Neoliberal Rationalities (neoliberal + rationality)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals

ANTIPODE, Issue 4 2010
Suzan Ilcan
Abstract:, This paper focuses on wide-ranging governmental discourses that enable new ways of shaping social and economic affairs in the field of development. Directing particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, we refer to these discourses as developmentalities. As a form of governmentality produced through these Goals, developmentalities draw on the turn of the century to recast certain development problems and offer reformulated solutions to these problems. We argue that they rely on three forms of neoliberal rationalities of government,information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, and their calculative practices, to shape global spaces and new capacities for individuals and social groups. Our analysis is based on extensive policy documents, reports, and development initiatives affiliated with the United Nations and other organizations, as well as insights derived from in-depth interviews and conversations with United Nations policy and research personnel from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). [source]


Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics

ANTIPODE, Issue 5 2009
Julie Guthman
Abstract:, This article reflects on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the politics of obesity. The course involved a critical examination of the construction and representation of the so-called epidemic of obesity and the major causal explanations for the rise in obesity. Students were unusually discomfited by the course and invoked pedagogical concerns and instructor embodiments in expressing their reactions. Student responses demonstrate how obesity talk reflects and reinforces neoliberal rationalities of self-governance, particularly those that couple bodily control and deservingness and see fatness as weakening the health of the body politic. The course also animated many students to scrutinize more deeply their own diet and exercise practices. I argue that the intensity of reaction stems from the productive power of the discourse of obesity and considerable investment students had in their bodies as neoliberal subjects. Besides classroom observations, the data in this paper are taken from student journals. [source]


GOVERNMENTALITY, LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY, AND THE PRODUCTION OF NEEDS IN MALAGASY CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
PAUL W. HANSON
Integrated conservation and development program planning pivots on a critical exchange. In establishing protected areas, part of the subsistence base of resident people is enclosed. Residents are then offered assistance in meeting needs emerging from the enclosure. The elicitation and interpretation of need in such programs forms a technology of governance. This article analyzes differing linguistic ideologies underpinning needs production in Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park Project, arguing that the technology of needs production is part of a green neoliberal rationality through which the Malagasy state and its citizens are being transformed, and from which an increasingly sophisticated countergovernmentality grows. [source]


Gendering reurbanisation: women and new-build gentrification in Toronto

POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 5 2010
Leslie Kern
Abstract For over a decade beginning in the mid 1990s, Toronto, Canada experienced a massive wave of condominium development. Women make up a high percentage of condominium purchasers and condominiums are extensively marketed to young, professional urban women. In grappling with this phenomenon, this paper constructs a gendered social geography of reurbanisation and new-build gentrification in Toronto, through qualitative research into women's experiences as downtown condominium owners. Examining both the gendered ideologies that have shaped Toronto's condominium boom, and the narratives of condominium developers and owners, this paper illustrates the gendered dimensions of city building and everyday life in the context of reurbanization. I argue that the neoliberal rationality of contemporary entreprenuerial city building is constituted, in part, by gender. Gender ideologies inform the processes of privatisation, commodification, and securitisation of urban space and urban life in the city's quest for a competitive position in the global urban hierarchy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]