Neoliberal Governance, Education, and Roma in Romania

What is it about?

State education is the neo/liberalism’s preeminent form of self-government, included in programs of governance, devised by transnational actors in development (e.g. EU, OSCE, UNDP, WB), which aim at integrating into the state structures populations (e.g. Roma), whose cultural constituencies and forms of knowledge are not yet subjected to market rationality. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s discussion of infrapower, the dialectical communication between Roma local forms of knowledge and state education is critically explored by looking at interactions between teachers, school mediators and Roma adults. Cultural idiosyncrasies are further analysed in relation to European neoliberal program of social integration of the Roma, which advances state education as the missing link between labour power and labour. The whole process assumes a complete dislocation of local knowledge(s), which are not subordinated to the capital, revealing state education as neoliberalism’s technology of domination of the self, incorporated in programs of social development.

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Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash