Introduction

The Introduction explores how neoliberalism has created widespread anxiety by forcing everyone to live in competition with one another and their environments. To confront and transform this social world of inequality, isolation, and “self-enclosed individualism,” we must be able to see social interconnections and the big picture of what’s happening to our lives, communities, and world. Thus, this book provides a cultural studies approach to neoliberalism, inviting readers to interrogate neoliberalism as our conjuncture. The aim of this intellectual work is to critique neoliberalism’s “status-quo stories” that keep us living in competition so that we might write new stories for new, more egalitarian worlds.