Foreclosing Women’s Studies: How racialized austerity politics threaten Women’s Studies and “public” higher education

• In Event: Women's Studies in the neoliberal university: Generating feminist leadership, citizenship and activism

Abstract

In line with the k-12 education crisis, the corporatizing university is part of an accelerating neoliberal project fundamentally undermining public higher education.

I analyze how the implementation of racialized austerity politics increasingly jeopardizes the legitimacy and viability of women’s studies and other marginalized area studies and the intersecting social justice struggles that such disciplines represent.

I examine current social scientific research and contemporary institutional examples and analyze the ideological and structural dismantling of women’s studies and area studies at the level of institutions, curricula, and faculty bodies across our increasingly stratified and segregated systems of public higher education.

Presenter

• Michelle Corbin, Worcester State University