The New Neoliberal Cultural and Economic Dominant: Race and the Reorganization of Knowledge in Schooling in the New Times of Globalization

Abstract

The fundamental insecurity and vulnerability with which we live has profound implications for education and for young people who must increasingly be prepared to live in a world that offers little recourse to personal, social or economic stability. This instability frames the need to move beyond conventionalism and the institutional practices of confinement to embrace more critical understandings and interventions in the field of education and in social life. However, although it is neither conceptually nor theoretically useful to isolate the variable of race from the social complexities in which it is located, this idea of movement must also be connected to stasis and to the confining circumstances that underwrite the lives of modern racialized subjects. Proper attention must be paid to the powerful patterns of historical incorporation and the work of culture and signification in specific contexts. This article seeks to expand an understanding and a delineation of the new terms of context and existence, showing the ways in which the logics of neoliberalism and globalization are defining the new discursive categories and new relations between education and society.