3. “I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees”: On the Rhetoric of Crisis and Academic Labor
Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion - Lauren Horn Griffin
James Dennis LoRusso [+]
Independent Scholar
James Dennis LoRusso currently serves as Vice President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is a former Associate Research Scholar in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, USA and is the author of Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Description
This chapter analyzes discourses surrounding “the American Worker” during the early 1970s to show how a perceived “crisis” eased the transition to the emergent neoliberal economic order that defined the late twentieth century. The essay then turns to the perceived crisis in academic labor amid the global pandemic to explore the ways that the rhetoric of crisis reinforces the acute material inequalities that structure the academy today.