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Insubordinate Spaces for IntemperateTimes: Countering the Pedagogies of

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Barbara Tomlinson & George Lipsitz

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Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times:Countering the Pedagogies of Neoliberalism

Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz

Teaching and learning take place today in a time of crisis and chaos. The economy,the environment, and the educational system are all in dire peril due to the cumu-lative consequences of decades of neoliberalism and its concomitant regimes of dispossession, displacement, and disciplinary subordination. Privileging profitsover people, the policies implemented by multinational corporations, transna-tional financial institutions, international trade organizations, and national gov-ernments have produced problems that the people in power cannot solve. Theycannot fix the things they have broken. They cannot repair the damage they havedone to the planet and its people. The fiscal crises their policies have produced

impel them to propose ever more drastic measures to eviscerate the social wageeven further, to reduce the numbers of rights-bearing citizens, and to plunder pub-lic resources for private gain. Public education as we know it is at an end. The ques-tion is no longer whether there will be radical transformations in schooling andsociety but rather what changes will be made and whose interests they will serve.

The crises of our time are epochal in nature. The present is not just anotherhistorical moment punctuated by multiple unresolved political, economic, andsocial problems. This is a historical turning point defined by the systemic break-down and chaotic disintegration of longstanding social institutions. The emerg-ence of new patterns of investment and trade, the contradictions and costs of

empire, and the destructive effects of privatization have worked in concert toeclipse the status of the United States as the central economic power in the worldsystem (Valdes and Cho 2011; Wallerstein 2008). The securitization of the mort-gage loan industry, massive tax breaks to the rich, and the defunding of essentialsocial institutions have produced an economy of austerity even for the middleand working classes. New regimes of racialized security—from the War onDrugs to the Patriot Act—have been accompanied by policies of criminalizationand incarceration aimed at the racialized poor and immigrants. Increased stateexpenditures on policing, imprisonment, and military action overseas protectthe privileges of the wealthy in the short run, but misallocate resources anddestroy assets important for long-term economic well-being. In concert these

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policies have destroyed the social stability and widely dispersed purchasingpower needed for a vibrant, broad-based, and egalitarian economy.

Yet at a time when corporate profits and assets have reached unprecedentedlevels, when the gap between rich and poor has expanded to an extent not seenin decades, the rich want still more. In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis

since the Great Depression, capital is staging a general strike. It refuses to invest inproductive economic activity in order to force governments to agree to even moretax cuts for the wealthy, more reductions in spending on education, housing,transportation, and health care, and the creation of more privatization programsdesigned to transfer public assets into private hands. The dominant neoliberalproject entails the creation of a fragmented, de-linked, privatized, and devolvedstate—dedicated to protecting the propertied and the privileged but unwillingand unable to meet the needs of the majority of the population (Woods 2010).

Neoliberalism is not just an economic system. Unimpeded capital accumu-lation requires extensive ideological legitimation. Neoliberal practices seek to

produce neoliberal subjects through a social pedagogy that aims to naturalizehierarchy and exploitation by promoting internalized preferences for profits overthe needs of people, relentless individuation of collective social processes, culti-vation of hostile privatism and defensive localism based on exaggerated fears of difference, and mobilization of anger and resentment against vulnerable popu-lations to render them disposable, displaceable, deportable, and docile. The gran-diose aspirations of neoliberal pedagogy, however, are often undermined by thesystem’s ruinous effects. Neoliberalism promises prosperity but delivers aus-terity. It confuses consumer choice with human agency and reduces justice torevenge and punishment. It produces resistance among the very populations ithopes to suppress and control.

Henry A. Giroux argues that countering the disasters of neoliberalism requiresfacing ‘‘the challenge of developing a politics and pedagogy that can serve andactualize a democratic notion of the social’’ (2011). We suggest that ImmanuelWallerstein’s notion of ‘‘middle-run’’ temporality (2008) and Stuart Hall’s dis-cussion of ‘‘middle-level’’ theory (1986) point the way toward a framework forconsidering new interventions and producing new possibilities in these intemper-ate times. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is also helpful in understanding howpractices of cultural persuasion support what Giroux calls ‘‘neoliberalism as apublic pedagogy’’ (2005), and how pedagogies for the neoliberal subject can beanalyzed, explained, and countered. We argue that its public pedagogy papers

over neoliberalism’s many contradictions, its simultaneous deployment anddenial of its racial project, and its attempts to establish all sites outside of the mar-ket as ‘‘insubordinate spaces.’’ The university is an important site of struggle inthis argument. The pedagogies of the neoliberal university train both studentsand faculty to align themselves with market subjectivities, thereby subvertingdemocratic possibilities. At the same time, as a set of ‘‘insubordinate spaces,’’the university offers opportunity for critique and argument that can counter neo-liberalism and its racial project. We also argue that we need to expand our imagin-ation about the spaces where counter-pedagogies take place. Both the universityand the community offer possibilities for insubordinate spaces; in this article wedelineate the challenges and opportunities in academia and activist community

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cultural work. In ‘‘insubordinate’’ community sites all across the United Statesand around the world, new publics and new polities are emerging rapidlythrough reciprocal practices of teaching and learning. As Pauline Lipmanobserves, a new social imaginary is emerging in marginalized spaces where wecan find ‘‘seeds of a democratic, cooperative way of living together’’ in com-

munity gardens and urban farming, community-run youth programs and artsspaces, and economic cooperatives (Lipman 2011, 147). These efforts at populareducation also comprise important sites for struggle: for example, students atthe Center in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, the Seattle Fandango Project, workereducation by Mujeres Unidas y Activas in San Francisco and by Asian ImmigrantWomen Advocates in Oakland, the Improvisation, Communities, and SocialPractices collaborative research project, and the collaborations orchestrated bythe Los Angeles Community Action Network. Inside schools and out, we cancounter neoliberalism by cultivating our collective capacity for democratic delib-eration, collective decision making, and public engagement and accountability.

‘‘MIDDLE-RUN’’ TEMPORALITY AND ‘‘MIDDLE-LEVEL’’ THEORY

Countering neoliberalism’s social project may seem an overwhelming task.Incessant hailing by neoliberal discourses encourages us to overlook their frac-tures and fissures, to think of them as a seamless structure of domination. Yetit is important to remember that, as Stuart Hall observes, ‘‘hegemonizing is hardwork’’ (1988, quoted in Lipsitz 2001, 272). We argue here that thinking with‘‘middle-run’’ temporality and ‘‘middle-level’’ theory can give us a frameworkto create ‘‘insubordinate spaces’’ for these ‘‘intemperate times.’’

