Brandon Absher - Böcker

In this edited collection, philosophers and critical theorists develop theoretical tools to conceptualize and evaluate the neoliberal university, working together both to interrogate how it reproduces systems of oppression and exploitation and to identify more liberatory and egalitarian alternatives. Acting and organizing within and against neoliberalized higher education in the Western capitalist world, the international group of scholars included in this volume experience the contradictions and possibilities of the contemporary configuration of the university daily. And yet the crisis in higher education is only one aspect of a much broader social crisis in which neoliberalism and related social inequalities, rapid climate change, de-democratization, rising authoritarianism, war, and genocide interconnect. Edited by Brandon Absher, this volume critiques and intervenes in higher education in the midst of this unprecedented social and natural crisis; at once to expose its structure and inadequacies and to envision an alternative based on the principle of the commons. What can higher education be, and how might it contribute to a more just, egalitarian, and liberated world?

In The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom, Brandon Absher argues that the neoliberal transformation of higher education has resulted in a paradigm shift in philosophy in the United States, leading to the rise of neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal philosophy seeks to attract investment by demonstrating that it can produce optimal return. Further, philosophers in the neoliberal paradigm internalize and reproduce the values of the prevailing social order in their work, reorienting philosophical desire toward the production of attractive commodities. The aim of philosophy in the neoliberal university, Absher shows, has become the production of human capital and profitable knowledge.