Bridging the Divides of Educational Exclusion Across Neoliberalized Institutions


Grisha Cowal, Academic

With the intent of combatting the neoliberalization and exclusivity of higher education, a small team of professors and students at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia have created a grassroots Prison Education Program to target the overlapping inequities that neoliberalism in both higher education and Canada’s prison industrial complex create. Drawing on both research and personal experience as a student in the shared development and implementation of the Prison Education Program, this paper will utilize an abolitionist feminist theoretical framework to highlight the barriers that incarcerated people experience to obtaining higher education as well as the unique ways that professors and students are taking collective action to increase education access and expand the program. Neoliberal encroachment is evident in both the academic and prison industries through its features of profit maximization and social control; thus, the Prison Education Program believes that efforts to de-commodify education should be intimately connected to abolitionist efforts that reject carcerality as it serves as a physical and ideological space for the reproduction of capitalist relations (LeBaron and Roberts, 2010). The corporatization of Canadian universities is underpinned by broader transnational economic shifts that have occurred since the 1970s, in which social welfare began to see divestments both financially and ideologically (Olssen and Peters, 2005). During this same period, uptake in neoliberal policy reforms supported the development of the prison-industrial complex which quickly became a globalized industry serving the overlapping interests of colonial governments, corporations, and correctional departments (Sudbury, 2002). Discourses of crisis played a key role in cementing neoliberalism within universities (Ramírez and Hyslop-Margison, 2015) and are also apparent in Canada’s “tough on crime” rhetoric, which fueled the expansion of a prison nation founded on racial capitalism (Davis et al., 2022; Harris, 2018; Mallea, 2011). Moreover, discourses of crisis are utilized by Correctional Services Canada to justify banning internet access for prisoners under the guise of threatened security. The ban on internet access poses significant barriers to obtaining post-secondary education for prisoners, requiring the Prison Education Program to develop alternative methods of course delivery. By regulating the information that comes into the prison, and subsequently, the information that prisoners can put out, the carceral state maintains power through perception. Foucauldian perspectives highlight the ways in which neoliberalized institutions, such as universities and prisons, enact governmentality through policies, practices, and discourses that are aimed at creating self-disciplining subjects plagued by ideologies of individualism, constant demands for self-improvement, and an ongoing pressure to compete for limited resources (Ross and Savage, 2021). Students are decreasingly viewed as colleagues of academia and are instead targeted as consumers of knowledge capitalism (Olssen, 2006). On par with their status as consumers of knowledge capitalism within academia, students and professors are similarly positioned as the producers of knowledge in a relentless cycle of production-to-consumption that demands constant output of research (Berg et al., 2016). Within academia, the neoliberal foundation of which the production and consumption of knowledge is situated has dire consequences as academics become estranged to their research and teaching labour. By connecting academia directly to community care through collegial relationship building between professors, incarcerated students, and non-incarcerated students, the Prison Education Program resists the estrangement and isolation that both prisons and universities generate, as we aim to give new meaning to the creation of knowledge. Knowledge production and validation within western academia has historically reflected the values of the white men who hold power within these institutions, disregarding the lived experiences of people who face intersecting oppressions and excluding their truths from dominant epistemological discourses (Collins, 2000). The colonial roots of western academia combined with the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people in Canadian prisons (Paynter et al., 2023) results in intersecting barriers to education for Black and Indigenous students. The Prison Education Program prioritizes centering the voices and experiences of incarcerated students in the production of knowledge, and employs the radical imagination (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2014) to engage in collective conversations to envision an inclusive future for academia that transcends the boundaries of the carceral state. Efforts to de-commodify academia and carcerality must be relational, as community care is central to reclaiming academia as a site of radical resistance in a time of austerity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: