Essay Reviews
Rethinking the Curricular Imagination:
Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age
of Neoliberalism
Giroux, H. (2009). Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lewis, T. (2008). Defining the Political Ontology of the Classroom: Toward a Multitudinous
Education. Teaching Education 19(4), 249–260.
Lewis, T. (2009). Biopower, Play, and Experience in Education. In D. Kellner, T. Lewis,
C. Pierce, & K. D. Cho (Eds.), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (pp. 45–57). Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lewis, T. (2009). Understanding the Logic of Educational Encampment: From Illich to
Agamben. The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 28–36.
Reviewed by:
GREGORY N. BOURASSA
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
INTRODUCTION: CURRICULUM INQUIRY IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM
One of the more difficult and pressing challenges confronting curriculum inquiry today relates
to the increasing enclosure and privatization of the public sphere. Public schools, often exalted
and thought to be among the most resilient spaces of the common, are now incredibly fragile,
on the brink of being fully besieged by the onslaught of neoliberalism (De Lissovoy, 2008;
Saltman, 2007). While this practice of enclosure is not necessarily new, as market forces
have long been encroaching the spaces of public schooling (Du Bois, 1918; Dewey, 1930), the
emergence of neoliberalism in the last thirty years marks a particularly insidious turn. The
novelty of neoliberalism resides not only in that it has become normalized and even celebrated,
but also in that the far-reaching tentacles of neoliberalism assume pedagogical dimensions.
1
At
the same time, the unapologetic posturing of neoliberalism (Giroux, 2009) offers curriculum
theorists the contours of a common target that has not always been so easily recognizable in
© 2011 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Curriculum Inquiry 41:1 (2011)
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2010.00528.x