Mediatizing neoliberalism: the discursive construction of education’s ‘future’

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the chronotopic nature of media representations serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of the future. Through an analysis of two media texts—first, the Korean television documentary series Myeonggyeon Manli, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university—it shows how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks from the present, and how this distinct future chronotope works to rationalize neoliberal transformations of education that are taking place in the here and now.

이 논문은 미디어 표상이 갖는 크로노토프적(시공간적) 특성을 살펴보고, 이것이 어떻게 미래에 대한 신자유주의적 비전을 정당화하는데 이용되는지 논의한다. 한국의 다큐멘터리 프로그램 ‘명견만리’와 한 싱가폴 대학의 학생 취업센터가 만든 홍보 비디오를 분석함으로써, 이 논문은 두 텍스트 모두 미래를 현재와 극명히 분리된 시간으로 묘사하고 있음을 보이고, 이렇게 구성된 미래의 시공간은 어떻게 지금 이곳에서 벌어지는 교육의 신자유주의화를 정당화하는지를 논의한다.

KEYWORDS:

• Education reform
• media representation of the future
• neoliberal chronotypes
• volatility
• unpredictability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His work focuses on language ideological processes that shape and sustain material and political relations under globalization. Topics of his research include the politics of English as a global language in Asian context, shifting conceptualization of language in neoliberalism, language and affect, transnationalism and the metapragmatics of mobility, and media representations of discourse. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World (co-authored with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity: The Politics of Language in South Korea (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Notes

1 http://nus.edu.sg/cfg/content/roots-wings; accessed 11 April, 2018.

2 The video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4fyhY27AY&t=30s.