This symposium brings together an international discussion about how the educational experiences of those already ‘living on the edge’ (Smyth and Wrigley, 2012) as a result of high unemployment, privatisations and ‘austerity’ driven public-sector cuts are being made increasingly precarious by neoliberalism’s central tendency towards marketization of education. Papers to be presented in this linked double symposium show how this tendency is being enacted through policy and practice in international settings and across educational sectors via a mixed but increasingly common repertoire of organisational means (governance, liberalisation, selection) and discursive production (managerialist, performative, and ‘risk’ emphatic). They also draw attention to the lived practices of those learning in precarious spaces, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork gathered in a variety of international settings – the UK, Australia, Spain, Canada and Cyprus – and a variety of educational sites. 

 In theoretical terms, papers presented within the symposium are variously mindful of the divergent strands and theoretical controversies within the growing literature on ’precarity’. In this burgeoning field, Standing’s book, The Precariat: The new dangerous class (Standing, 2011) has had relatively wide coverage and has arguably come to represent the received academic understanding of precarity. Standing deploys the term ‘precariat’ to describe a supposedly new category of social class, the political potentiality of which remains un-decidable and, thus, potentially “dangerous”. This position has been increasingly criticized from a left perspective in the recent period (see Breman, 2014) and other accounts – notably those coming out of dissident Italian post-operaista Marxism, (Berardi’s Precarious rhapsody is a good example. See Berardi, 2009) – view precarity in a celebratory way, as a new, post-Fordist political subjectivity of contemporary social transformation. These latter accounts, while marginalized within the academy, have informed pedagogic aspects of the anti-globalisation movement, have been influential in autonomist informed actions such as Occupy! and are prevalent in activist pedagogies on the periphery and outside of the academy.

 In practical terms, papers identify the worsening conditions of a number of different educationally precarious groups in different national settings. Contributors develop a critique of how a common set of discourses of derision - around class and race, supposed ‘problem’ neighbourhoods, genetic deficiencies, ‘cultures of poverty’, and ‘problematic’ migration – are circulating at the populist edge of education policy in ways that generate an idea of precarity as resulting from the supposed moral and economic deficiencies of those very groups whose lives are becoming increasingly precarious. This process, papers argue, conceals the responsibility for economic crisis, neatly blames the victim, and sets the scene for the final de facto annulment of any egalitarian promise in the neoliberal educational project.  Challenging this,

individual papers outline ethnographic aspects of how these policy discourses and marginalising practices are being lived, resisted, challenged and subverted both within and beyond the institutional boundaries of education.  Looking at primary, secondary and tertiary sectors as well as informal, community and street education settings, they report on empirical research and describe a variety of governance, pedagogic, curriculum, and relational initiatives that are being undertaken.

References

Berardi, F. 2009. Precarious rhapsody. Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions

Breman, J. 2013. “A bogus concept”. In New Left Review. 2^nd series. Nov/Dec 2013. 84. 130-138

Standing, G. 2011. The precariat: The new dangerous class.  London: Bloomsbury

Smyth, J. and Wrigley, T. 2013. Living on the Edge:Rethinking poverty, class and schooling. Peter Lang: New York.