Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship

Lipsitz, George

doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.3.451

Cited by 84 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…When Lipsitz (2006) analyzes post-Katrina New Orleans, for instance, he juxtaposes the 'sensationalized accounts of alleged looting' by black residents with the ensuing 'legalized looting to enable corporations to profit from the misfortunes of poor people ' (2006, 452). He makes a similarly cogent analysis of how capital and whiteness cooperated in New Orleans by relying on a concept of social warrant, which he argues has shifted from a civil rights orientation toward hostile privatism and competitive consumer citizenship.…”

Section: Claims On Spaces Of Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

Atasay

Delavan

2012

Journal of Education Policy

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This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. We draw on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a preand post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system. IntroductionWe agree with the stand many scholars are taking against what they see as a broad movement to profit from education in spaces like the US by making public education appear to be an inevitable and monumental failure, a space of disaster that needs to be reformed or reconstructed through 'free'-market policy. We agree that educators should not allow this neoliberal discourse to dominate our debates because its material effects will intensify racial and class-based inequalities in the educational system and the economy. But we want to complicate what we see as the prevailing view of privatization in this scholarly conversation: that advocates of discourses and practices captured by the term neoliberalism seek to privatize the public sphere to the point of depletion. Our research indicates that this is too unidirectional a view and we put forward the thesis that neoliberalism is a claim -both a rhetoric and a mechanism of possessing -whose practices continually re-create or maintain some version of a public (though destined for a continual process of privatization) as a means of spreading neoliberalism's logics in spite of the material failures of its promises. We elaborate this thesis through a playful conversation between Klein's (2007) concept of disaster capitalism and Lefebvre's (1991) concept of monumental space, and we then apply it to a case study of how disastereducational and otherwise -is monumentalized for neoliberal ends in Haiti from 2004 to 2010. We choose Haiti because its largely private education system is an integral example of the inadequacy of a unidirectional view of privatization. Our

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Section: Claims On Spaces Of Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

Atasay

Delavan

2012

Journal of Education Policy

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“…Dismantling and privatizing the school district was a crucial component. In the words of Lipsitz (2006), the aftermath of the hurricane ushered in an orgy of 'legalized looting to enable corporations to profit from the misfortunes of poor people' (452).…”

Section: Journal Of Education Policy 561mentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic crisis, accountability, and the state’s coercive assault on public education in the USA

Lipman

2013

Journal of Education Policy

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This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the 'integral state' as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative.

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“…See Myers and Gardella 2007. For a good discussion privatizing relief see also Lipsitz 2006 andKlein 2008. 16. For a good discussion of the displacement of labor and employment in the post-Katrina years, see also Button and Oliver-Smith 2008. were coming back on each street.…”

Section: Disaster Capitalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Other Road to Serfdom: Recovery by the Market and the Affect Economy in New Orleans

Adams¹

2012

Public Culture

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In 2010, I was told that during the 2008 presidential campaign, the University of Chicago Press had a surprising run on a book by Friedrich Hayek titled The Road to Serfdom. A best seller when it was originally published in 1944, Hayek's book was called "a war cry" against socialist planning, endorsing the idea that private sector investments and free market solutions are more efficient and effective than government spending or planning programs. Hayek argued that centralized planning leads ultimately to impoverishment under the tyranny of authoritarian government (his example is Nazi Germany) -a type of serfdom. 1 Applauded by neoliberalist Milton Friedman and other Chicago School economists, Hayek's work has been perhaps misleadingly called an endorsement of "laissez-faire capitalism" as the best route to both democratic freedom and socioeconomic stability. 2 Hayek received a Nobel Prize in 1974 and a Presidential

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Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship

Cited by 84 publications

References 3 publications

Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

Economic crisis, accountability, and the state’s coercive assault on public education in the USA

The Other Road to Serfdom: Recovery by the Market and the Affect Economy in New Orleans

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