No abstract
The author explores the cultural politics of neoliberal globalization, its deformations of critical facets of public culture as it has returned home, and he explores the politics of emergency. Rather than seeing the politics of emergency as something indicative of an emerging 'emergency regime' attendant to the terror war, he argues that the current politics of emergency is rooted in neoliberal globalization more generally, especially in terms of the need for powerbrokers to institutionalize insecurity and anxiety as central facets of a 'new normal.' He then turns to the criminalization and militarization of schools as examples of how the process of institutionalizing insecurity has unfolded in the last decade, suggesting that public schools are an ostensible and crucial site (being the one of the last sites to be precaritized) because the types of subjects and agents required for neoliberal globalization must learn how to live (in fear) with neoliberal globalization. Without an understanding of how schools are being leveraged to produce a 'new normal,' strategies for engaging schools as democratic public spheres will be potentially under-developed or mis-directed.Much like the need to gradually increase the dosage of a heavily used medication in order to experience the same level of relief, so too with respect to emergency powers: the perception may be that new, more radical powers are needed to fight impending crises, particularly if the existing powers seem to have failed to prevent the events that give rise to the new emergency. (Gross, 2006, p. 82) Let me retell a public school event to which unsurprisingly scant critical attention has been devoted in both academic and popular circles and briefly outline related changes in school disciplinary practices from the past few years.[1] While this event might be seen as an example of the effects of the politics of emergency, a detailed examination of the domestic impacts of neoliberal globalization and a critique of the politics of emergency could demonstrate that this event (and others in public schools) exemplifies the emergence of a 'new normal' that is marked and constituted by conditions of mass anxiety and fear.On the morning of 5 November 2003, 17 plain-clothed and uniformed police officers took their posts to perform a drug-raid -at Goose Creek High School in Stratford, South Carolina. As 107 primarily African American students departed the buses and entered the school at 6.40 a.m., police officers jumped out of closets and from behind closed doors, brandishing guns and unleashing a search-and-sniff dog. Officers slammed and locked doors and, with the aid of school personnel, effectively blocked the school's internal thoroughfare. Students were forced frantically to the floor -some by the coercion of the barrel of a gun -and others were handcuffed, as the authorities performed their dubious search without seizure for 40 minutes. The event was so overwhelming, one student later claimed, 'I thought it was a terrorist attack or something' (student quoted in
Public schools deploy a range of processes and practices that help constitute the formation and legitimation of certain knowledges, relationships, skills, values and, ultimately, subjectivities . School discipline regimes are one of these practices . Exercising their power through pedagogical modes of address, these regimes are currently organizing relationships throughout school cultures that reflect the values and encourage role performances associated with neoliberal capitalism . This research paper describes and analyzes two widely used discipline regimes-zero tolerance/hyper-criminalization and positive behavior interventions and support (PBIS) -through Foucault's theories of governmentality and biopolitics . These two regimes provide mirror images of the primary modes of punishing and disciplining under neoliberalism: criminalization and individualization . The paper will also explore how neoliberalism subjects schools to processes of enclosure, but also how schools themselves have become sites productive of neoliberal subjects through the content, values and interests embedded in the curricula of PBIS and criminalization which students must master .
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