Neo-Liberal Education, Indigenizing Universities?

Abstract

The focus of this article is to explore the limits of indigenizing the academy within thecurrent context of university restructuring. Approaching the Indigenization of aca­demia in the broader context of neo-liberalism is useful for several reasons: (1) to ex­amine the ways in which educational reforms are being shaped and imagined bycompeting visions of what constitutes knowledge; (2) to explore how universities arenot only responding to neo-liberal logics but also active participants in producing suchlogics; and (3) to analyze the impact that neo-liberalism has on resurgent knowledge.The article argues that the seemingly disparate pedagogical discourses that have beencirculating in recent years in many universities do not indicate incoherence. Restruc­turing of education, internationalization, the focus on community, and Indigenization,among others, are part of new processes of subjectivization that are inseparable fromneo-liberalism. Moving beyond the inevitability of neo-liberal governance and the flat­tening of difference involves making visible how discourses naturalize certain solutionsand ideas about what is (im)possible.