LAUSR

This special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication on ‘Education and the discourse of global neoliberalism’ has its origins in a two day symposium which was held at the UCL Institute of Education in 2014. Several presenters at the symposium, which focused mainly on education in the Anglophone world, have contributed to this special issue in which we have also incorporated papers addressing the educational situation in a range of Asian contexts. In doing this we aim to show that neoliberalism is a complex phenomenon which takes on local characteristics in diverse geopolitical, economic and cultural settings, while retaining a core commitment in all its manifestations to market fundamentalism. Despite the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of austerity in the massively indebted nations of the European Union, neoliberalism has shown itself to be a remarkably resilient and mercurial phenomenon. It is also much talked about and theorized across a range of disciplines. The editors’ preface to a recent book on the topic (Flubacher & Del Percio, 2017) points out that between 2002 and 2005 there were around a thousand academic articles a year being published in which the term was used, with a ninefold annual rise in usage in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. With such a profusion of commentary and theorization, it is only to be expected that opinions differ as to the nature of the phenomenon. Brenner, Peck & Theodore (2010) have described this intellectual climate, which is worth quoting at length, as follows: