Transnational Feminist Solidarity in and against the Neoliberal University

A Conversation¹

Introduction

In Spring 2016, Simten Coşar, a professor of political thought in the Faculty of Communication at Hacettepe University, Ankara Turkey (retired in 2017), traveled to the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst to continue her research on feminist encounters in and with the neoliberal university. Abigail (Abbie) Boggs was among the scholars she interviewed at UMass. Then serving as the associate director of the WGSS department’s graduate program, Boggs is now an assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, working in feminist, queer, and abolitionist university studies, with a particular focus on the transnational histories and implications of US higher education.

During our discussion, as we shared our distinct, yet overlapping, political and theoretical approaches to the study of higher education, we began to see a great deal of potential for collaboration. At times we each had to slow down, to question our grounding assumptions and shift our frames of reference to more fully articulate and contextualize our points to one another. Language was certainly one factor that impacted the pace of our conversation, as literal translation required us to work outside of the fast thinking and acting mode of neoliberal academic production. But the slowing down was also a result of our different disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical investments: Abbie is trained in cultural studies with a commitment to historical materialist analysis and theorizations of knowledge, power, and accumulation. Simten is trained in political science with a theoretical preference for structuralist accounts as well as a commitment to interdisciplinary research and structuralist perspective “without guarantees.”² At some points, we simply had to explain the particularities of the history and form of the higher education systems in the United States and Turkey, and at others, we had to parse out particular terms and turns of phrase. We found respite in a more generous stance towards each other and our thinking; it offered space and time to think through the possibilities of feminist collaboration in neoliberal contexts.

Though we had only met a few times before this interview, we came into the discussion with a shared investment in each other’s work and a sincere hope of expanding our own thinking. Most crucially, perhaps, we shared a commitment to a feminist political engagement that eschews a simple focus on “women in the academy” for a more capacious mode of feminist critique that insists on approaching the study of gender with and through questions of political economy, subjectivity, and power. We think that in the present era, where personalism, violence, and insecurity are the rule of politics, this particular feminist critique is necessary. Such a critique involves rethinking the feminist way of knowing in an era when thinking and talking academically are being degraded. For it is always the way we know that shapes our relation to the world at large; and likewise, the relation that we form with the world reshapes and reproduces the way we know. Here we are talking about “knowing” not only as an individual endeavor, but also as a social phenomenon. Thus, we are talking about feminist analysis that aims to form continual connections across countries and cultures not only through research on women and/or gender and/or sexuality per se, but through using the academy itself as a space for feminist activism vis-à-vis neoliberal policies.

By the end of our first conversation, we had developed an initial vision of bringing other feminist scholars from across a variety of higher education locations into the conversation with the explicit intention of fomenting new strategies for challenging neoliberalism within the university. Here it is important to note that we do not view the effects of neoliberalism uniformly. This is especially true given the amorphous and changing character of gender, sexual, religious, and racial policies within neoliberal logics as they manifest across different geographies. The pervasive nature of neoliberalism requires theoretical and practical projects that foster interaction among feminist voices from different socio-political contexts. We hope to contribute to a concerted effort to strategically share and build feminist knowledge; when authoritarian regimes are now prevalent throughout the world such an effort is all the more urgent. Ideally, we would like to initiate a collaborative transnational working group of feminist scholars invested in tactically acting upon the politics, the presents, and futures of higher education, analyzing the points of connection across models of higher education in different locales.

What follows is structured as a conversation. We lay out our individual investments in transnational feminist investigations of higher education, provide provocations for future work in this vein, and make a preliminary case for a collaborative, transnational feminist project that takes the academy as its central object of inquiry. This conversation is particularly well-suited to this special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, inspired by the 2014 Scholar and the Feminist conference, entitled “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices,” which was organized to mark the twentieth anniversary of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s 1994 landmark text, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. In this text, Grewal and Kaplan articulate a vision for a transnational feminist approach to the study of gender attentive to the circuits of culture and capital as they are linked to the “scattered hegemonies” of patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and colonialism. While doing so, they remain cognizant of the place of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies within the US academy and articulate their hope that the work can be “a springboard to launch other transnational, feminist, collaborative projects.”³

Transnational feminist scholarship is often overlooked in genealogies of critical university studies, and we believe it can vitally and critically inform examinations of the neoliberal university.

