped the knowledge they transmitted in their classrooms, and thus influenced the political consciousness of a new generation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 684-694
Author(s):  
Luana M Alagna

Claude Lefort, French philosopher and activist, exponent of the anti-totalitarian moment in France, has developed an original theoretical proposal on democracy and totalitarianism. When he distanced himself from the creed of the proletarian revolution as an instrument of understanding of human action, he focused on the understanding of the political as a space in which the social emerges, in which it takes shape. The idea that society acquired a unity through the revolutionary project was overturned by the knowledge that the social cannot be contained; it cannot be the object of appropriation and unification through action or knowledge without threatening freedom and the existence of society itself. Democratic political society can only be heterogeneous, in which the conflict cannot be resolved precisely because the various interests in society are irreducible and asymmetrical. Machiavelli, in the Lefortian thinking, had identified the sense of the political at the beginning of his institution, in which the division and disagreement between classes are the foundation of social relations. This view is opposed to the classical conception of dissent as a moment of collision between passions and reason, where the disorder compromises the political structure. Social conflict indeed is an irreducible resource for the existence of human relations, public space and political society. In the clash between two realisms, Lefort shelved the Marxist one to deepen the turmoil of the ‘divine Machiavelli’, replacing in his theoretical vision the Machiavellian idea of the political as a social dimension to the Marxist dominance of the production forces; the political is the way in which society represents its legitimacy and presupposes conflict as inescapable, a way to guarantee political freedom. Plurality and irrepressible diversity will be instruments for guaranteeing democracy.


1977 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. K. McConica

If study of the university can have any place in the general history of society, it must be understood as a part of a much larger historical phenomenon, of whose vastness and complexity the university's records themselves make us aware. In the sixteenth century we are conscious of powerful currents of social change and energy upon which the universities floated with little or no power of control: a rapidly growing population, geographically and economically on the move; a burgeoning school system; urban wealth growing and changing location, but always under the massive dominance of London; an active land-market; rise in prices; and the work of governments, both national and local, concerned with education and its consequences. This is the setting of Tudor society, and only special optical devices will enable us to pick out the university and set it in the foreground. In the process some distortion is inevitable. An indication of the problems that occur in university history may be found in the view of a recent student of Tudor Cambridge who, while acknowledging that one contribution of the universities to the complex change within English society was ‘the creation of a more refined and integrated cultural and intellectual milieu’ centred upon London and the court, finds the truly significant contribution in a more informed, vigorous and tenacious local solidarity in the ‘country’. Another historian of Elizabethan England tells us that in the universities, ‘the interesting thing, as so often in English life, is the extent and intimacy of the social mixture’.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrine Vitus

Summary This article analyses – by drawing on ideology critical and psychoanalytical concepts from Slavoj Žižek and Glynos et al. – how political, social and fantasmatic logics interplay and form social workers’ professional identities within two youth social work institutions that operate within different social policy paradigms: a social-interventionist paradigm in 2002 and a neoliberal paradigm in 2010. Findings The article shows how the current neoliberalisation of public policy permeates social work practices through fantasmatic narratives that create professional identities to heal discrepancies in and conceal the political dimension of everyday life. In one institution, within a welfare state-based ideology a compensating-including social professional identity is created in response to the young people’s alleged deficiencies; in the other institution, within a neoliberal ideology a mobilising-motivating identity is created to meet the young people’s alleged excess. In both narratives, however, the young people risk bearing the blame for the failure of the social professional project. Applications Fantasies in both institutions conceal how social workers’ professional identities sustain dominant ideology through dislocating uncertainties, ambiguities and ambivalences implicated in professional social work. Whether rooted in the state-based welfare or market-oriented neoliberal policy paradigms, realisation of these dynamics may expose the basic interdependencies of state, civil society and market actors implicated in the project of professional social work.


Author(s):  
Jason Oliver Chang

U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.


1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Fisk

AbstractG.A. Cohen interprets Marx as a technological materialist: the productive forces are “primary” in history. There are several mistakes here. First, for Marx technology is neither always nor predominantly the direct stimulus - either causal or functional - of the social relations of production. Second, it is not even the case that for Marx primacy in explanation is a matter of being a direct stimulus. It has to do rather with being a framework that underlies interconnections between direct stimuli and their results. It turns out that this framework cannot be technology but only the relations of production. Third, technological development is not an autonomous process but is for Marx one that is dependent on the cooperation of producers. This introduces the political element of the class struggle into technological development and refutes a technological reading of why a given class rules.


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