Project title
Alter-Neoliberal Analysis: Abduction, Critique, Radical Imagination
Research question
How can we scrutinize and challenge neoliberal rationalities in a way that furthers, rather than undermines and recuperates, emancipatory processes of transformation?
Project description
Yet again, neoliberalism has been declared dead. This time, it is due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that we keep writing obituaries for neoliberalism, crisis after crisis, raises some important politico-epistemological issues about the ways in which we understand, analyze, and challenge neoliberal rationalities—and the prospects of eventually overcoming them. On the one hand, as capitalist realist writings inform us, many neoliberal tenets have become naturalized or ‘simply obvious’. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociologists show, neoliberalism has managed to incorporate critical activity into its mode of function. In this light, the goal of this project is to conceptualize an alter-neoliberal analysis: a mode of inquiry that visibilizes the strange ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to critique them in ways that minimize their reproduction and, on this basis, radically imagine conceivable politico-epistemological alternatives.
Selected publications
- Soudias, D. (2021). Subjects in crisis: Paradoxes of emancipation and alter-neoliberal critique. The Sociological Review, 69(5), 885-902. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261211019270
- Soudias, D. (2021). Imagining the Commoning Library: Alter-Neoliberal Pedagogy in Informational Capitalism. Journal of Digital Social Research, 3(1), 39-59. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v3i1.58
- Soudias, D. (2020). Spatializing Radical Political Imaginaries. Neoliberalism, Crisis, and Transformative Experience in the Syntagma Square Occupation in Greece. Contention, 8(1), 4-27. https://doi.org/10.3167/cont.2020.080103