On individual histories and the study of higher education

Simten:          

My work on higher education builds on my previous engagement with neoliberal rationality to understand the thinking pattern that accompanies the structural changes in Turkey since the 1980s. My professional experience has mostly been in foundation universities – not-for-profit universities run by capital groups as different from the state universities. State universities are funded by the state; they are state institutions, and the faculty members as well as the administrators are civil servants. After completing my undergraduate studies in a state university, I did my graduate and postgraduate studies in a foundation university. And after earning my PhD I worked in foundation universities. It was only when I changed institutions and started to work in a state university in 2012 that I dove into the everyday implications of neoliberal regulations for academic life. For many years I had been asking, “what is happening to us?” Since I started to work in the state university, I have added the question “what are we – as academics – doing with these regulations?” This is in part due to my rather casual observations and personal experience with the way neoliberal policies have been infiltrating state universities – certainly not without resistance. But it is mostly due to the influence of my colleague, Hakan Ergül, a well-known ethnographer in Turkey, who pushed me to add that specific question, and thus, to start a collaborative research project.⁴

In our research, we began to see the complexities of neoliberal higher education policies across countries and regions, and the connections between higher education, the free market, and governmental policy-making. University policies were deploying key neoliberal terms: flexibility in teaching, flexibility in employment, quantifiability of curriculum quality, and accountability towards the stakeholders. It can be argued that within the broader international context – and especially in relation to those non-EU geographies that welcome the EU-directed reform agendas like Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan – the higher education reforms reflected neoliberal socio-political priorities. Thus, as Eva Hartmann notes, “what takes shape is a transatlantic norm-setting process,” signifying the flux in global flow of neoliberalism.⁵ Our research focused on the way certain norms were introduced in Turkey in a top-down way by the Council of Higher Education (Yüksek Öğretim Kurumu, CoHE), and then implemented, carried out, and at times justified by us, the academics.⁶ This justification took many forms, extending from the mere technicalization of the to-dos in the process, to using the to-dos as a means to increase the quality of education in certain universities and/or seeing to it that all the universities adopt certain quality standards.

Abbie:

I agree wholeheartedly with the point you added to our introduction: “it is always the way we know that shapes our relation to the world at large.” That statement is an apt description of every class I teach, be it in women, gender and sexuality studies; sociology; or in critical university studies. I’m continuously perplexed by the absence of a more explicit study of knowledge production, and especially the role of institutions of higher education in this process, in most college and university curriculums. As you make clear, such a study is crucial in the Turkish context, especially in this particular moment. The US context also demands attention given the global influence of US-based institutions, educational and otherwise. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the considerable denigration of academic and intellectual production in the United States during the Trump era, be it in regards to scientific matters of climate change or social, cultural, and political concerns regarding the differentiated valuing of human life.

Like you, Simten, I have had a long-standing interest in the politics of higher education. As an undergraduate Women’s Studies major at Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in Connecticut, where I now teach sociology, I wrote a senior thesis in 2002 centrally concerned with the incorporation of queer and sexuality studies into the curriculum. When I arrived at the University of California, Davis to begin my doctoral education in 2005, my exposure to transnational feminist cultural studies turned my attention to the more transnational politics of US higher education, and I became specifically, and perhaps obsessively, concerned with the figuration of international students in US media, immigration law, and university policy. This became my current book project, American Futures: Noncitizen Students and the Transnational US University, which provides a critical genealogy of US higher education, immigration policy, and social scientific thought through the paradoxical figuration of non-white international students as both model entrepreneurial students and potential terrorists.

