Neoliberal Discourses in British University Mission Statements

Liz Morrish's latest work with Helen Sauntson (University of Birmingham) analyzes neoliberal discourses in British university mission statements. The paper produces a critical analysis of a corpus of British university mission statements as a means of examining how text producers within higher education (HE) institutions use appraisal features to engage in public-sector marketing.

The paper focuses upon one specific marketing practice which has emerged in British universities over the past decade – the production of ‘mission statements’ or ‘university visions’. This is a standard practice used in businesses, particularly multinational corporations, which has been more recently adopted by the HE sector, arguably as part of the wider emergence of a neoliberal governmentality in university management. It has been argued that the values upheld by universities now centre around the marketisation, financialisation and commodification of enterprises which used to offer a public service but which are now much more driven by a neoliberal market economy (Canaan & Shumar 2008, Duggan 2003, Harvey 2005, Lynch, 2006). Mission statements serve the primary function of marketing the university in an environment of increasing competitiveness and commodification within British HE. Mission statements tend to be characterised by a discourse which realises and reinforces the competitive, market-driven values of the university. Appraisal (Martin 2000, 2003) is particularly helpful for uncovering these discourses which, as we argue in this paper, permeate and typify university mission statements.

 Preliminary findings suggest that the university mission statements make extensive use of Judgement and Appreciation markers, particularly around activities such as research and learning. Judgement markers tend to fall mainly into the sub-category of Social Esteem (especially tenacity and capacity). Appreciation markers are, predictably, positive and seem to cluster around particular 'products' which the universities are seen to be marketing. The authors have previously examined the ‘products’ marketed by universities via their mission statements (2010). This study complements the corpus linguistic approach of this study with the application of APPRAISAL analysis. 

Liz Morrish & Helen Sauntson (2013): ‘Business-facing motors for economic development’: an appraisal analysis of visions and values in the marketised UK university, Critical Discourse Studies, 10 1, 1-20. DOI:10.1080/17405904.2012.736698

Global Queer Cinema

Global Queer Cinema is an AHRC funded research network in the Translating Cultures scheme, and is located in the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. The organisers are Rosalind Galt (Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (Warwick).

The first symposium Queer Cinema and Aesthetics of the Global that Galt and Schoonover organised took place in 12-13 May 2012. This event brought together international scholars to consider the aesthetics and politics of queer cinema in a global context. Speakers included David Eng (University of Pennsylvania), Patricia White (Swarthmore College), Gayatri Gopinath (New York University), Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter), Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex), Shamira Meghani (University of Leeds) and Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU). This two-day symposium’s format was participatory and aimed to generate debate and analysis. Speakers screened short clips from queer film or other moving image media and present informal analyses. Moreover, the participants circulated samples from their current research on the subject before the event and a series of intensive workshops and roundtable discussions took place. Questions Galt and Schoonover aimed to address included:

          (i) What is rendered visible by placing these three terms together: ‘global’, ‘queer’ and ‘cinema? What tensions are revealed, what rhetorics engaged?

          (ii) How do presiding visions of the global depend upon the inclusion or exclusion of queer lives?

          (iii) How do the politics of neoliberalism and human rights discourse intersect with queer lives? How does contemporary queer film and media practice engage and refuse these tensions? How can we think about queer visual aesthetics, and how do questions of form, style and genre coalesce in contemporary queer politics?

         (iv) What kinds of global communities are produced (or precluded) by the histories of the queer film festival, or of other modes of queer media consumption?

         (v) How can we theorise the role of popular cinema, art film, the avant-garde, community and activist media in these political landscapes? Are these distinctions necessary critical tools?

The second and final workshop, which took place on 5-7 April 2013, reiterated the same format. The aim of the network was again to bring together scholars working on international topics in queer film and visual cultures, and to engage both senior and emerging scholars. The event comprised Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU), Rohit Dasgupta (University of the Arts), Samar Habib (SOAS), Hoang Nguyen (Bryn Mawr), John David Rhodes (Sussex), B. Ruby Rich (UC Santa Cruz), Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth), and Juan Suarez (Murcia).

For further details of the project, please visit http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/

For a sample of Cüneyt Çakirlar's contribution in these two events he was invited to, please visit page of the journal Screen (52:3).

Queer Culture and Dissidence in Turkey

Earlier this year, Cuneyt Cakirlar published an edited collection (with Serkan Delice) which explored queer culture in Turkey. 

