How the Neoliberalization of Academia Leads to Thoughtlessness PDF Download

Author: Justin Pack
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498584802
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Universities across the US have committed to a process of neoliberalization that is radically altering higher education: academia is increasingly being run like a business. As a result, the university is becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead is becoming more and more a place to specialize, strategize, produce and profit. Students race through coursework to bolster job prospects while facing massive debt. Faculty scramble for the biggest grants and angle for the most prestigious journals. Sink or swim, publish or perish, triumph and win: there is no longer time to think and to wonder. This undermines the opportunity for students to develop into good citizens that can truly think critically and judge carefully. Thinking and judgment are, according to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the only things that can save us if the powerful machines of science or capitalism begin to work in ways they should not. Arendt saw Nazi Germany use the newest science and the best economic management to systematically kill six million Jews. She saw the disturbing inability of the populace and the intellectuals to capably resist the Nazi machine once it got rolling. Applying Arendt’s insights to modern academia, Pack argues that unless checked, neoliberalization threatens to turn the university into a place that discourages thinking and the development of judgment in favor of hyper-specialization and strategic action.

Author: Justin Pack
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303122261X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded to money. Money and merchants became heavily debated concerns in the Axial Age, which coincided with the spread of coinage. A deep suspicion of money and merchants was particularly notable in the Greek, Confucian and Christian traditions, and continued into the Middle Ages. These traditions wrestled with a new dialectic of purity that also appears with the widespread use of money. How were these concerns dealt with politically, socially and philosophically? How did they change over time? How did medieval Europe deal with money and how did this inform modern governmentality? To answer these questions, Pack turns to Hanna Arendt’s work. Arendt argues that one of the outstanding characteristics of our time is thoughtlessness. This thoughtlessness is related to how modern life, especially under neoliberalism, is increasingly structured by abstract systems, abstract calculative rationality, abstract relations, and the profit motive. Money both drives and embodies this machinery. The hyper-complex abstract systems of modernity discourage, to use Arendtian terms, “thinking” (wonder, questioning everything) in favor of “cognition” (problem solving). Too often the result is thoughtless cognition—the ability to make things more productive and efficient paired with the incapacity to question and challenge the implications and morality of these systems.

Author: Brandon Absher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793615993
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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In The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom, Brandon Absher argues that the neoliberal transformation of higher education has resulted in a paradigm shift in philosophy in the United States, leading to the rise of neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal philosophy seeks to attract investment by demonstrating that it can produce optimal return. Further, philosophers in the neoliberal paradigm internalize and reproduce the values of the prevailing social order in their work, reorienting philosophical desire toward the production of attractive commodities. The aim of philosophy in the neoliberal university, Absher shows, has become the production of human capital and profitable knowledge.

Author: Justin Pack
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498591353
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Love in many premodern cultures extended to and permeated the world or even the cosmos, but love in contemporary consumerist society tends to be sexualized, romanticized, and individualized. As a result, ancient visions of ethical love are difficult for moderns to comprehend, especially those rooted in premodern Western thought, or Native American thinkers that describe a love of the natural world that would help us live more responsibly on the Earth. This volume retrieves the significant narratives of love of the world and the concomitant ethical ramifications of those visions and argues that our age of science and technology has destroyed the ancient, living cosmos of previous visions and replaced it with a mechanical universe. This shift has resulted in various forms of destruction, diminishment, and forgetfulness. Overcoming modern world alienation requires recovering a sense of what it means to love the world and changing our practices to reflect our interconnection with it and our interdependency on it.

Author: Ryan Gunderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000191184
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological maxim, ‘make the familiar strange’. Addressing the methodological questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange, what it means to ‘make the familiar strange’, and how this approach benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization. Through a typology of the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification, the author argues that the primary barrier to sociological knowledge is our experience of the social world as fixed and unchangeable. Thus emerges the importance of constituting the familiar as the strange through a process of social defamiliarization as well as making this process more methodical by reflecting on heuristics and patterns of thinking that render society strange. The first concerted effort to examine an important feature of the sociological imagination, this volume will appeal to sociologists of any specialty and theoretical persuasion.

Author: Justin Pack
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498584791
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As the modern university is increasingly run like a business, students and faculty are losing the time and space to wonder and think under the hypercompetitive demands to produce. The goals of critical self-knowledge and good citizenship are being undermined by the demands of profit.

Author: Suman Gupta
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137493240
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book explores how the kinds of world-wide restructurings of higher education and research work that are underway today have not only increased employment insecurity in academia but may actually be producing unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors. Recent and current re-organisations of higher education and research work, and re-orientations of academic life (as students, researchers, teachers) generally, which are taking place around the world, achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim: though ostensibly undertaken to facilitate employment, these moves actually produce unemployment both for those within academia and for graduate job-seekers in other sectors.

Author: Lesley Green
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004614
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

Author: Brandon Absher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781793615985
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Brandon Absher demonstrates that the neoliberalization of higher education has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophy in the United States. Neoliberal philosophy aims to produce human capital and profitable knowledge.

Author: Clyde W. Barrow
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800375913
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 813

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Book Description
An indispensable and exemplary reference work, this Encyclopedia adeptly navigates the multidisciplinary field of critical political science, providing a comprehensive overview of the methods, approaches, concepts, scholars and journals that have come to influence the disciplineÕs development over the last six decades.