Introduction: Disfiguring Neoliberalism

Abstract

I started thinking and writing about neoliberalism in 1999 when I began graduate study at Dublin City University. Back then my understanding of it, and a whole lot of other things, was pretty unformed. I mainly had some hunches and intuitions. Perhaps my strongest one was that the power and authority of neoliberalism had something to do with how the social world was talked about in everyday media contexts — discourses that were deeply political and ideological, yet simultaneously trite and mundane. Much has changed since 1999. I was then writing about an Irish context that looks very different in 2014. And I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2003, since engaging with its media and political culture. However, the argument here is essentially guided by similar intuitions, even if they are now articulated in a form that my earlier self would have been unable to formulate.