Doyle, Matthew;
(2025)
'Decolonization' as neoliberal ideology: Anthropological theory and the political economy of the modern university.
Anthropological Theory
10.1177/14634996251395351.
(In press).
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Abstract
Current management-led proposals to ‘decolonize the university’ within elite Anglo-American institutions ideologically legitimate their restructuring as transnational businesses. While anthropology is uniquely placed to critique social institutions and ideologies, its current dominant theoretical orientation is blind to the forms of power which shape its own institutional environments. Even as anthropologists have engaged in theories said to address problems of representation and epistemic injustice, they have failed to analyze the multiple crises of contemporary higher education, resulting from the profound transformation of universities’ political economy under neoliberal capitalism. A genuinely decolonial anthropology is one which frankly analyses its own structural economic conditions and combines this with a political practice of national and transnational solidarities to transform the institution of the university at the local and global level.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | 'Decolonization' as neoliberal ideology: Anthropological theory and the political economy of the modern university |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/14634996251395351 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996251395351 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
| Keywords: | Decolonization, neoliberalism, postmodernism, higher education, anthropology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217726 |
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