Immanuel Wallerstein argues that many differences that appear to be aboutpolitical principles and policies are often actually differences about what is themost strategically important temporality. He claims that most people’s attentionnecessarily focuses on the short run (‘‘what most people think of as life’’ [2008,51]), which always requires compromise; our various arguments about the shortrun tend to focus on what constitutes the appropriate compromise.1 Strategies andmoves for the short run can interrupt and impede neoliberal projects. Forexample, mass mobilizations and mass demonstrations have given voice to broadpopular support for public education in Puerto Rico (Sassen 2010) and for collec-tive bargaining rights in Wisconsin (Davey and Greenhouse 2011). Focused com-

munity campaigns have struggled to make equitable high quality publiceducation available to all in Chicago, Illinois (Lipman 2011) and to fight againstthe privatization of public education in Los Angeles (Lippe-Klein and Hendy2011). Yet for Wallerstein, short run projects can do very little to reverse the ascen-dance of neoliberalism. Wallerstein’s position is that, in the short run, the currentconfiguration of power guarantees that all strategies will be confined to choosingamong competing evils. Arguments about short-term tactics and goals will all beabout what compromises must be made and which will be the lesser of two evils.Long-term efforts address a more distant temporality. Scholars focused on thelong run present powerful and important critiques of the origins and evolutionof neoliberalism, its proclivities for both exploiting and occluding social identities

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of race, sex, and gender, and its perverse propensity for channeling desiresfor freedom into practices that promote violence, exploitation, and oppression(Goldberg 2009; Reddy 2011; Valdes and Cho 2011). These long term projects alsodo important and necessary work. Some projects attempt to sketch out a blueprintof a long-term future in which the plurality of selves that now define us might

interact more justly, humanely, and creatively. In the long run, a changed worldsystem will emerge eventually from the current systemic crisis. But Wallersteinargues that the outcome of this crisis is probably impervious to our debates aboutthe nature of utopic futures, and ‘‘is not in any fashion inevitable’’ (2008, 61).2

Unfortunately, the long term, where the most meaningful changes are likely to be made, lies beyond our grasp at the present. The pieces needed for long-termchange are not yet in place. We are not yet the people we will need to be to builda genuinely democratic and egalitarian society.

For these reasons, Wallerstein argues that short- and long-term projects needto be supplemented by work in the middle term, by patient and practical political

and pedagogical work in the mid-range temporality of the next ten to twentyyears. According to Wallerstein, the potentially ‘‘unsavory’’ compromises neces-sary for the short run are inappropriate for the middle run. Although the actualconstruction of a ‘‘more democratic and more egalitarian world-system’’ is notyet possible in the middle run (61), our actions must point in that direction.According to Wallerstein (2008):

It is the middle run where the significant action concerning a left agenda is located . . . Themiddle run involves a combination of continuous preparatory work (what is called polit-ical education) and constant pressures on the powerful (what is called the construction of movements) with a deep patience about seeing the fruition of all this work. Gramsci’sfamous slogan, ‘‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’’ is exactly right. Forthe optimism pushes us to engage in what the pessimism tells us often seems to be andsometimes really is a Sisyphean task. (53–54)

The rewards of work in the middle run may not be immediate, nor the outcomeguaranteed. But without our work in the middle run, Wallerstein argues, the newworld-system may well be worse.

What we can do is to make possible the multiple political activities that will end up tilting thebalance against a richer, better organized, and far less virtuous group—those who wish tomaintain or even reinforce another variant of the hierarchical, polarizing systems we havehad heretofore. (2008, 61, emphasis added)

Attending to this middle-range temporality compels us to think about spatial-ity as well. Neoliberalism has not only ‘‘taken place’’ in the sense that historiansuse the phrase to connote that events happen, but neoliberalism has also takenplaces, transforming public social sites like classrooms and community culturalevents into spaces for commercial exchange. Creative collective action, however,can turn these sites into insubordinate spaces capable of serving as crucibles for building democratic capacities and capabilities.

People seeking alternatives to the disciplinary subordination of neoliberalismcan use the middle-range temporality of the next two decades to developpractices, processes, and institutions promoting popular ability to participate in



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processes of democratic deliberation, mutual recognition, and collective account-ability. Teachers and students can counter the classroom and social pedagogies of neoliberalism by cultivating new ways of knowing and new ways of being.Insubordinate spaces in the classroom can be crucibles for radically revisingexisting understandings of teaching and learning, of reading and writing, and

of citizenship and social membership. At the same time, insubordinate spacesin communities can be sites for developing new networks of instruction, appren-ticeship, and interaction. Thinking in terms of the middle run allows us toteach ourselves and others to exploit the fissures and fractures available to us.Wallerstein reminds us that the outcome of the struggle has not been foreclosed, but there is still much to do: de-hegemonizing is hard work too.

Emphasizing middle-level temporality connects fruitfully with thinking interms of middle-level theory. In his analysis of Antonio Gramsci’s relevancefor the study of race and ethnicity, Hall explains the value of middle-levelabstraction in ‘‘complexifying existing theories and problems’’ by connecting

large concepts to specific situations (Hall 1986, 5). Gramsci’s immersion in theeveryday struggles of the working class in Turin, Italy during and immediatelyafter World War I led him to adapt Marxist theory to ‘‘a lower more concretelevel of application’’ (Hall 1986, 7). Moving to the middle level enabled Gramscito appreciate the segmented and fragmented nature of the working class and thecomposite qualities of individuals. He came to see power as dispersed acrossthe entire social field and embedded in the quotidian activities of everyday life.He rejected both the short-term view of revolution as a process through whichthe state could be smashed or seized and the long-term view of revolution asthe inevitable outcome of the crises built into capitalism. Instead, Gramsci cameto argue for a middle-range, protracted ‘‘war of position’’ to be waged across

many different sites. Activism plays a central role in Gramsci’s analysis becausehe argues that people are subordinated not by just the philosophical core of reigning ideas and identities, but rather by the organic presence of those ideasin their everyday lives. Gramsci argues that the plurality of selves inside anygiven identity is a collective rather than an individual phenomenon, thataggrieved and insurgent subjects are not found but rather made through concretecontestations against the institutions of civil society and the state. Rather thanfocusing on ideal and abstract schematic formulations about what identitiesshould be, ‘‘middle-level theorizing’’ attends to concrete struggles over whatidentities are now and what they are capable of becoming.

PEDAGOGIES FOR THE NEOLIBERAL SUBJECT

Counter-pedagogies that may enable a ‘‘democratic notion of the social’’ includedemonstrating the social and cultural pedagogies that create neoliberal subjects,that show how people are made into neoliberal subjects able to overlook the contra-dictions of neoliberalism, the social conditions it creates, and its exploiting of racial arguments. Acceptance of neoliberal thinking is not ‘‘spontaneous,’’ butthe result of a relentless campaign of cultural pedagogy. This pedagogy shapeshow individuals see themselves within a social world. Neoliberalism emphasizes



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individualism and the ‘‘privatization’’ of responsibility through the interpellationof people as individual entrepreneurs of their own selves. People are framed assolely responsible for their own outcomes and positioned as free of responsibilityto others and to what might be considered a community or ‘‘public good.’’Davies and Saltmarsh note that in neoliberalism, ‘‘Populations are administered

and managed through the production of a belief in each individual in his or herown freedom and autonomy’’ (2007, 3). They point to Nikolas Rose’s argumentsdemonstrating the need for an enormous structural apparatus in order to createthe conditions in which such economic and social individualism is seen as ‘‘natu-ral,’’ ‘‘necessary,’’ and ‘‘desirable’’ (1999). Dominant discourses treat this struc-tural apparatus as both necessary and invisible, constantly ‘‘hailing’’ subjectsthrough the ideological discourses of institutions and cultural products (seeAlthusser 1971). The advocates of neoliberalism understand the process of socialpedagogy well. From entertainment to advertising to education, they seek toshape institutions, structures, and spaces that run by themselves and reproduce

themselves, that generate not only market-oriented opinions but market-orientedpersonalities and dispositions as well. They seek to inculcate the imperatives of the market inside individuals.

