Foucault and Contemporary Theory in Higher Education: New Approaches, Theories, and Conditions of Possibility

It is no news that the neoliberal tide, as Ong (2007) once described it, has shifted the ways in which universities operate. Neoliberalism, as a contemporary configuration of capitalism, has continued to both shape the ways in which knowledge is produced in universities and mold the subjectivities of the producers of such knowledge since the late 1970s. By experiencing a withdrawal of state funding in favor of the market as a site of veridiction (Foucault, 2010) for their allocation, the neoliberal rationality relentlessly mobilizes (Western) higher education through a specifically economic rationale. By means of national and international comparisons, neoliberalism sets institutions and their members against one another, racing for the best REF-able outputs and for a restless search for funding, increasingly procured through partnerships with the private sector.