LAUSR

When we first conceptualized this special issue in spring 2016, there were reasons to hope that neoliberalism might be nearing an endpoint. Neoliberalism, as a particular and extreme form of capitalism, faced two intertwined crises, one economic and the other environmental. Almost 10 years after the economic crash of 2007, the United States was still recovering from an economic meltdown caused in part by an under-regulated fraudulent mortgage lending system and the wealthiest 1% gaining an increasingly larger percentage of all the wealth, while median income has remained stagnant for the last half century (Saez & Zucman, 2019). Simultaneously, the environmental crisis worsened as climate change and global warming results in more frequent and stronger storms; drier conditions leading to more brush and forest fires in California, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere; longer and deeper droughts; increased desertification; sea-level rise and flooding (Mirowski, 2013). Consequently, there are more refugees and more conflicts between those who have and those who don’t. In addition, humans are dispersing more and more dangerous toxins across the globe. Most recently, scientists are discovering that humans and all living things are being contaminated by micro-plastics that they are ingesting and storing (Cox et al., 2019). Consequently, it was becoming increasingly apparent that neoliberal policies, which aim to replace governmental and collective oversight of the economy, the environment, and education with individual decisions within markets, are a significant cause of these crises. Therefore, it seemed that people were increasingly realizing that neoliberalism—as a way of making individual and societal decisions—was on the verge of being replaced. Indeed, initiatives such as nations promising to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions they produced suggested that alternatives to neoliberalism were becoming increasingly possible. However, over the last five years, neoliberalism has not only remained dominant economically, but has also remained the dominant social imaginary (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010).