Crucial for considering pedagogies of neoliberalism is their role in whatAntonio Gramsci has described as processes of ‘‘hegemony’’ (1971). Accordingto Gramsci, hegemony emerges through alliances that develop among compe-ting groups working to exert economic, intellectual, and moral leadership, work-ing within a ‘‘semi-autonomous’’ cultural arena related to social structures butnot reducible to them. Social theories that reflect the interests of those groupsdo not gain social dominance through physical coercion or state power alone, but through dialectical processes of cultural persuasion in which subordinate

groups are ‘‘recruited into their own subordination.’’ As S. Kim (2001) argues,

According to Gramsci, the consent of subordinates is constructed when a dominantgroup’s particular world view is accepted by the subordinate groups as their world view,and thus the dominant group’s interests appear to be the interests of the society at large.As a result, the dominant group is seen as entitled to its ethical and intellectual leadershipand arises as a hegemonic group in a particular historical period. (6645)

Under such circumstances, neoliberal hegemony must constantly engage inculturally persuasive practices to maintain its dominant status.

The pedagogy that frames neoliberal thinking as ‘‘common sense’’ is particu-

larly effective because subjects do not see themselves as ‘‘in training.’’ Ideologicalinfluences delivered in the form of pronouncements signal their persuasiveintent; they are therefore visible, controversial, and refutable. In consequence,Louis Althusser argues, the most powerful ideological influences exist not in pro-nouncements but in ‘‘apparatuses,’’ in practices, and these practices are alwaysmaterial (1971). Practices and discourses from multiple cultural sources worktogether: neoliberal ideologies appear convincing in part because they are echoedconstantly in advertising, entertainment, public relations, and political dis-courses. These discourses ‘‘hail’’ or ‘‘interpellate’’ subjects as if they are alreadyneoliberals—or at least ought to be. They encourage subjects to find positionscongruent with neoliberal common sense, to accept its dominance, and to



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position neoliberal notions as those things that are already understood, that ‘‘gowithout saying.’’ Even when subjects resist their interpellation as neoliberals,they nonetheless must ‘‘overhear’’ and be affected by neoliberal assumptionsand arguments about the nature of social relations. Whether individual subjectsnotice them or not, accept them or not, these displays of dominant power are

meant for everyone.In recent years, neoliberal pedagogies have expanded in extent and force.

Emboldened by decades of state policies and private actions that have engi-neered a massive redistribution of wealth to the rich, neoliberal investors andideologues are now waging a coordinated, coercive, and well-funded campaignthat seeks to make investment and ownership the central activity in human life.Neoliberalism presents itself as an apolitical, nonideological, and essentially tech-nical project based on objective principles of efficiency. The free-market funda-mentalism of neoliberal hegemony imagines people to be market actors whoare atomized engines of self-interest unencumbered by the particularities of time,

space, and social identity, as free individuals untouched by tradition andunencumbered by history, as isolated, independent, and purely self-interestedmonads. This campaign aims at restructuring all realms of human endeavor asmarket transactions, to elevate the time, space, and subjectivity of the marketover all other identities, spatialities, and temporalities.

The effect of these campaigns of neoliberal pedagogies is to valorize neoliber-alism, to treat it as unassailable, beyond history, beyond criticism, impervious tocounter-argument. Yet the neoliberal project is riddled with contradictions. Aswe argue below, it is a cultural and ideological project that is massively inef-ficient, that wastes and misallocates resources in the process of attempting tomake inequality and injustice seem natural, necessary, and inevitable. Race

and gender occupy central yet shifting roles in justifying neoliberal choicesand outcomes, both deployed and disavowed. Part of what happens to the futureof the common good—including public life, schools, and universities—willdepend on the ability to pose credible and popular counter-models of education,not only inside the university but in all of the realms of endeavor and social loca-tions where thinking people are struggling against the hegemony of market time,space, and subjectivity.

CONTRADICTIONS OF NEOLIBERALISM

The neoliberal project is riddled with contradictions. One of the key mechanismsused by neoliberals to manage these contradictions is the simultaneous deploy-ment and disavowal of race. Neoliberalism needs to deploy race because makingpublic spaces and public institutions synonymous with communities of colorcan taint them in the eyes of white working-class and middle-class people whothen become more receptive to privatization schemes that undermine theirown stakes in the shared social communities that neoliberalism attempts to elim-inate. Oppositions between public and private, between producer and parasite, between freedom and dependency function as racialized metaphors. As PaulineLipman explains, ‘‘the cultural politics of race are central to constructing consent



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for privatizing public goods, including schools’’ (2011, 12). On the ideologicallevel, race serves as a justification of asymmetrical power, as an explanationfor why the market does not deliver general prosperity, as excuse for portrayinginequality as natural, necessary, and inevitable. At the same time, neoliberals alsoneed to disavow race because it refers to historical social identities outside the mar-

ket, identities that contain repositories of collective memory, sources of moralinstruction, and archives replete with epistemologies and ontologies inimical tothe interests of market capitalism. This contradiction of racial deployment anddisavowal makes neoliberalism potentially vulnerable to practices and argu-ments that reveal the collective, cumulative, and continuing presence of racismas a central force in social relations and as a disavowed but powerful presencein politics and scholarship.

During the past three decades, neoliberals have advanced the cause of privatization through a series of moral panics focused on the putatively bad behavior of demonized groups frequently coded as nonwhite and=or female:

racial minorities, immigrants, welfare recipients, the homeless, inner-city youth,single mothers, religious minorities, people with nonnormative sexual identi-ties, and most recently, even teachers and public employees with pensions.Moral panics about the spoiled character of public spaces and public institu-tions are promoted to justify neoliberal ways of ‘‘saving’’ them throughmarket-based ‘‘reforms’’ like privatization. The fact that these reforms alwaysfail to produce positive results—and, in fact, help destroy the very institutionsthey purport to save—does not discredit them. When privatized reforms fail tocontribute to the ‘‘public good’’ as they have promised and been paid to do,when they have not expanded opportunities and have not improved outcomes,racism works as a pivotal way to rationalize the failure of those reforms and to

authorize new ever more draconian neoliberal schemes with their accompany-ing profits. The failures of neoliberal reforms are attributed to the personal defi-ciencies (and racial identities) of the populations that rely on public servicesand institutions. Racially inflected rounds of blaming and shaming absolvecapitalism and capitalists of any accountability for the stagnation of real wages,the impoverishment of the public sector, the demise of social services, lowwages, mass unemployment, and the enormous and ever-expanding gap between the super-rich and everyone else. These campaigns focus attentionon the putative deficiencies of members of aggrieved groups: people whocontrol virtually nothing are then blamed for virtually everything. In the process,

the people who control nearly everything are blamed for nearly nothing (Salaam2009). Thus neoliberal logic itself is impervious to failure: if any new privatiza-tion program does not deliver the promised ‘‘public benefits,’’ the blame for thefailure is always placed on those who should have been helped and were not:they are judged to be unfit for freedom.

What counts as ‘‘failure’’ under neoliberal logic has a shifting role: individualscan fail, will fail, and be positioned as deserving to fail because they have notaccommodated themselves to their proper tasks as consumers and entrepreneurs.Public employees and their institutions can fail and be punished if they do notsatisfy mandated standards. In contrast, however, privatization schemes cannever fail because their focus is always on the short run interests of capital.