I see my work on the politics of US higher education as contributing to a broader movement of US-focused scholarship on the university that has discussed changes taking place within the academy as the corporatization, privatization, globalization, and neoliberalization of higher education. In recent years, this work, especially widely read pieces emerging from humanities-based programs such as comparative literature and English, has come to travel under the term “critical university studies” (CUS).⁷ I take it as a given that it is necessary and important for feminist scholars to join much of this scholarship as it engages the specific processes and material effects these terms mark. With that said, I am also concerned with unraveling how these processes not only happen to the university, but also happen through the university. In other words, I am concerned with how university structures, always with and through the state and capital, have fomented the very frames of thinking and knowing that have brought about the technocratic models of governmentality now so widely lamented as neoliberalism, a term that I see you also find useful.

My hope is that this project can support work that asks how universities, both individually and when networked together, have set the terms of much formal knowledge production and thus play a significant, though not deterministic, role in conditioning the ways people know and inhabit both universities and the world. It seems vital that the charter for a transnational feminist practice of studying the university grapple with the particular histories and politics of various institutions across different locations while also engaging the everyday experiences of feminist scholars on campuses and in the world today. A project of this scale, however, certainly requires a significant number of scholars who are committed to the process and complications of collaborative multi-disciplinary, intergenerational, transnational work.

On the uses of neoliberalism as a concept

Abbie:

This makes me think about how the possibilities for shaping the academic life and space within our reach are closely tied to wider socio-political dynamics, which currently meet around the term “neoliberalism,” across different geographies. Since we are interested in thinking about and across different geographies, it would be apt to clarify what the term “neoliberal” means for each of us. Could you say a bit about what you see as the implications of the kinds of changes termed “neoliberal” for universities on the whole, as well as universities in particular geographic spaces, and for feminist scholars operating within universities?

Simten:          

For me, neoliberal agendas represent the multiplicity in the neoliberal course of events. For defining neoliberalism, I rely on David Harvey’s formulation: accumulation by dispossession. So neoliberalism symbolizes a stage in capitalist history and, thus, capital accumulation. This time, accumulation is merely financial, virtual, and continuously liquid.⁸ The neoliberal phase of capitalism flows through constant emphasis on the flexibility, liquidity, and elasticity of states of being – property and possession, being the privileged modes among these states of being. In parallel to this rather abstract delineation, neoliberalism is about the naturalization of competition among individuals of the free-market as the gateway to self-realization. It is also about turning to conservative family and religious circles when one happens to fail in this self-realization process. It is about replacing social rights with the rights of individuals as capital owners and capital seekers, and melting social rights into familial liabilities. It is about the valorization-cum-naturalization of risk, as a constant and creative state of being for all human beings, and praise of risk-taking and thus precariousness as profitable acts for individuals. Last but not the least, for me neoliberal agenda(s) are not homogenous in content, but have standardized and universal benchmarks like the ones I have listed. The way the agendas are formulated and operated throughout the world depends on the stage of capitalism at which the region/country stands in the global ranking. Thus, for example, I think my country, Turkey, is among the Two-Thirds World, where neoliberal practices also benefit the flow of the global capital flow – i.e., the capital from the One-Third World.

As for the academics in general, neoliberalism might be understood in terms of the free-marketization of the relations within knowledge production processes. This is not to say that academic life had been detached from the free-market before capitalism took its neoliberal turn. It means more the permeation of free-market credentials into academic knowledge production processes so as to turn them into commodity production processes. Thus, for me, a feminist critical approach to the neoliberal academia involves a concern with the shift in the way the worth of an academic work is determined, in the speed required in academic production, and in the correlation between the increase in the number of women academics on the one hand, and the decrease in job security in academic settings as work places on the other.

