Toward critical pedagogies of the international? Student resistance, other-regardedness and self-formation in the neoliberal university

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations toward politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students’ and future citizens’ other-regardedness toward those “superfluous” and “disposable” others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault’s thinking of “counter-conduct” to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 student occupation of a French university against the local government’s abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students’ own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing—inside and outside classrooms and curricula—marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international.