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The failure of vouchers or charter schools, privatizing public housing, or cuttingservices for the poor and the disabled is essentially inconceivable under neolib-eral logic because the ‘‘success’’ of a privatization scheme is immediate. Theseschemes succeed as soon as investors and owners are given access to publicfunds, and that success continues until those public funds are depleted. What

appears to be a failure to contribute to the ‘‘public good’’ is no failure at all forinvestors and owners authorized to loot public resources and to ‘‘write off’’any failures as a tax loss. Public institutions are evaluated and disciplined interms of their ‘‘intended’’ goal of improving the public good, but privatizationschemes are evaluated in entirely different terms. The ‘‘apparent’’ goal of improving the public good is subordinate to what government officials, investorsand owners understand to be the true goal: extracting profit from public funds.Maximizing profit requires developing ‘‘value’’ through structures of publicity,leading to the cheating and misrepresentation routinely found to accompanyhigh-stakes testing, charter schools, and other forms of educational privatization

(Anderson and Applebome 2011; Asimov 2007; Severson 2011; Winerip 2011).But such revelations are not treated as a challenge to privatization. For in neolib-eral logic, the ideology that authorizes privatization is untouched by the collapseof any single scheme of privatized exploitation, which is treated as a singularevent. Investors and owners, having increased their wealth through the profitsgained from public funds, simply move their capital onwards, reconstitutingthemselves as new companies or brands. Properly framed in the neoliberal para-digm, nothing succeeds as much as failure. Each new disaster created by neolib-eral policies creates a crisis that can be used to advance another round of privatization.

The contradiction between the world that neoliberalism imagines and the

world in which we actually live is just one of many contradictions that plaguethe free market fundamentalist project and render it inherently unstable politi-cally and ideologically. Neoliberalism produces many of the very problems itpurports to solve. It promises prosperity and security yet creates austerityand instability. It needs political legitimacy and popular acquiescence, yet it cre-ates chaos constantly in the lives of the citizens and denizens who grapple withits regimes of disciplinary subordination. It fabricates a grossly deluded descrip-tion of the economic and social world in which we live. Rather than the sum of interactions among free market actors, our world has been shaped in innumer-able ways by systematic racial stratification and gendered hierarchies that are

created and sustained by inherited wealth, hierarchical divisions of labor, coor-dination among oligopolies and cartels, and the ‘‘locked in’’ advantages thataccrue to dominant social identities (Roithmayr 2007). Teachers and studentsrequire empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated understandingsof the centrality of race to the ideology and social ecology of neoliberalism.They also require knowledge about the ways in which the humanities andsocial sciences themselves have been culpable in helping create and legitimatethe racialized appeals that work so effectively to advance the neoliberalproject. We can realize these possibilities, however, only by coming to gripswith the centrality of race and racism to contemporary social identities and civicdiscourse.



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K–12 EDUCATION AND NEOLIBERALISM’S RACIAL PROJECT

In neoliberal society, race serves as a crucial justification for prevailing relations of power and as a wedge designed to fragment the public into antagonistic competinggroups. Educational privileges and resources are at the center of these debates. The

general privatization of public education has its origins in experiments conductedon children of color in the form of charter schools, high stakes testing, ‘‘teacherproof’’ curricula (online and in the classroom), classroom-to-career vocational pro-grams, military academies in schools, and vouchers. The No Child Left Behindprogram entails massive subsidies for segregated suburban schools—the schoolsthat need funding the least—while defunding education for poverty stricken stu-dents of color who need educational expenditures the most. The Teach for Americainitiative receives substantial funding to send largely untrained temporary tea-chers without certification into inner-city schools to hide the fact that we have atwo-tiered educational system. Instead of expending public money to fight for

the kinds of permanent adequate resources and instructional capacity that wouldend the two tiered system, funds are channeled to Teach for America, which offersa dollop of color and multiculturalism to college graduates who then move on toother professions, often touting their brief tours as temporary teachers as qualifica-tions that make them experts on education and on the deficiencies of poor childrenand their families. Inner-city students relegated to overcrowded, understaffed,resource poor schools populated by classmates who suffer from undiagnosedand therefore untreated learning disabilities are punished as a group for not magi-cally overcoming the effects of housing segregation, environmental racism, andtheir isolation in the bottom tier of educational institutions.

Affluent white children with access to fully equipped resource-rich schools

staffed by experienced and credentialed teachers and replete with resources forcounseling, support, and enrichment are rewarded as a group for their privilegedaccess to the top tier of educational institutions. When advocates of educationalequity propose race-based solutions like affirmative action for these race-basedproblems, they are told that it is illegitimate to treat people as part of groups ratherthan as individuals. Yet the different educational opportunities allotted to studentsof different races do not come in response to their performance as individuals, butinstead because of their membership in groups and because of the relationship of those groups to the way whiteness functions as a racial cartel—channeling unfairgains and unjust enrichments to whites through housing and school segregation,

employment discrimination, environmental racism, and differential approaches topolicing, sentencing, and incarceration. Suburban white parents insist that theschool successes of their children emerge from their own values and successfulparenting practices, rather than from the quality of the schools to which theyare offered privileged access by housing segregation. Yet these parents insist thattheir children’s schools must retain and even increase all the advantages theyderive from inequitable tax structures (see, for example, Rose 2013 forthcoming).Affluent white parents see their schools as so ‘‘needy’’ that their tax dollars should be kept ‘‘at home,’’ not spent instead on inner-city schools that are demonstrablymore needy by every measure; nor are they willing to send their own children toschools they claim are good enough for Blacks and Latinos.



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The increasing numbers of students of color in K–12 education makes attackson public education especially harmful to communities of color while doing lessdamage to white people, who are overrepresented among the ranks of the alreadyeducated because of the continuing effects of historical segregation in education.White children are less reliant on public schools because they will inherit assets

and opportunities from their parents to a greater degree than is true of youngpeople of color. In the short run, it is easier to defund public institutions thatcan be portrayed as the province of people of color (public schools, public health,public housing, public transportation) than it is to cut spending on the institutionsthat do more to serve the interests of white entitlement like the home owners’mortgage deduction, the export-import bank, or subsidies to agri-business.

The free market fundamentalism that guides the attack on public schools con-flicts directly with the educational needs and interests of students and teachers. Itpromises to improve educational outcomes, yet it produces a constrained andvocationally oriented curriculum. Its adoption is not because the corporatization

of the classroom has been shown to improve instruction or learning, but rather because this kind of educational ‘‘reform’’ opens up lucrative opportunities forprofit-oriented companies to make the classroom a site for consumption of stan-dardized tests, testing aids, teaching modules, instructional equipment, and whatmarketers (without a trace of irony) refer to as ‘‘teacher proof’’ curricula. Theseare exercises in corporate synergy masquerading as pedagogical innovation. Inthe name of setting ‘‘standards’’ they impose standardization on the necessarilyplural and diverse practices needed in any classroom. They display contempt forthe opinions of experienced teachers about how pupils learn, and they view stu-dents and parents as passive consumers of educational credentials rather than asactive and engaged participants in the process of becoming lifelong learners.

They presume that one size fits all, that the ideal educational setting involvesonly one kind of teacher, one kind of student, one kind of pedagogy, and onekind of curriculum. Instead of actually addressing the dire educational needsof young people in this society, they are content to cannibalize the classroomfor the benefit of entrepreneurs and investors.