Abbie:

I suppose, for me, neoliberalism can be a useful rubric because of all that you have said here in the ways it can account for the function of the free market as a key determining frame of structural and epistemic violence. But, I strongly believe that in order to strategically act on, against, and potentially through the free market, especially in its current form, it is necessary to attend to the ways neoliberalism, as the dominant socio-political mode works with and as a mode of capitalism that has always functioned through logics of differentiation and stratification predicated on ideas about race, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship status, and more. As Cedric Robinson argues, for instance, capitalism has always been racial capitalism; “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology.”⁹ This is especially the case when racism is understood in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”¹⁰ Many feminists have made similar arguments about the ways capitalism is gendered in its obscured reliance on feminized labor in social reproduction.¹¹ I do think there is some particularity to how this all functions across time and space but it seems productive to insist that political economic, and structural analysis be attentive to how the economy is shaped through these frames.

As I remarked above, the term neoliberalism has been heavily trafficked in US-based work in higher education as a shorthand for describing the changes that have transpired in US higher education over the last forty years. For instance, in 2000 Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades co-authored a brief article entitled “The Neo-Liberal University” in which neoliberalism began to serve as a convenient term to consolidate arguments regarding the imposition of market logics on the university through academic capitalism and managerialism.¹² They are concerned with how changes in the university reflect changes that have already been occurring in the restructuring of government according to a neoliberal rationale of profit and privatization. Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux’s 2004 Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era makes a similar argument, culminating in a chapter entitled “Neoliberalism Goes to College: Higher Education in the New Economy.”¹³ For Giroux and Giroux, the university is a fundamentally benevolent institution that has been infected with the market drive of neoliberalism. This understanding conjures up neoliberalism as if it were a virus concocted in corporate boardrooms and conservative think tanks and conspiratorially introduced to the university. All that is needed to eradicate this affliction is proper treatment. I depart from this understanding of neoliberalism in arguing that rather than looking outward or building defenses, scholars of the university must interrogate how neoliberal logics of the market, especially as they are coterminous with shifting ways of understanding identity, morality, and value, have been generated by, rather than merely imposed upon, the university.

In so doing I take up discussions of neoliberalism that have emerged from transnational feminist cultural studies, transnational American studies, and critical ethnic and queer studies. Such theorizations have proven especially productive for analyzing the uneven application and effects of ostensibly neutral neoliberal theories of personhood and value.¹⁴ This work is more in line with Craig Steven Wilder’s approach to the university, in that it asks scholars to grapple with the embedded and embodied histories of the university liberalism, colonialism, and slavery.¹⁵ Given its prevalence, timeliness, and explanatory power, I also see neoliberalism as a useful rubric for thinking about institutional formations in the university, the contemporary constitution of subjectivity, and the ways students, faculty, and staff have shaped and been shaped by this cultural, social, and economic phenomenon. In the process, I build on the insights of critical university studies regarding the neoliberalization of US higher education, but also diverge from them to consider more systematic conceptions of neoliberalism as a broader rearrangement of human experience via scholars less wholly located in critical university studies, such as Jason Read.¹⁶ I am interested in the ways neoliberalism reconfigures and incites the kinds of deeply gendered and racialized temporal arrangements of personhood and institutions that undergird universities as future oriented institutions. For instance, in my current book project, I suggest that a history of international students and the development of neoliberal thought within higher education illuminates the culpability of the university in the generation of neoliberal beliefs and subjects and their transnational instantiations.

Simten:

Your emphasis on the need to stay alert to the traps of broad generalizations that would lead us to a standardized, all-encompassing, monolithic description of neoliberalism as the dominant socio-political frame starting from the late twentieth century onwards is all the more significant for us when seeking ways to initiate transnational feminist cooperation in the academia. I believe what you and I share is the belief that we have to be attentive to keep the balance between the generalities of neoliberal structures on the one hand, and specificities of neoliberalism in particular locales on the other hand. I also believe that with the history of local activism and knowledge production feminist academics have the experience to do so at a global level. However, what concerns me is the rather disturbing prevalence of authoritarian regimes at a global scale. What would you say on the prospects for feminist counter-strategies to think and act through neoliberalism and authoritarian regimes?

