Individualised and instrumentalised? Critical thinking, students and the optics of possibility within neoliberal higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the state of critical thinking in higher education’s everyday pedagogical encounters, against the backdrop of increasing commodification and marketisation. Illustrated by observation, focus group and interview data from 15 first-year undergraduate social-science students at a UK research-intensive university, I explore how neoliberal modes of governmentality create, reproduce and legitimate specific forms of critical thinking and critical thinkers. First, I describe how dominant discourses of critical thinking as a commodified technology for assessment rub up against understandings of critical thinking as socio-political protest – using data from students and those teaching them. I then explore the positioning of critical thinking as emotional self-surveillance and unpack the consequences of this politics of reflection over resistance. Using Barad’s notion of the ‘apparatus’ as a contextualising optic of possibility, I argue that while varied forms of criticality exist within the multifarious entanglements constituting the ‘neoliberal’ academy, instrumentalised and individualised practices come to matter and are valorised. This produces pedagogic and political consequences for thinking critically in and about higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• pedagogy
• higher education
• Barad
• neoliberalism; student subjectivity/ies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [132644].

Notes on contributors

Emily Danvers

Dr Emily Danvers is a Lecturer in Education in the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex, UK, where she also received her PhD in 2016. Her research interests are on how disadvantaged groups experience everyday moments of exclusion in educational institutions e.g. via pedagogies, policies, practices, emotions, relationships and ideas. This has included work on critical thinking, doctoral writing, widening participation and Gypsy, Roma and Travellers in higher education. Her academic work has been published in Gender and Education and Teaching in Higher Education.