Yet the widespread adoption of these very policies has helped produce thepresent crisis. Constant need to find new outlets for investment and new sourcesof profit leads the advocates of neoliberalism to believe that they can no longerafford to tolerate an only partially privatized educational system. Their passion betrays something less than confidence in the triumph of the market. Consumer

demand in the United States will never rebound to the levels of the past thatproduced greater equality in income and wealth. The very ‘‘successes’’ of neoliberalism have created so much inequality, driven wages so far down, and impo-verished so much of the population, that investors and owners have no faith inany future economic prosperity fueled by consumer demand. Rather than raisingwages to fuel demand, they prefer to privatize the public sector by fueling publicmoney not only to privately owned and managed schools, but to private prisons,utilities, garbage collectors, security firms, and even armies. These privatizationschemes have now arrived full force at colleges and universities making themcrucially important sites where an important part of the short-run, middle-run,and long-run future of neoliberalism will be decided.



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THE NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY

To the free market fundamentalists, college and K–12 classrooms alike seem likeinsubordinate spaces. They view these classrooms as sites that are insufficientlyintegrated into the apparatuses that generate immediate profitable returns on

investments. Although schools are essentially conservative institutions that seekto prepare students for future market activity, they are not conservative enoughfor today’s investors and owners who now see schools as subversive to profit makingin the present. If neoliberals were the conservatives they often claim to be, theywould honor and emphasize study of the intellectual and artistic traditions of the past and their relevance to the present. But the free market fundamentalistsare not conservatives, but rather revolutionary plutocrats who view universityclassrooms as vestigial remnants of a previous era of capitalism when it was con-sidered useful to nurture and sustain the critical distance that academic inquirypromoted. The attack on the university is ‘‘ideological’’ in the largest sense: rather

than merely a political attack on ‘‘dissenting ideas,’’ it is an attempt to eradicatediscourses and disciplines that might be concerned with ‘‘public or communitygood,’’ that do not automatically place market practices at the center of the socialworld, that offer alternatives to the subjectivity of the market actor fixated onmaterial gain. In recent years it has become evident that the logic of neoliberalismis not confined to delegitimation of the humanities and the social sciences. It nowcalls into question the existence of all parts of the university—including thesciences—for similar reasons: not merely because university expenditures are‘‘costly’’ in a time of artificially created financial limitations, not merely becauseuniversities provide a ‘‘public good’’ offensive to ideologies of privatization, butexplicitly because the university potentially refuses to allow the time and space

of the market to occlude all other historical, social, and cultural times and spaces.Because neoliberalism works to delegitimize and eradicate any alternatives to

market time and market space, it seeks to create the ‘‘entrepreneurial’’ university:a place of market competition and market subjects. Audit and surveillance systemsare central to this project. They operate as an apparatus of enforcement as well asa technology for production of neoliberal educational selves. As Davies andSaltmarsh argue, audit systems are framed as necessary exactly because neoliber-alism frames individuals as wholly self-interested and, therefore, untrustworthy:

Within this competitive, consumer-oriented system individuals in pursuit of their ownfreedom must also be persuaded to freely accept responsibility both for themselves asindividuals and for the success of their workplace. To this end an extensive audit systemis needed since, in a neoliberal philosophy, trust and commitment to the collectivewell-being have been made redundant. (2007, 3)

Davies and Saltmarsh argue that the audit systems, built on distrust, increasinglyreproduce it (see Rose 1999, 155). Davies and Bansel argue that audit systems notonly ‘‘govern,’’ but serve as ‘‘technologies of the self’’ to create faculty as neoliberalsubjects.

The operation of these technologies on and in the subject simultaneously secures thesubject’s viability and subjection. It secures their individuality and their regulation as



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responsibilised and accountable subjects who support an expanding industrialisation of the university: that is, capture by the market, market forces and practices. In this takeup of the institutional ambitions as one’s own and one’s willing work on oneself to becomethe appropriate and appropriated subject of the new university, there is a slippage . . .toward the neoliberal subject whose morality is intimately muddled with that of the entre-

preneurial institution whose project is a pragmatic one of survival within the terms of government. (2010, 9)

The audit system of the university and the corporatization of the classroom arepart of a broader social pedagogy designed to create everyone as neoliberal subjects. Outside the classroom, powerful interests promote a culture of conformitywhere ‘‘fitting in’’ counts more than knowing the truth. Neoliberal logicsuspects—quite rightly—that the university provides spaces that do not placethe personal pursuit of acquiring and owning at the center of the social world.It seeks to eradicate those spaces by turning both faculty and students intomarket-driven, competitive neoliberal subjects unconcerned with the ‘‘public

good.’’ It views sites like classrooms as polluted by contemplation, creativity,and community, as obstacles in the way of the imperatives of market spaceand market time.

When school districts across the country succumbed to political and economicpressure and allowed for-profit educational entrepreneurs to set up charterschools subsidized by state funds in inner cities in Milwaukee, Baltimore, andSan Francisco, most faculty members and students at Research One universitiesdid not view those decisions as a threat to them. When charter schools failed tooutperform their counterparts in the public system despite being able to choosetheir students and their teachers—yet were rewarded with more contracts andcontrol over more schools—university faculty members and students did not gen-

erally perceive a threat to the their own endeavors. When in the wake of the flood-ing that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, reconstruction of the city of NewOrleans entailed the dissolution of the public school system, the firing of seventhousand teachers who were union members and the backbone of the local Blackmiddle class, and provision of new state and federal subsidies for privatefor-profit charter schools, those actions were not perceived to be a threat totop-tier colleges and universities. But now, as privatization has come to the uni-versity with full force, faculty and students see that what was allowed to happento inner-city students and teachers yesterday is happening to colleges and univer-sities today. What confronts higher education now is what has already been con-

fronting people all across the nation and all around the world, what Naomi Kleinaccurately calls ‘‘predatory disaster capitalism.’’ Although it impacts differentpopulations in different ways, predatory disaster capitalism always entails a frag-mented, delinked, privatized, and devolved state unable to meet human needs but perfectly suited to assist investors in reaping the gains that flow from accu-mulation by dispossession (see Klein 2007; Woods 2005, 1012; Harvey 2003, 67).

The ascendency of neoliberalism, its denigration of the notion of the commongood, and the consequences of its shifting deployments of race, time, and space,have long been at issue to those concerned with the future of the university. BillReadings (1997), Masao Miyoshi (2000), Jennifer Washburn (2006), ChristopherNewfield (2008), and Frank O’Donoghue (2008), for example, exposed the causes



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and consequences of the impending privatization of education in its early stages.With the exception of the education of the elite, neoliberalism positions theuniversity according to market logic, as a site where consumers can buy the cre-dentialing they believe they need to obtain jobs in the future. Although there areparts of this credentialing that emphasize competition, in many cases students

are encouraged to view themselves as consumers who deserve a path of leastresistance to the credentials they need. Teachers will feel these changes deeplyin their everyday lives. Rather than promoting a competitive culture of workand achievement, the end result of this corporate fiscalized, virtualized, andvocationalized higher education will be a ‘‘race to the bottom,’’ a scramble by stu-dents to acquire the greatest amount of reward for the least amount of work. Thisclimate will produce large amounts of cheating and vehement demands for theleast strenuous kinds of assessment possible. The multiple choice tests empha-sized in high-stakes testing regimes already teach students that education entailsproviding short answers to short questions, that gratification comes instantly in

the form of correct answers that close down rather than open up intellectual con-cerns. Students accustomed to the tasks mandated by high stakes testing there-fore look for simple and direct tasks in their college work. They can makeliteral connections between questions and answers, but they cannot develop theirability to read carefully, write clearly, or think logically. They solve puzzles butare baffled by problems.