At a time when fascism as a relation to politics is a fact of institutional power, transnational feminist solidarity in knowledge production is all the more urgent, especially given how politics reflects on everyday life. As history attests, fascism builds on the disparagement of critical thinking, disparagement of knowledge and intellect. Today, this is happening both in the One-Third World and the Two-Thirds World in different forms. In this respect, the persistence of feminist activism in parts of the Two-Thirds World as in Turkey is significant. Connecting feminist knowledge from different parts of both worlds is a critical intervention in twenty-first century fascism.

On transnational feminist collaboration in the current moment

Abbie:

A transnational feminist collaboration to grapple with the politics of higher education as an institution of social and epistemological reproduction is all the more urgent in the current moment as we witness a surge in conservative politics framed in expressly anti-feminist, ethno-nationalist terms in many locations including, but not limited to, the United States, Turkey, France, India, Austria, and South Korea. As we began our conversations, this fact came into stark reality as President Erdoğan in Turkey consolidated power and deepened his interventionist policy towards higher education following the attempted military coup d’état in July 2016. And through our final work on this piece, we experienced the palpable despair as feminists, leftists, Muslims, migrants, and members of countless other groups anticipated the various violences former President Trump unleashed domestically and internationally. While our focus here is on the politics of higher education, we look to universities and colleges as institutions deeply embroiled within, and in some ways responsible for, the broader structure of the global economic and political order. Can you say a bit more on your thoughts about the current moment and what’s to come?

Simten:

Universities and academic knowledge production regimes are not contextless. They are part of the prevailing socio-political structure; directly affected by and (in)directly affecting it. The connection between institutional power mechanisms, universities in general, and academics in particular has always been a matter of the dialectics of power (in the broadest sense of the term) and freedom (in the broadest sense of the term). And it is no secret that the symbolic zenith of authoritarian, and totalitarian power dynamics comes when academic knowledge falls into the clutches of institutional power mechanisms. It is our contention, as we have discussed, that the contemporary phase of global finance capitalism carries the risk of such a backlash in terms of academic freedom. The increasing tide of intolerance toward academic and intellectual knowledge, and thus towards academia itself, among the institutional power circles in different countries confirms this significance. As for Turkey, the neoliberalization process has been continuing for more than four decades, with shifting effects on universities. It was in the early 1980s, it was under the military regime that private education was legally recognized in Turkey. The 1990s and especially 2000s witnessed increasing infiltration of market logic into the higher education system. This is related not only to the steady increase in the number of non-profit universities, but also the gradual adjustment of state universities to the free-market logic as defined by neoliberal criteria. While the non-profit, non-state universities were presented as conduits for freer education, the CoHE remained the authoritative body that regulated and ruled over the universities. The increase in the free-marketization of university education has not preempted the rising tide of authoritarianism. Thus the unfolding of populist rage in the aftermath of the attempted coup d’état in Turkey on the night of 15 July 2016. One of the most vivid examples took place when, at a funeral for an Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) affiliate, the imam (who was murdered during the attempt) begged God for protection from “wickedness of the literati.”¹⁷ Nowadays in Turkey, what the term “literati” refers to metaphorically is no secret. Since July 15th, the country has been ruled by decree laws within the scope of state of emergency. Academics who have a critical stance toward the institutional power structures in the country have been systematically repressed and purged through these laws. Certainly, Turkey is not alone in the repression of academic freedom. One can recall the recent government repression on academics in India.¹⁸ Thus I believe, scholarly intervention into the universities in countries such as Turkey – where each and every day there are scenes of deepening of socio-political crisis – is more than an academic interest; it is a responsibility of being an academic per se.

