The spectral scientists of corridor B: Neoliberalization and its ghosts in higher education

This paper examines the role and function of science as a vocation in contemporary higher education. In recent decades, universities have expanded and reorganized their resources and expertise around commercially viable research avenues. All the signs point towards the creep of new public management coupled with neoliberal economic policy that starting in the 1980s had introduced accountability, standardization and internal competitiveness into public sector institutions. In this paper, I examine how the idea of the vocation is produced in higher education institutes using the example of an internal research audit that was carried out in a major research-led university between 2002 and 2005. I examine its impacts on biomedical scientists who lost access to laboratory space, a move that effectively ended their research careers. These scientists were redeployed to teaching-only positions and shortly thereafter, resurrected as ghostly reminders of the effects of audit. While teaching-only staff echoed Foucauldian critique in exposing the power/knowledge matrices of institutional management, it was their spatialization as spectres stalking the edges of research that revealed how the moral economies of science are valorized not in resistance to neoliberalization but as constitutive of it.

Giving Unwanted Gifts: Political Economy of Youtube Apology

A public apology is a fairly common content found on the YouTube platform to restore the reputation and regain people's trust. At the same time, Youtube can also be used as a commodity-based economic platform that allows organizations, individuals, and Google (the owner of Youtube) to earn revenue either through advertising or direct promotion. These two things reflect the dual benefits of two opposites: genuine demand in the public interest and economic exploitation for the benefit of certain parties. This is well explored by the political economy theory of media which sees the digital platform as a convergence between the moral economy of commodities, the moral economy of gifts, and the moral economy of public goods. This article aims to further explore the three elements of the political economy of the media in the context of apologies on Youtube in five cases that occurred in Indonesia. The five apology cases were analyzed using parameters reflecting the moral economy of commodities, gifts, and public goods. The results of the analysis provide a typology of apology and a model that reflects the interrelation between the three moral economies involved in every apology.

Cocaine

The contributors to Cocaine analyze the contemporary production, transit, and consumption of cocaine throughout the Americas and the illicit economy's entanglement with local communities. Based on in-depth interviews and archival research, these essays examine how government agents, acting both within and outside the law, and criminal actors seek to manage the flow of illicit drugs to both maintain order and earn profits. Whether discussing the moral economy of coca cultivation in Bolivia, criminal organizations and drug traffickers in Mexico, or the routes cocaine takes as it travels into and through Guatemala, the contributors demonstrate how entire ways of life are built around cocaine commodification. They consider how the authority of state actors is coupled with the self-regulating practices of drug producers, traffickers, and dealers, complicating notions of governance and of the relationships between economic and moral economies. The collection also outlines a more progressive drug policy that acknowledges the important role drugs play in the lives of those at the urban and rural margins. Contributors. Enrique Desmond Arias, Lilian Bobea, Philippe Bourgois, Anthony W. Fontes, Robert Gay, Paul Gootenberg, Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Thomas Grisaffi, Laurie Kain Hart, Annette Idler, George Karandinos, Fernando Montero, Dennis Rodgers, Taniele Rui, Cyrus Veeser, Autumn Zellers-León

Surprise Reveals the Affective-Moral Economies in Cancer Illness Narratives

Emotions, like joy and sorrow, feature in illness narratives, dramatizing stories of becoming: sick, well, controlled, in control. However, brief emotions, such as surprise, have received limited analytic attention in cancer illness narratives. Drawing on 20 interviews with 11 participants with diverse cancer diagnoses, along with the 455 photographs they produced for this study, we address the complex interactions between discourse, societal expectations, and perceptions in moral-affective economies. Tracing the emergence, deployment, and silencing of surprise provided an avenue to explore connections between affect, morality, advocacy, and philanthropy. We show how surprise works to deny uncertainties couched in individual risk, and situate cancer causation within the logics of anticipation, (re)producing socio-cultural etiology narratives. Attending to surprise reveals how some cancers are situated as individual responsibilities, with restricted access to compassion and collective resources. Thus, we interrogate the affective-moral economy underpinning cancer illness narratives, and surprise’s pivotal role in its analysis.

COVID 19, communal capital and the moral economy: Pacific Islands responses

One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various forms of communal capital such as kinship exchange, subsistence farming and strengthening of social solidarity have become features of this bourgeoning moral economy. In the post-COVID era, there needs to be a major rethinking of how community-based moral economies can be mainstreamed as assurance for resilience and as a responsive mechanism against future economic calamities.