Whereas the neoliberal university values some of the knowledge considered tocontribute directly to employment, all other forms of knowledge are seen as hur-dles requiring minimal rote learning rather than the skill building necessary to become a critical thinker, creative problem solver, and life-long learner. Follow-ing the failed model of ‘‘teacher proof’’ education in K–12 schooling, university

students will be rushed through their undergraduate years taking large classestaught by part-time adjuncts who give them standardized tests that can begraded by machines. The small areas of research and intellectual excellence thatremain will not be valued in themselves. Instead, as top administrators in theUniversity of California system have explained recently in reference to anexpensive project they have already underway, universities’ reputations forresearch excellence will be valuable mainly as a source of status useful for build-ing the brand equity of online education modeled after for-profit MBA diplomamills but graced by the imprimatur of an elite university (The Council of UC Fac-ulty Associations 2010).

The cumulative consequences of school segregation, academic tracking, andtwo-tiered public school systems, coupled with dramatic increases in tuitionsand fees, will undermine the cosmopolitanism of college conversations. Thesocial base of the university will become narrower and narrower under theseconditions. The diverse class, racial, and linguistic backgrounds of students thatgive academic inquiries enormous vitality and that make them different from theconversations that prevail in segregated suburban high schools will no longerinform college work. Instead, universities will increasingly be populated only by the children of investors, owners, managers, and professionals who willexpect the university to provide them with the uniformity they have come toexperience in the limited circles in which they travel.



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INSUBORDINATE CRITIQUE AND COUNTER-PEDAGOGIES IN THEUNIVERSITY

Universities can and should be atypical and anomalous spaces in our society,sites to counter the pedagogies of neoliberalism. They can be places where evi-

dence and argument matter more than influence, where original and generativethinking is more highly valued than entertainment, where independent research-ers ask and answer important questions without interference from their fundingsources. Particularly promising are what James Lee calls ‘‘the provisional spacesthat institutions tolerate but do not fully sanction, the conversations that compelus to read different kinds of books and nudge us, at times, to put our booksdown’’ (2004, xxx). Because U.S. society has been encouraged by its entertain-ment, advertising, and public relations industries to seek easy, accessible, andsimple solutions to complex problems, more than ever we now need placeswhere mind work that is necessarily difficult can be conducted. Under these cir-

cumstances universities need to continue to do the things that they have donewell in the past: to preserve and protect academic freedom, to promote pureresearch, to permit unfettered inquiry into the things that unite and dividepeople, to ask and answer difficult questions about what makes for the good lifeand about what individuals and groups owe to one another.

To use the resources of the university to counter neoliberal pedagogies, how-ever, requires us to recognize that the university is not an innocent victim of neoliberalism. Rather, the university is one of the key sites where neoliberalismhas been invented, learned, and legitimated. The university is an important insti-tution in society. It is filled with what Gramsci called ‘‘experts in legitimation’’whose ideas, evidence, and arguments support the organized abandonment of

aggrieved groups. Anti-racist advocates for environmental justice, for fair hous-ing, for augmented funding for AIDS research, as well as anti-racist opponents of massive prison building projects, urban redevelopment schemes, and neoliberaleconomic policies, constantly need to challenge the expert knowledge of scien-tists, judges, physicians, criminologists, bankers, urban planners, and econo-mists. Students and scholars challenging dominant neoliberal formulations canprovide useful tools for their struggles. It will not be enough simply to add onnew evidence to existing paradigms. Instead, the fight against the logic of neoliberalism requires exposing and challenging the epistemological and ideologicalunderpinnings of contemporary science, law, medicine, urban planning, and

business, while working together to develop generative new ways of being andthinking.Because neoliberalism uses race extensively as a rhetorical and ideological

tool, solutions to the crisis in higher education need to reckon with race. Theyrequire empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated understandings of the centrality of race to the ideology and social ecology of neoliberalism, but alsoknowledge about the ways in which the disciplines themselves have been culp-able in helping create and legitimate the racialized appeals that work so effec-tively to advance the neoliberal project. Thus perhaps the most importantcontested terrain in the corporate university lies in the area of choosing theobjects of our research and teaching. And it is here where interrogating race



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can once again make an enormous difference. The study of racial projects can beespecially important work in the context of neoliberalism’s simultaneous deploy-ment and disavowal of race. White supremacy is not merely an aberrant attitudeexpressed by a few individuals, but rather a political system that is crucial to themaintenance of racialized capitalism. As Cedric Robinson explains, whiteness is a

racial regime, a ‘‘justification for the relations of power.’’ As such, it is unrelent-ingly hostile to its exposure and exhibition (2007, xii). The situated knowledge of aggrieved racialized groups can help produce a more empirically grounded andtheoretically sophisticated understanding of social relations. Yet to do this alsorequires critique of the academy and its traditions.

To counter the pedagogies of neoliberalism requires us to critique themethods and traditions of the academy and the degree to which they—likeneoliberalism—both deploy and deny race. Scholarly focus on the particularitiesof time and place historically originated out of conservative impulses. The studyof national languages, literatures, and histories proceeded from presumptions

about the importance of preserving and perpetuating the characteristics thatproduced order and hierarchy in what were perceived to be states with incom-mensurable qualities. In the biological and social sciences an emphasis on classi-fication often emerged from racist frameworks rooted in assumptions about thesuperiority of some classes of people over others (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008;Guthrie 2003; Gulbenkian Commission 1996). Liberal enlightenment thought con-tains currents that challenged these standpoints as parochial and gesturedtoward the study of universals, of what might be true for all humans across timeand space (Noble 2002). Unfortunately this universalism remained grounded inits own parochialisms, generally posing as universal truths that reflected theinterests of some dominant particular. Nonetheless, the conservative impulse

to focus on the particularities of place and space also enabled some practitionersof social history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, sociology, musicology, and philo-sophy to challenge the disembodied universalisms of enlightenment scholarship by foregrounding the situated knowledge of aggrieved and marginalized indivi-duals and groups (Gulbenkian Commission 1996).

Scholars have never been simply neutral observers of racial projects, but rathersocially and historically situated thinkers and writers who often unwittingly pro-duce the concepts and categories upon which racism depends. Nearly all of thedisciplines in the academy originated in anxieties about difference emanatingfrom Europe’s encounters with populations it deemed to be ‘‘other.’’ From the

emphasis on language and literature as building blocks for a common nationalculture to the origins of classics and geography in the experiences of empire,from the racially motivated inquiries into the ‘‘intelligence’’ of different races thatstimulated the growth of psychology to the anthropological roots of Kant’sphilosophical inquiries into differences in reasoning capacity among membersof different races—nearly all academic disciplines suffer from the long-term con-sequences of their exclusionary origins. Classics and ‘‘oriental’’ studies emergedto discipline the ideological threat posed to the west by the existence of otheradvanced civilizations, whereas biology’s fascination with typologies promotedorderly systems of cultural practice like tonal functional harmony in music andgrammar in language. The project of ‘‘man’’ at the heart of the humanities



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emphasized interiority and individualism to hide the collective projects of slav-ery and empire, to explain and rationalize European domination, to locatenon-European nonwhite populations in an earlier stage in history, and to pro-duce docile subjects unlikely to look beyond their private interests. The rights bearing subject of law, the economic subject of the capitalist market, and interior

subject of psychology emerged in the same era. Each identity reinforced theothers. The expressive culture that emerged in this era reflected dominant prio-rities. Donald Lowe explains, for example, that perspectival painting, the rise of visual knowledge, and the development of bourgeois systems of perception allprivileged distance and judgment over proximate inter-subjectivity. Part of thehistorical work of the disciplines that emerged from this era has been to helpsuppress the anxieties that perceptions of difference pose for the monologicEuropean imagination, to situate things that are ‘‘different from’’ Europe as lessthan Europe, and to naturalize and legitimate the idea of racial difference as anatural reflection of and justification for European hierarchies.