As the current moment is marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the deeply embedded structural inequalities in the universities, and which has so far been a manifestation of the availability of neoliberal spaces for authoritarian practices, I would just underline the necessity of feminist lessons in solidarity. Academics, today, need more than ever to prioritize the knowledge of the feminist fields of solidarity. Feminist academic intervention is urgent in this sense. However, despite the power of local feminist interventions, the many threats to academic freedom worldwide ask for alternative and systematic ways of knitting together these local interventions. This, I believe, is necessary, first, to preempt additional backlash by limiting feminist responses to local settings, and subsequently by weakening it through localization. Second, it is necessary to feed into feminist academic achievements across countries, to ensure dialogue among local bodies across transnational lines.

Abbie:

It strikes me that so much of what we are now observing and calling for echoes Grewal and Kaplan’s insights in Scattered Hegemonies, and, indeed, much of the work by US-based scholars writing towards a transnational feminist politics in the mid-1990s, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, Norma Alarcón, and others. While the majority of this work did not specifically focus on higher education, it did, like much work emerging from identitarian fields in that moment, including Black studies, Asian American studies, LGBTQ studies, necessarily consider the politics of knowledge production and the institutionalization of fields that had grown, at least in part, from political movements. In fact, that is one of the all too often overlooked genealogies of CUS. While these projects have been pushed in new and important directions in the intervening twenty years, especially by scholars of queer, trans and indigenous studies, their basic call for work that seeks to “understand the production and reception of diverse feminisms within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements” feels as, if not more, vital in the current moment. While I agree wholeheartedly with Robin D.G. Kelley’s recent assertion that universities, as institutions that have historically generated some of the most violent logics of liberalism, neoliberalism, and white supremacy, “will never be engines of social transformation” and that “such a task is the work of political education and activism,” I also hold on to the potential and use value of educational institutions to foment radical forms of reflection, engagement and action.¹⁹

In the age of Trumpian politics, we still have a lot to worry about and a lot to organize around as feminists, as university community members, and as people committed to the potential of universities as spaces with at least some room for critical work. For instance, in the United States there is a real need to continue critical work on the precarization of the professoriate, as well as efforts to get cops off campuses and abolish student debt. In so doing, it is time to return to the lessons we gleaned from the post-9/11 efforts by the Bush administration to use the comparatively minor powers of the federal government to curtail research in international studies, especially around the politics of the Middle East. In many ways, the Obama administration only strengthened the capacity for federal intervention in higher education. While it is quite tempting to turn inwards and focus on the pressing issues of local and national politics, our conversations have also helped me understand, in ever more grounded ways, how much we can learn from each other both about our different circumstances, but also in terms of tactics and strategies. While US scholars are going to have to start thinking in new and creative ways about modes of contesting federal incursions into higher education policies, Turkish feminists have been working under such conditions since the early 1980s. On the flipside, while Turkish scholars are relatively new to the workings of non-profit private higher education, institutions of this sort have been a substantial component of US higher education since its very inception in the 1600s. We have much to learn from each other.

Future Collaborations:

We think that the neoliberal transformation of the universities has led to negative outcomes regarding the quality of higher education, the state of citizenship as a platform for social dialogue and peace, and the potential for the (re-)production, exchange, and circulation of knowledge with an ethical stance for equality and justice. We also think that we, academics, have a direct responsibility to delineate, interrogate and counter these negative outcomes. At the same time, we have seen an important turn toward the just and ethical in many universities’ responses to the Movement for Black Lives in terms of initiatives to confront systemic racism and hire more Black faculty. We believe that a critical scrutiny of the neoliberalization of universities in different contexts, coupled with academics’ narrations of manipulation, internalization, surrender, and resistance to this process, would eventually lead us to imagine the form and means for transnational feminist organization to challenge it. Starting from our everyday academic lives on an individual level, moving to departmental and thence to faculty and the university organization, we could move toward a systematic countering against the neoliberal understanding of knowledge, against neoliberal criteria for assessing academic quality, both in terms of academics’ success and in terms of students’ success, and against neoliberal order of academic life. As academics and as scholars we need to be intentional in how we relate to each other, to administrative bodies (higher or lower), to our research and publication, to the work that we do, to students, and to society and politics at large.

