Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    Understanding Indigenous Exploitation Through Performance Based Research Funding Reviews in Colonial States
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2020-11-11) Love TR; Hall CM
    Countries with significant indigenous populations, such as Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic countries, are providing increased support for improvements in the number of indigenous academics represented in higher education and engaged in research. Such developments have occurred at the same time as the implementation of performance-based research funding systems. However, despite the significance of such systems for academic careers and knowledge diffusion there has been relatively little consideration of the way within which they meet the needs of indigenous academics and knowledges. Drawing primarily on the New Zealand context, this perspective paper questions the positioning of Māori researchers and Māori research epistemologies (Kaupapa Maori) within the Performance Based Research Fund and the contemporary neoliberal higher education system. It is argued that the present system, rather than being genuinely inclusive, serves to reinforce the othering of Māori episteme and therefore perpetuates the hegemony of Western and colonial epistemologies and research structures. As such, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the present ecologies of knowledge that performance based research systems create not only in the New Zealand higher education research context but also within other countries that seek to advance indigenous research.
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    Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self
    (1/07/2023) Ashraf SI; Phelan S
    The figure of the so-called journalism ‘fixer’ has received overdue academic attention in recent years. Scholars have highlighted the role played by fixers in international news reporting, a role historically obscured in the mythos of the Western foreign correspondent. Recent research has produced useful insights about the work done by fixers in ‘the shadows’ of the international news economy. However, it has also tended towards a domestication of the role, where the local ‘fixer’ finds their place in a collaborative relationship with those officially consecrated as ‘journalists’ from elsewhere. This article presents a critical theoretical analysis of this functional role, building on the image of the fixer as a kind of ‘entrepreneur’. Rather than interpreting the latter designation as a source of empowerment or agency, we approach it as a euphemism for the hyper-precarious and exploitative underpinnings of fixer-labour. Our argument draws on different theoretical sources, including Foucault-inspired work on the entrepreneurial rationality of the neoliberal self, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and Rancière’s concept of politics. The theoretical argument is supported by the first author’s reflections of working as a Pakistani-based ‘fixer’ during the U.S-led war on terror.
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    Neoliberalism and authoritarian media cultures: a Vietnamese perspective
    (1/03/2022) Yến-Khanh N; Phelan S; Gray E
    This study asks how the concept of neoliberalism can be adapted to a critical analysis of authoritarian political and media cultures that cannot be adequately understood through the Western-centric narratives that dominate the literature on neoliberalism. We examine the case of Vietnam, a country where the relationship between the media system and the political system is defined primarily by the power of the party-state autocracy. We explore the extent to which neoliberalism is a useful theoretical category for grasping the relationship between state, market, and civil society actors in Vietnam, especially as it relates to the media system. Supported by an analysis of how Vietnamese news media cover healthcare and education for people with autism, we conclude by extrapolating three theoretical-methodological guidelines that will be useful to researchers examining the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarian political and media cultures in different countries.
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    Inquiring into the spirit of social work
    (Interuniversity Centre Dubrovnik, 11/07/2016) Napan K; Oak, E.; Flaker, V; Mali, J
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    The morality and political antagonisms of neoliberal discourse: Campbell Brown and the dorporatization of educational justice
    (University of Southern California, 2017) Salter LS; Phelan SP
    Neoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the social application of moral objectives. Yet it also presupposes a particular moral code, where acting on the assumption of individual autonomy becomes the basis of a shared moral-political praxis. Using a discourse theoretical approach, this article explores different articulations of morality in neoliberal discourse. We focus on the case of Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who reinvented herself from 2012 to 2016 as a prominent charter school advocate and antagonist of teachers unions. We examine the ideological significance of a campaigning strategy that coheres around an image of the moral superiority of corporatized schooling against an antithetical representation of the moral degeneracy of America’s public schools system. In particular, we highlight how Brown attempts to incorporate the fragments of different progressive discourses into a neoliberalized vision of educational justice.
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    Friends, enemies, and agonists: Politics, morality and media in the COVID-19 conjuncture
    (SAGE Publications, 31/05/2022) Phelan S
    The radical democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe has long criticized the moralization of politics in its neoliberalized Third Way form. The argument informs her analysis of the rise of the far right, which she suggests has partly been enabled by moralizing antagonisms that inhibit a culture of agonistic political contestation. This paper uses Mouffe to think about the current condition of mediatized public discourse, extending her critique of moralized politics to a wider set of targets. I illuminate the argument through an analysis of a BBC Newsnight report that thematizes the ‘toxic’ nature of public debate about the science of COVID-19. I show how the report internalizes sedimented ‘culture war’ discourses about the polarized nature of today’s public culture and, in the process, offers oblique insights into how far-right discourses are normalized. I end by considering some of the limitations of Mouffe’s work as a resource for thinking about how to counteract the far right.