Cultivating Desire and Common Sense: teachers as architects of the self and governmentality

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 4:15 pm - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Policy Analysis Across Contexts

Abstract

This paper provides a renewed understanding of the ways in which neoliberalism reshapes contemporary common sense, producing new sensibilities through the mechanisms of governmentality rooted in market-driven evaluation regimes. The imperatives of accountability and evaluation, I argue, are not simply imposed but are internalised, embodied, and enacted, engendering modes of governance that operate through, rather than against, the self. Employing a qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviewsand classroom observations, I show how, even as educators articulate resistance, their work remains sutured to the very regimes of accountability they seek to challenge. The neoliberal project, far from being external to pedagogy, is embedded within its very fabric - constituted in practice, enacted through discourse, and sustained through the complicities of everyday teaching.

Author

• Zahid Naz, Queen Mary University of London