ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism is one of the labels used to describe key factors that shape the contemporary world, its relations and institutions, its power structures and modes of subjectification (Foucault 2008 [2004]). Apart from Michel Foucault’s work, which traced the points of emergence of the contemporaneity or the genealogies of a present situation through historical analysis, the humanities reveal many insightful analyses and studies of what neoliberalism stands for. The transformations that constitute the present moment are many, and they are approached from different perspectives that accentuate its various aspects: capitalism, “liquid times” and uncertainty (Bauman 2007), “control societies” (Deleuze 1995 [1990]: 177–82), “risk society” (Beck 1992 [1986]), or the “society of the spectacle” (Debord 2000 [1967]) among others. Those investigations coincide with reflections on the ways universities have transformed in the past two decades along neoliberal lines (Reading 1996, Slaughter and Leslie 1997, Pocklington and Tupper 2002, Cȏté and Allahar 2007, 2011, Nussbaum 2010, Collini 2012). Importantly, the debates concerning the crises of the universities are held from various standpoints, and the recognitions are all but homogeneous; to exemplify the intensity of those discussions let me mention Sara Ahmed’s criticism (2015) of an article by Terry Eagleton published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2015).
