Rethinking Non-immigrant Precarity in U.S. Corporate Universities

• In Event: Governance of Immigration and Emigration in Institutions

Abstract

This paper will theoretically explore the various ways in which organizational structures of the corporate university are imbricated in racial hierarchies underlying global immigration, with particular reference to non-immigrant precarity in US academia. Moving beyond critiques focused on curriculum and pedagogy, I argue that as an epitomizing product of capitalism, the corporate university must be dismantled to decenter global knowledge creation itself. We must view the generation of critical social science research in context of interactions between the colonizing structure of global immigration laws and Global North's academic-institutional hierarchies. The paper begins by theoretically framing corporate university, its cooption of diversity and equality as the cornerstone of contemporary neoliberalism and its entanglements with contemporary immigration regimes such that it emerges as a precarious site for non-immigrants as a subject group. I then discuss how even seemingly critical fields of inquiry in the social sciences, including Decolonial Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, etc are institutionally arranged within corporate universities, to sustain racialized precarity for non-immigrants in academia, through its hiring, research and pedagogical practices. I conclude by drawing on two grassroots education models in India as means for (re)imagining decolonial possibilities through subversive philosophies of education and spatial alternatives, which is crucial for any social science research to become truly critical and meaningful.

Author

• Sudeshna Chatterjee, University of Massachusetts Boston