In Voices of Modernity, Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs explain how studiesof language have served to help structure social relations along hierarchical lines by connecting fears about linguistic hybridization’s threat to the purported purityof languages to fears of social disorder and disruption. They argue that for JohnLocke, language served the same function that the market serves for today’sneoliberals (2002, 7). Locke viewed language as an abstract, general, and certain basis for knowledge once it could be disconnected from its ties to particularsocial locations, interests, differences, and conflicts (2002, 59). In How Novels Think,Nancy Armstrong argues that the modern novel hailed and in fact constructed aparticular kind of modern human subject, an individual who recognized the suf-fering of others by feeling pity for them but not acting to change social relations,

creating a lonely and besieged monad shaped by fears of being engulfed by anunruly social aggregate (2005, 25). In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison showshow disavowals and deployments of race in U.S. literature produce an elusive‘‘Africanism’’ against which white national identity gets constructed. This literarydevice assured white readers that the ‘‘not free’’ was the ‘‘not me.’’ Yet thisAfricanist presence has often been more powerful when implied but not statedopenly. As Morrison notes in a phrase that applies to neoliberal postracialismas deftly as it does to the Africanist presence in U.S. literature, ‘‘the act of enforc-ing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act’’ (1992, 46). PhilosopherCharles Mills (1997) argues that the social contract at the center of political

philosophy is in fact a racial contract that enshrines white male supremacy as aglobal political system. Yet philosophers rarely mention race. Mills explains thatthe absence of race from philosophical discourse is not aberrant or accidental, butrather constitutive of the discipline. This epistemology of ignorance, as Millsterms it, requires the absence of race, disqualifying in advance the testimony of any witnesses willing to report racism’s pervasive presence and power in theworld (1997). Speaking as a Black Jamaican American, Mills explains, ‘‘Dominantdiscourse requires our absence, since we are, literally, the men and women whoknow too much, who—in that wonderful American expression—know where thebodies are buried [after all, so many of them are our own)’’ (1997, 132). In an insight-ful inquiry into the origins of philosophy, Emmanuel Eze concludes that much of



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western humanism has proceeded from the premise that only westerners arehuman (1997).

The ignominious origins of the disciplines continue to shape their work today.Disciplinary paradigms have helped establish ‘‘color blindness’’ as a desiredmeasure of a fair and just organizational practice. Who is served by erasing

racism as an explanation for inequality? How do traditions of liberal interchange-ability in philosophy and law help occlude the role of racism in skewing oppor-tunities and life chances in society? How has the problem of difference beenconstructed in such a way that we now virtually ban all discussion of race-boundconditions but not the conditions themselves? Examining how the history of thedisciplines helps shape the racial common sense of neoliberalism is worthy workfor the middle run years that lie ahead.

Critique of the university requires analysis of the ways that the grounding of the disciplines reproduces neoliberal and racial regimes. It also requires analysisof how contemporary scholarly practices create taken-for-granted occlusions.

Inside the university the disciplines segregate different kinds of knowledge intodiscrete and atomized conversations. An academic division of labor breaks upholistic social and historical processes into discrete and incommensurable parts.Some traditions of the university, however, conflict with the neoliberal project.The very nature of scholarship gives scholars priorities that do not meet theneeds of neoliberalism directly. Their work grapples with the cumulative legacyof ideas, evidence, arguments, and actions produced by previous generations.Scholarly research is innately social. It requires humility in approaching the pastand an understanding of how shared social history both inhibits and enableswork in the present and shapes plans for the future. Scholarship also compelsscholars to contend with place, with the origins and evolution of the spaces we

inhabit and with the perspectives, standpoints, and situated knowledges thatemanate from other places. Historical events not only ‘‘take place’’ in the sensethat they happen, but historical events also ‘‘take places’’ and transform themfrom simple physical spaces into cultural geographies that promote some formsof social relations while constraining and containing others.

SPREADING INSUBORDINATE SPACES THROUGHOUT SOCIETY

There is worthy and honorable work to be done in every institution in our society

in resisting the efforts of neoliberal pedagogies, in defending all the social, his-torical, aesthetic, and moral activities that proceed from principles outside of or in opposition to the mystifications of the market. These efforts will becomemost productive in countering neoliberal pedagogies, in developing strategiesfor the middle run, when they create networks of inter-racial counter-publicsand polities that draw on the emerging archives, imaginaries, epistemologies,and ontologies of people and groups fighting for their lives because of the crisesthat neoliberalism has caused.

Everybody thinks, but not everybody is designated by society as an intellec-tual. Individuals and groups outside of academia have experiences and under-standings that are usually hidden from scholars because of the systemic and



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structural segregation that limits access to the university by class and race andlanguage and national origin. Scholars, students, citizens, and denizens will alsoneed to develop new approaches to the particularities of times and space in asociety where increasingly only market times and market spaces will seem tomatter, to discover in seemingly unlikely places and spaces sites for the gener-

ation of new knowledge and new social relations. All the institutions thatproduce exploitation and alienation have the potential to become sites for socialchange.

Scholarship inside the university cannot reform itself on its own. Engagementwith the experiences, actions, and ideas of large groups of people active in socialmovement struggles for social change is necessary in order to move beyondmarket time and market space and to engage and learn from the particularitiesof historical and social times and places. All of society suffers from the segre-gation of university knowledge from the popular and vernacular knowledgesof populations that are not economically privileged. Scholars, teachers, and

students need to construct new institutions, affiliations, alliances, and social ima-ginaries by expanding conversations and discussions beyond the limited sphereof the university.

Aggrieved racial groups are formed by the processes of history. Their politicaland cultural mobilizations for justice tap into repositories of collective memorythat serve as sites for moral instruction and ways of calling communities into being through performances and practices that register their linked fate. Theircounter-memories and insurgent knowledges directly challenge the primacy of the present promoted by neoliberalism. As Brazilian scholar Silvana De Paulaargues, national landscapes under neoliberalism become configured largely aslocal segments of a global market, and time is reconceived. ‘‘Time itself is con-

ceived as an eternal present,’’ she explains, ‘‘in which even the past is transfig-ured by nostalgia into something timeless (which usually never existed). Inthese terms, the usual pattern of exercising citizenship is compromised, andthe idea of civil society moves toward being deeply emptied’’ (2006, 5).

Race-based political mobilizations and cultural collectives fill insubordinatespaces with alternative temporalities. Activists, teachers, and spoken word artistsin New Orleans use creative ‘‘story circles’’ as ways of giving voice to the rightof the Black working class in that city to participate in making the decisions thataffect their lives. Students fan out into their community to collect oral historiesand to stage public spoken word and theatre productions that invite community

members to discuss ways of improving local schools and neighborhoods. Thestory circles create a new locus for community deliberation and debate whilehelping young people become visible leaders and voices for change (Buras,Randels, Salaam, and Students at the Center, 2010).

