Austerity Education and the Pedagogies of Debt

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-11 - Austerity Education and the Pedagogies of Debt

Abstract

1. Objective. Austerity Education and the Pedagogies of Debt
Since the 2008 financial crisis the politics of austerity have centrally involved amplifying the longstanding neoliberal program of gutting the caregiving roles of the state while expanding privatization and deregulation. As David Harvey has suggested, neoliberalism has, since the economic crisis of the 1970’s, been used by the capitalist class to legitimize draconian policies that restore and consolidate class power by privatizing profit while socializing risk and eroding the power of workers and unions under the guise of fiscal discipline. Public education in the U.S. has been one of the caregiving institutions subject to fiscal starvation, privatization, and deregulation. This panel brings together noted and emerging scholars on the topic to address a variety of impacts that austerity and student debt are having on educational policy and politics, curriculum and pedagogy.
2. Overview. This symposium foreground the perspectives of youth and citizens in order to bring to light how processes of securitization are driven by logics of scarcity (privatization, public abandonment, debt, austerity) and surplus (the production of economically redundant populations). The following papers will be presented:
1. Dispossessing Urban Futures: Scarcity, Surplus, and Gendered Circulations of Violence by Alexander Means -SUNY Buffalo State College
2. How Public is Public Higher Education?Challenging Neoliberal Rationality Crisis in Higher Education by João M. Paraskeva-University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
3. The Subprime Student and the Payday Loan by Julia Hall -D’Youville College Buffalo
4. The Austerity School: Grit, Character, and the Privatization of Public Education Kenneth J. Saltman
5. Pedagogy of Debt by Sheila Macrine-Umass Dartmouth

3. Significance. This symposium presents a “programmatic coherence” (Mahmud, 2012) in the neoliberal socio-economic transition in the U.S. that can be seen, following Karl Polanyi, as historical alternation of stages of de-socialization, re-socialization and a new de-socialization. As David Harvey has suggested, neoliberalism has, since the economic crisis of the 1970’s, been used by the capitalist class to legitimize draconian policies that restore and consolidate class power by privatizing profit while socializing risk and eroding the power of workers and unions under the guise of fiscal discipline. Public education in the U.S. has been one of the caregiving institutions subject to fiscal starvation, privatization, and deregulation.
4. Structure. Five papers will be presented followed by interactive Q & A.

Authors

• Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• João Menelau Paraskeva, University of Massachusetts

• Alexander Means, SUNY - Buffalo State

• Julia Hall, D'Youville College