We think that such feminist intervention might be too ambitious if understood as a great leap forward from the local to the transnational. Thus we propose small steps that originate from particular local contexts – such as Turkey, the United States, India, and South Africa – with a view to sharing academic experience with neoliberal policies and in neoliberal structures. Then we might proceed to integrate further prospects that would involve the search for common mediums for concerted – yet diverse – strategies for negotiating, manipulating, and resisting the neoliberal order of academic life. The main aim and aspiration of this endeavor would be forging transnational solidarity platforms for feminist academics in their encounters with the neoliberal universities under increasingly authoritarian socio-political contexts.

Works Cited:

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Boggs, Abigail and Nicholas Mitchell. “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus.” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 432–63.

Cherniavksy, Eva. “Neocitizenship and Critique.” Social Text 99 (2009);

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1. We would like to express our gratitude to Görkem Akgöz and Liz Montegary for their invaluable comments and recommendations on the first draft of this manuscript and to the two anonymous readers. We appreciate Catherine Sameh’s generous support with their editorial work. [↩]
2. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology – Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (2) (1986): 28–44. [↩]
3. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). [↩]
4. Hakan Ergül and Simten Coşar, Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). [↩]
5. Eva Hartmann, “Bologna Goes Global: A New Imperialism in the Making?”, Globalisation, Societies & Education,Vol.6, #3 (September 2008), 217. [↩]
6. CoHE is the institution, which was founded under the auspices of the military regime in 1981. It was considered to be necessary that the institution would to standardize higher education in Turkey, and preempt the over-politicization of the campuses – the students and professors, included – as had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s. The Council was turned into a constitutional organ within the scope of the 1982 Constitution. It has so far functioned more as an authoritative and repressive institution than as a coordinating one. [↩]
7. For a more elaborated discussion of Critical University Studies see, Abigail Boggs and Nicholas Mitchell, “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus,” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 432–63. Key texts in the field include Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1996); Jeffrey Williams, “Deconstructing Academe: The birth of critical university studies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2012; Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008). [↩]
8. Here the term “liquid” is used symbolically. The reference points are first Zygmunt Bauman’s description of late-modernity – i.e., late capitalism – in terms of liquidity. See Bauman, Liquid Modernity (UK and USA: Polity, 2000); Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (UK and USA: Polity, 2013). Second, I rely on David Harvey’s conceptualization of late-modern accumulation by dispossession. See Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, 40 (2004): 63–87. [↩]
9. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina Free Press), 2. [↩]
10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. [↩]
11. See, for instance, Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” from Wages Against Housework, Power of Women Collective and the Falling Wall Press (1975): 1–8; Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1979): 1–33; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Creating a Caring Society.” Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000): 84–94. [↩]
12. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoads, “The Neoliberal University,” New Labor Forum 6 (Spring-Summer, 2000), 73–79. [↩]
13. Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). [↩]
14. Eva Cherniavksy,”Neocitizenship and Critique,” Social Text 99 (2009); Chandan Reddy, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberalism Multiculturalism,” Social Text 89 24.4 (2006): 1–24; Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). [↩]
15. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). [↩]
16. Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 25–36. [↩]
17. “Cenaze töreninde imamın duası: Bizi okumuşların şerrinden koru,” Birgün, July 17, 2016, http://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/cenaze-toreninde-imamin-duasi-bizi-okumuslarin-serrinden-koru-120341.html [↩]
18. Görkem Akgöz, “Akademik Özgürlük Meselesinde Uzakları Yakın Eden Benzerlikler: Milli ve Yerel Kıskacında Hindistan ve Türkiye,” Başlangıç, http://baslangicdergi.org/akademik-ozgurluk-meselesinde-uzaklari-yakin-eden-benzerlikler-milli-ve-yerel-kiskacinda-hindistan-ve-turkiye/ ; Sujatha Surepally, “Why are Indian Universities under Siege,” Public Talk, College of Education, UMass Amherst, April 28, 2016. [↩]
19. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” The Boston Review, March 7, 2016. [↩]