Who is Responsible? Neoliberal Discourses of Well-Being in Australia and New Zealand

Molly Mullen
Kelly Freebody
Amber Walls
Peter O'Connor

Policy proposals about social change and well-being shape the implementation of applied theatre projects through technologies such as evaluation practices and funding applications. Representations of projects can, in turn, effect public discourse about who participants are and why they are or are not ‘being well’. Like public policy, applied theatre for social change has to establish a problem that needs to be solved.

Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education

Susan Brinn Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright
Learning Under Neoliberalism Book Cover

As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices.

Paradox and Possibility: Voluntarism and the Urban Environment in a Post-Political Era

Nate Gabriel

In this paper, I consider the role of public engagement in the management of urban environments and its ability to undermine post-political discourses. In particular, I explore the ways in which the ethical propositions of an apoliticized environment are variously taken up uncritically, challenged, and sometimes modified through the public’s engagement with de-politicized discourses of environment management.

No Place for Wilderness: Urban Parks and the Assembling of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Governance

Nate Gabriel

In this paper, I examine the ways in which urban parks are enrolled in political struggles to reorient the techniques of urban governance toward entrepreneurialism as the only viable model for economic development. Through a case study of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System, I examine a series of events during the previous three decades in which Fairmount Park has become subject to this reorientation toward entrepreneurialism.

Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action

Gerda Roelvink
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Building Dignified Worlds investigates social movements that do not simply protest but actively forge functional alternatives. Gerda Roelvink takes actor network and performativity theories of action as starting points for thinking about how contemporary collectives bring the new into being.