Editor’s introduction and reflection: Recognizing economic hegemony as a communication pedagogy issue

The effects of neoliberalism on university students in and out of the classroom is an important yet understudied area of communication pedagogy. There is a paucity of scholarship in our discipline that critically examines neoliberalism with the intent of developing pedagogically sound methods of instruction and emancipation from economic hegemony. Since undertaking the role of editor of Communication Teacher, an important part of my vision for the journal has been to offer a special issue that focuses on scholarly interventions into neoliberalism from a communication-specific framework. In this issue, a variety of scholars investigate this understudied area by offering articles that explain how communication pedagogues can help students to identify the deleterious effects of neoliberalism as a form of economic hegemony on many aspects of their lives. The articles published in this special issue challenge higher education and communication pedagogy scholarship to devote more attention to investigating this pressing communicative problem. Specifically, the articles provide pragmatic approaches that instructors can utilize to respond to the presence of neoliberalism that serves to indoctrinate students into a corporatized world in which productivity and profit are the primary ideals that are valued. I offer my thanks to each author in this special issue for their important contributions. I also wish to thank guest editors Dr. C. Kyle Rudick and Dr. Ashley R. Hall for their careful work and guidance in this endeavor.

The articles offer insight into this important issue and thus will advance the conversation about neoliberalism in the communication discipline. To begin the conversation, I will offer my thoughts related to the ways in which neoliberal hegemony has impacted recent events in the United States and also identify ways in which communication scholars can respond to this nefarious ideology.

Illuminating a path for communication pedagogy to resist neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, which currently enjoys its hegemonic position as the global political-economic system, has played a significant role in creating many of the negative situations that exist in today’s world. This hegemony, which has largely become synonymous with neoliberalism, is the current state of hyper-capitalism in which governments, major corporations, and the ultra-rich control the markets through the advancement of unregulated trade. Neoliberalism favors tax breaks for the wealthy and creates vast levels of wealth inequality. Neoliberalism “puts a premium on competitive attitudes and unchecked individualism, and allows the market to become a template for structuring all social relations” (Giroux, 2020, para. 5). Without the ability to consume products and services, neoliberal society deems people as disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015).

The US government’s and industry’s lack of preparation for and response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a prime example of neoliberal influence. Although scientists have warned of a future coronavirus epidemic since the SARS outbreak in 2003, Noam Chomsky explains that neoliberal logic is that “There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe” (Polychroniou, 2020, para. 2). Thus, few steps were taken to develop vaccines for outbreaks such as COVID-19. Many students have been affected by the neoliberal practices that have exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic, such as loss of jobs, medical bills, and loss of health insurance. In addition to the impact on students, the US government’s neoliberal policies have done little to ameliorate the effects of COVID-19 on communities of color. For example, during the pandemic, black people have become unemployed at higher rates than white people, but “rent and other bills have not been cancelled, and government failure has resulted in catastrophic, avoidable death, especially in black communities” (McHarris, 2020, para. 11).

The protests that have occurred in myriad cities across the United States and around the world in response to police brutality against the black community are linked to neoliberal capitalist policies as well. McHarris (2020) explains that “Capitalism, which is inextricably tied to race, has created a society with unnecessary pain, suffering and premature death. People inevitably target businesses during rebellions because capitalism and policing are linked: police protect capital, business and property” (para. 10).

The challenge for communication pedagogy scholarship is to devote more attention to investigating economic hegemony. Although some communication scholars have studied neoliberalism by focusing on (1) how people communicate about neoliberalism and (2) how people communicate in ways that produce neoliberalism (Bsumek, 2019), communication pedagogy scholarship can do more to examine this phenomenon. Specifically, more work is necessary to investigate neoliberal hegemony as both a communication issue and a pedagogy issue. Thus, communication pedagogy scholarship should identify strategies to assist students in developing a solid ethical foundation from which to critique hegemonic messages that are communicated to them. Doing so will help students to recognize when they are being manipulated by this inimical ideology.

Communication pedagogy scholars are well suited to engage in this trajectory of scholarship because the response to neoliberalism is both a communication issue and a pedagogy issue. Specifically, neoliberalism is a communicatively constituted problem. Deetz’s (1992) foundational text, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization, illustrates well the ways in which corporate hegemony has consumed people’s lives and serves to normalize communicatively the marginalization that people experience because of it. Today, communication pedagogy scholarship must continue to analyze neoliberal capitalism’s contemporary means of oppression, which utilizes communicative techniques to advance, and often obfuscate, its actions and ideologies. Taking such action can allow for the development of a curriculum that utilizes pedagogically sounds methods of assisting students in recognizing and resisting the communicative practices that neoliberal entities employ. Similarly, scholarship can examine the ways that communicative practices support neoliberal systems and how pedagogy can dismantle them. Although many avenues for research are possible to investigate this, I will offer two.

First, scholarship should investigate how instructors and students can counter neoliberalism through critically reflective pedagogical practices such as dialogue, a discursive practice that can lead to liberation (Freire, 1970). A recent example of this is Martínez Guillem and Briziarelli’s (2020) analysis and resistance of “gig academia.” Communication pedagogy scholarship could further investigate how instructors and students can work collectively to develop pedagogically sound means of dialoguing about neoliberal hegemony in order to analyze its potential impact on their lives. Such scholarship could be employed, for example, to empower economically marginalized students to speak openly about the oppression they experience. This type of dialogue should “address the underlying causes of poverty, class domination, environmental destruction and a resurgent racism” to move toward economic change (Giroux, 2020, para. 35).

Second, communication pedagogy scholars should determine ways in which to assess the degree to which students are learning to make change. Blinne’s (2021) edited volume Grading Justice: Teacher-Activist Approaches to Assessment makes an excellent and necessary contribution in this area. Additionally, critical assessment procedures are being developed in the area of critical communication pedagogy to provide instructors with a means to determine the degree to which students are learning to recognize and respond to power (Kahl, 2018). More scholarship that investigates such procedures would allow educators to assess students’ abilities to recognize the employment of neoliberal strategies, to understand the ways in which these messages obfuscate the truth, and to use their own communicative abilities to respond to them.

Recent national events have shed light on the negative communicative effects of neoliberalism on society. These events should be viewed as a challenge for communication pedagogy scholarship to confront neoliberalism further. The communication discipline needs to utilize the philosophical and methodological foundations of our field to continue to develop curricular approaches leading to an enhanced understanding of neoliberal hegemony as a communication pedagogy issue. By creating various approaches, communication scholarship can build more knowledge that will foster students’ communicative expertise in critiquing and resisting the neoliberal messages they encounter.