1st Edition
The Globalization and Corporatization of Education Limits and Liminality of the Market Mantra
The forces associated with globalization, whether economic or social, have conditioned the ways educators operate, and have profoundly altered people’s experiences of both formal and informal education. Globalization, as a multidimensional, multilevel process, is unequivocally, but not exclusively, based on the economics of neoliberalism. This book chronicles new sites of tension in education that are a result of an ever-globalizing economy and its accompanying neoliberal practices in the United States, Costa Rica, and the US territories in the Caribbean. The contributions are grouped into two areas: institutionalized schooling practices and non-formal educational practices that focus on identities and language.
Each chapter questions the neoliberal market mantra that education must be rebranded into a marketable product and consumed by individuals, making a complex and compelling ethnographic argument that the market mantra is bankrupt. The authors argue that globalization produces liminal subjects and leads to the destruction of social institutions like education that are essential to democratic governance. The aim of each article is to uniquely disentangle the dynamics of the process, so as to resolve the mystery of how globally inspired paradigms and policies mix with locally defined structures and cultures. In assessing globalization’s relationship to educational change, we need to know how globalization and its ideological packaging affect schooling, from transnational paradigms, to national policies and to local practices.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
Introduction: The globalization and corporatization of education: the limits and liminality of the market mantra Denise Blum and Char Ullman
1. A good investment? Race, philanthrocapitalism and professionalism in a New York City small school of choice Amy Brown
2. Hip hop as empowerment: voices in El Alto, Bolivia Ariana Tarifa
3. The play of risk, affect, and the enterprising self in a fourth-grade classroom Steven Bialostok and George Kamberelis
4. "English for the global": discourses in/of English-language voluntourism Cori Jakubiak
5. "My grain of sand for society": neoliberal freedom, language learning, and the circulation of ideologies of national belonging Char Ullman
6. Floating migration, education, and globalization in the US Caribbean Mirerza González and Nadjah Ríos-Villarini
7. Neoliberalism and the demise of public education: the corporatization of schools of education Marta Baltodano
Biography
Denise Blum is an associate professor of Social Foundations in the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA. Her research focuses on political economy in Mexico, Cuba and the United States, looking at neoliberalism and equity issues and how young people are negotiating their identities in contexts of educational reform. She is author of Cuban youth and revolutionary values: Educating the new socialist citizen (2012).
Char Ullman is an associate professor of Literacy/Biliteracy and Educational Anthropology in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA. Her research focuses on globalization and language use among Mexican (Im)migrants to the United States. She explores the ways in which people construct and are constructed by identities and ideologies, with an emphasis on nationalism. Her current project is about translanguaging on the Mexico-U.S. border.
