ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, ‘Packaging Knowledge: The Neoliberal Tapestry’, has a critical take on the neoliberal mode of knowledge control in contemporary times. Distancing itself from the simplistic and reductive criticism of the neoliberal project as a ‘conspiratorial phenomenon’, it makes a far deeper critique to reveal how in subtle and nuanced ways the project seeks to construct an academic matrix in which dissent slowly and steadily becomes a ‘vanishing entitlement’ in epistemological and pedagogical terms, and no less in everyday experience. It specifically identifies concertive control – based on conformity by choice, rather than brute force – as the state-of-the art strategy of knowledge politics practised by the neoliberal forces to weaken the argumentative core of social sciences and academic freedom. Accordingly, the chapter exposes how the highly publicised concept of ‘knowledge society’ detaches social sciences and their practitioners from the society both perceptually and professionally. In explaining how the scope of becoming critical educators also puts social scientists in a very challenging position, the chapter critiques critical pedagogy – the cutting-edge pedagogical exercise of countering the neoliberal hegemony in academia – revealing some of its limitations that get in the way of its radical spirit and transformative promise. The chapter concludes with the observation that social scientists have to come out of the illusion of grandeur and calibrate their strength to resist the growing impact of the monochromatic vision of knowledge.
