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Learning in neoliberal times: Private degree students and the politics of value coding in Singapore

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  • Yi’En Cheng

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2014 in Singapore, I offer a case study of how students are shaped by and pushing back against neoliberal discourses, by focusing on the ethnographic context of a local private education institute. Drawing on theorizations around the corporeal politics of value, this article examines the actual production of neoliberal subjectivities in light of a new rhetoric around the ‘learning citizen’ in the globalising city-state. I demonstrate how private degree students engaged with practices of value coding that attempt to fashion themselves into ‘employable’ future workers, but in ways that are informed by a different circulation of value meanings. These value practices – often defensive, anti-elitist, and subversive of a dominant subject of value (i.e. the ‘proper’ university student) – were aimed at recuperating and creating a separate domain of value worth. I argue that the actual production of neoliberal citizenship in education spaces need to be (re-)interpreted through a politics of value coding. This allows for a clearer view of how students themselves negotiate embodied forms of value, with and against those practices of alienation and exclusion that mark them as human capital.

Suggested Citation

  • Yi’En Cheng, 2016. "Learning in neoliberal times: Private degree students and the politics of value coding in Singapore," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(2), pages 292-308, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:48:y:2016:i:2:p:292-308
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X15613355
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Yi'En Cheng, 2015. "Biopolitical Geographies of Student Life: Private Higher Education and Citizenship Life-Making in Singapore," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 105(5), pages 1078-1093, September.
    2. Peter Kraftl, 2015. "Alter-Childhoods: Biopolitics and Childhoods in Alternative Education Spaces," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 105(1), pages 219-237, January.
    3. Noel Castree, 2006. "From Neoliberalism to Neoliberalisation: Consolations, Confusions, and Necessary Illusions," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 38(1), pages 1-6, January.
    4. Brown, Phillip & Lauder, Hugh & Ashton, David, 2011. "The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199731688.
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