ABSTRACT
Nancy Fraser’s recent work, in conversation with Rahel Jaeggi, is centred, as she explains, on the ‘crisis’ instigated by the ‘shift from state-managed capitalism to the financialised capital of the present;’ a crisis that standard sociological, political, economic and pedagogical models of critique and praxes fail to sufficiently account for (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018, p. 9). This multidimensional crisis requires new approaches to social reproduction, care, recognition and redistribution. Central to these issues, I argue, is the question of the Earth’s ecology and how these matters have been conceptualised in relation to it. In finding ways beyond and around the crisis of capitalism, which is simultaneously a crisis for all life on Earth, Fraser maintains that ‘we cannot simply return to older received’ critiques and methodologies, ‘but must rather complicate, deepen, and enrich’ our efforts by ‘incorporating insights [from] feminist thought … poststructuralism, postcolonial thought, and ecology’ (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018, p. 7). In this theoretical paper I place Fraser and Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation (2018) in dialogue with examples of feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial thought – specifically those labelled new materialist – that seek to ‘materialise’ and ‘ecologise’ contemporary political, economic, social and pedagogical concerns. By focusing on questions of ‘making time’ in higher education I argue that the most unrelenting currents influencing time and change today are neoliberal capitalism and the ‘geological age of man’ it has conjured into being, the Anthropocene.
