Introduction

Irish higher education (HE) offers an interesting case study of both the transformative power and limits of neoliberalism. In many respects, Ireland is one of the most neoliberal countries in Europe, and as one of the so-called ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), it was also one of the states that was hardest hit by the ‘Great Recession’. Although neoliberalism has also been resisted in significant ways inside and outside the university, most of the literature on the topic in Ireland focuses almost exclusively on the power, reach and hold of neoliberal ideas. With this in mind, the primary aim of this chapter is to offer a less ‘one-sided’ account and to document how neoliberalism has, and continues to be, resisted by staff and students in HE in multiple ways. Of particular interest here is how ‘everyday’ practices and values (De Certeau, 1984) that are not explicitly political might be understood in relation to more formal political acts of resistance.

Taking a radical, critical realist perspective (Jessop, 2012; Sayer, 2015), I will use empirical and documentary research on resistance and explore how these hidden or ‘marginal’ practices might be drawn upon to re-imagine the university as a space in which we can move against and beyond neoliberalism. As Barnett (2013) argues, an analysis of any such alternative requires close attention to the conditions and constraints on action in a given context and period as they operate at various scales and levels. Thus, the chapter begins with a socio-historical analysis of neoliberalism as both a global and national phenomenon, as well as the specific ways in which this has shaped Irish HE, in order to make full sense of the everyday and political resistance of staff and students described and analysed in the second and third sections.

Taking the measure of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has become, over time, what the geographer Jamie Peck (2013: 133) has called ‘an unloved, rascal concept’, that is to say, it has become a highly elastic and often analytically overstretched term, used as a catch-all term for everything that is negative and disempowering. There is now an all too familiar mode of analysis of neoliberal politics that offers a melancholy and dystopian vision of a ‘totally administered world’.