Homeless activists and advocates in Los Angeles have joined forces with aca-demics and artists to produce two remarkable books: Downtown Blues: A Skid RowReader (Heatherton 2011) and Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Camp and Heatherton 2012). Produced in colla- boration with the Los Angeles Community Action Network and the SouthernCalifornia Library for Social Studies and Research with additional funding froman American Studies Association Community Partnership Grant, these books



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feature first-person narrative life histories of homeless people, interviews withactivists and advocates, transcriptions of observations during walking tours of Skid Row by performers Lisagay Hamilton and Chuck D, and analytic articles by activist scholars. The books’ editors, Jordan T. Camp and ChristinaHeatherton, created these volumes about segregated places as insubordinate dis-

cursive spaces, as sites for staging unexpected conversations across place, race,and class lines to generate new knowledge about the causes and consequencesof race and class oppression (Heatherton 2011, 6; Camp and Heatherton, 2012).

The international initiative coalescing around Improvisation Communitiesand Social Practices (ICASP), headquartered at the University of Guelph inCanada, has been promoting dialogues between artistic improvisers and humanrights activists to build a participatory and democratic culture around humanrights issues. In a project that includes musicians, actors, spoken word artists,and academics from diverse places around the world, ICASP has developed anunderstanding of artistic improvisation as a valuable model for social dialogue

and action. Participants in the project have discovered that improvisation can cul-tivate dispositions, attitudes, and traits with enormous applicability to humanrights struggles. Improvisers have to be conscious of the needs of others. Theymust analyze problems rapidly and invent solutions immediately. They cultivatecreative communication and cooperation with others (see Fischlin, Heble, andLipsitz, forthcoming).

Chicano artists and activists are fashioning a new political performance cul-ture through the practices of the fandango, a participatory event organized aroundnew deployments of Mexican son jarocho music. Efforts by cultural workers inMexico to position son jarocho as a community practice and to resist its cooptation by the cultural industry and the state have attracted the attention of Chicano

musicians and scholars visiting Mexico. On returning to the U.S., these indivi-duals have launched efforts like Fandango Sin Fronteras (fandango without bor-ders) and the Seattle Fandango Project that bring Mexican musicians to theUnited States to spread the son jarocho revival, but with a new twist. In the UnitedStates, fandango workshops bring together people of different ages and skilllevels to play, sing, and dance together. Skills are shared and music is madetogether. These gatherings take place in the spirit of conviviencia, which expressesthe determination to enjoy performance and to live together outside the institu-tions of commercial culture. In these settings, music from one of Mexico’s mostAfro-diasporic cultures serves as an impetus for U.S. Chicanos to express their

complex racial formation and their particular and specific optic on the local,national, and transnational networks that shape their lives (Gonzalez 2009;Rodriguez 2009).

Social movement organizations addressing the needs of low wage immigrantwomen workers turn community centers into insubordinate spaces by conduct-ing extensive education and leadership training sessions. A member of MujeresUnidas y Activas ( MUA) in San Francisco describes the organization as ‘‘myUniversity,’’ explaining ‘‘here I learned my rights and how to defend them, Ilearned computer and organizing skills, and now I’m learning English at MUAtoo’’ (Lorimer 2011, 16). Members of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates inOakland learn English language and computer skills, receive instruction about



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recognizing and remedying occupational health and safety hazards, and developleadership skills by studying the histories of language discrimination, colonial-ism, racism, and sexism. In this unconventional educational setting they learnways to make their lives better in the short run, but they also engage in practicesof democratic deliberation, collective decision making, and public engagement

and accountability that develop their capacities for creating broader socialchanges in society in the medium run (Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2010). Workingwith these kinds of activists can help scholars to participate in the developmentof new ways of knowing as well of new ways of being, to discover nontraditionalarchives and to generate nontraditional imaginaries as constitutive parts of mobilizations for resources, rights, and recognition.

Countering the racial project of neoliberalism entails work inside and outsidethe university. Some of it will be in harmony with the traditions of the academy,some of will be in counterpoint to them. In addition to the mastery of the empiri-cal knowledge and difficult methods prized in the academy, this work also calls

for social intervention. It tries to change the world it studies. The emphasis onintervention, however, does not lessen the demands on scholars to be accurate,fair, rigorous, and self-critical. On the contrary, asking and answering questionsimportant to people with whose struggles we identify should compel us to doour work even better. We need to expose our ideas to large groups of people withfirsthand knowledge of the conditions we study, to confront the multiple stand-points and perspectives that emanate from neoliberalism’s proclivity for creatingseemingly endless new forms of differentiation, to learn to address issues that areimportant to the everyday life experiences of people who will most likely not beamong the ranks of those studying or teaching in the university. This kind of research promotes an honest reckoning with the narrow range of experiences

generally represented in academic conversations, and it requires us to take sides,to produce work worthy of contributing to social change. As radical sociologistGeorge Rawick argued decades ago, this is significant work, because in orderto do it, ‘‘we must overcome our own pessimism, our own social isolation, ourown fear of competing with mainstream sociology, our own fear of error. Wemust be willing to give intellectual blows when needed and to take and overcomethem when they are aimed at us. The matters we deal with are not trivial, theywill release human passion and energy, and we must not retreat behind ourdesire for peace in order to avoid these realities’’ (2010, 71).

In the middle run we have meaningful work to do. Inside and outside of class-

rooms counter-pedagogies can play an important role in building a collectivecapacity for deep democracy. In a society that constantly entices us to want tohave more, we can encourage each other to be more, to borrow the formula popu-larized by Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in the 1970s. In the short run,Archbishop Romero’s voice was silenced by the right wing death squad thatassassinated him in 1980 while he was saying mass. In the long run, we do notknow if his ideas will triumph. But the pedagogy he promoted has taken rootin Latin America and all around the world inside institutions geared for the mid-dle run, inside workers’ centers, liberation theology study groups, communitycampaigns for health, safety, and services, and in all forms of the arts and exp-ressive culture. Democratic desires survive and thrive inside these insubordinate



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spaces. They derive their energy and power from sources hidden from the eyes of the owners, investors, speculators and swindlers favored by neoliberalism.Romero himself explained this in describing his own personal political and peda-gogical transformation as a result of engagement with the poor and involvementin their struggles. He told his friend Father Cesar Jerez that he felt as if a piece of

charcoal had been lit inside him. Charcoal can be hard to light. It can take severaltries before it ignites. Once lit, it is not always evident that it still burns. Yet onceit has been kindled, ‘‘you don’t have to blow on it much to get it flame up again,’’Romero observed (Vigil 2000). Cultivating the middle range work that can bedone inside insubordinate spaces is like lighting a piece of charcoal: a slow,painstaking, difficult, and often frustrating endeavor. But once the charcoal islit, it lasts for a long time, burns hot, spreads warmth, sheds light, and flaresup powerfully at the slightest breeze.

NOTES1. Wallerstein argues that our choices in the short run always involve compromise: ‘‘In the short run,

not only should we support the lesser evil, but there is no other choice available, ever. Every one,without exception, chooses the lesser evil. We just disagree about which choice is that of the lesserevil’’ (2008, 52–53).

2. According to Wallerstein, our ability to predict the ‘‘long run’’ is limited and does not depend onthe quality of our plans: ‘‘Specifically, I do not think that we can define in advance the institutionalstructures that would result in a more democratic, more egalitarian world. We can draft whateverutopian models we wish. I don’t think it matters, because I don’t think that drafting such modelswill have too much impact on what actually emerges. The most we can probably do is to push in certaindirections that we think might be helpful’’ (2008, 51, emphasis added).

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