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The book aims to challenge heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and homo/transphobic violence in Turkey by investigating local historical and cultural narratives, social practices and forms of relationality in creative, dissident and queer ways. It interrogates the possibilities of an alternative critical practice that defies heteronormativity and its “partners in crime”, namely neoliberalism, nationalism, militarism and religious conservatism in contemporary Turkey. The critical agenda of this study is not only informed by a liberal human rights discourse that relies on sexual identity categories and identity politics. It is also inspired by sexual multitudes and ambiguities inherent within the local and historical cultural texture. Invoking unique possibilities of the local, this project looks at the ways in which the global travel of Western sexual identity categories and theories transform and assimilate local cultural forms of sexual subjectivity. While it questions the validity and applicability of categories and theories, this book also argues that the critical stance towards global sexual identity categories should not turn into an “authenticity fetishism”. Global sexual identity categories and Western theories can be appropriated critically and strategically, for different purposes, in different contexts. Rather than seeing the travel of global theories and categories as a hierarchical, single-dimensional imposition, this collection of essays suggests a reciprocal interaction always changing and transforming both the local and the global.

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Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet [The Sexuality Conundrum: Queer Culture and Dissidence in Turkey], Cüneyt Çakırlar and Serkan Delice (eds.), Istanbul: Metis, 2012.

Queer Art from Turkey

Earlier this year, Cuneyt Cakirlar presented his research on queer art from Turkey at an event on Turkish Society in the Neoliberal Age at the University of Oxford.

His paper focused on the contemporary art scene in Turkey which has gained a considerable international visibility in the last decade. The currently expanding traffic of art galleries, institutional investors and art collectors as well as the international networks in the country have made the scene as one of the most crucial territories of cultural capital, in which the artists and their collaborators working in neighboring fields of expertise (such as academics and activists) channel their critical voices through art. The neoliberal regimes and the political economy within this international travel of art-as-capital deserve critical focus. His research, however, focuses on in-depth analyses of art-works by the key queer figures from the contemporary art scene of Turkey. Being a part of a much more extended project, his talk addressed a critical space where the glocalization and/or internationalization of contemporary arts and that of queer (and/or LGBTT) practices intersect and nurture each other.

Cuneyt's use of “queer figures” refers not necessarily to certain active members of LGBT communities in Turkey but particularly to artists whose art engages with issues of gender and sexuality in creative and dissident ways. The current academic, artistic and cultural visibility of queer practices in Turkey opens up curious critical possibilities to articulate the problematic of cross-cultural translations as well as global form(ul)ations of sexual dissidence within the post-9/11, second-generation queer theory. The main aim of this project is to examine the art-practices of Kutluğ Ataman, Taner Ceylan, Nilbar Güreş, Murat Morova and Erinç Seymen by focusing on their transregional strategies of inhabiting the “queerly critical”. While their art-works may be said to engage with the hegemonic intersections between localism, nationalism, heteronormativity and masculinity in contemporary Turkey, they instrumentalize the transregional formations of criticism, theory and contemporaneity in dissident arts. Thus, though sceptical of an unproblematically performed de-contextualization of queer theories from its western referent, his discussion investigated the possible strategies of translating and transposing queer aesthetics into a practice that not merely insist on a local political context but also act as a methodological object in its potential to reciprocate the geopolitics of critical theory and that of the global contemporary art market.

His ongoing study proposes a critical agenda of reading these practices as theoretical and methodological objects of theory, aesthetics, visual culture and media that transposes a certain queer alterity to Turkish cultural memory – and vice versa – through a constant disidentificatory distance working on and against the local/global binary. While these artists “pursue the decisive strategy of scuffling with all dimensions of its geography-culture” (Kosova, 2009), their artistic agenda also demonstrates a curious self-awareness of cultural globalization within contemporary arts. Their art practice entails layers of critical appropriation which do neither escape nor entirely forego the globalizing imperatives of theory, politics and art-practice. The mode of critique within, and the queerness of, their methodologies, which is nurtured by the so-called global trends in contemporary art (such as actionism, performance, exposure, appropriation, parody/pastiche, intermediality, etc.) can be neither reduced to an Occidentalist internalization nor overinterpreted as self-localization that enacts an innate geographic alterity. 

“Queer Art from Turkey: Aesthetics of the Glocal, Erotics of Translation” Invited Lecture, Authority and Subversion: Turkish Society in the Neoliberal Age, organized by Kerem Öktem, Lauren Mignon and Celia Kerslake, University of Oxford, 9 May 2012.