Papers by Leon Salter
New Formations, 2020
Neoliberal discourse often positions itself as the antithesis of bureaucracy. However, as the heg... more Neoliberal discourse often positions itself as the antithesis of bureaucracy. However, as the hegemonic political project of the past forty years, neoliberalism has imposed various forms of bureaucracy, most notably, those that audit performance. This contradiction between antagonism towards bureaucracy and bureaucratising tendencies is particularly resonant in the contemporary neoliberalised education sector, where the perceived risk of not producing self-managing, autonomous, economically productive subjects must be minimised through audit mechanisms which, conversely, necessarily decrease those capacities in students. Through a case study of the neoliberalisation of New Zealand's school sector, using the lens of Lacan's four discourses, this article argues that the discourses of the Master and the University have worked together to sometimes obscure, but at other times highlight, this contradiction. Drawing on policy documents, political speeches and reports, I highlight that a key policy which increased the visibility of the contradiction was National Standards, introduced in 2007 to reduce the risk of the unknown through the collection of performance data. I also draw on interviews with educationalists who adopt the discourse of the hysteric as a means to publicly highlight this contradiction, contesting the symbolic mandate of the teacher-as-data-node, while avoiding the kinds of full-frontal resistance that might cost them their jobs and jeopardise the education of children.
International Journal of Communication, 2020
Concerns surrounding the threats that digital platforms pose to the functioning of Western libera... more Concerns surrounding the threats that digital platforms pose to the functioning of Western liberal democracies have grown since the 2016 U.S. election. Yet despite a preponderance of academic work in this area, the precise nature of these threats, empirical solutions for their redress, and their relationship to the wider digital political economy remain undertheorized. This article addresses these gaps with a semisystematic literature review that identifies and defines four prominent threats-fake news, filter bubbles/echo chambers, online hate speech, and surveillance-and constructs a typology of "workable solutions" for combating these threats that highlights the tendency to silo technical, regulatory, or culturally embedded approaches.
Critical Public Health, 2020
Healthy Food Guide (HFG) has been a hugely successful magazine, both dominating the health magazi... more Healthy Food Guide (HFG) has been a hugely successful magazine, both dominating the health magazine market and becoming deeply imbedded within the public health discourse, sanctioned and legitimated through a range of State apparatuses. Central to this has been an ability to differentiate itself from “restrictive diet programs” and other forms of “misleading” health advice, which they claim, unlike their magazine, are ungrounded in the latest scientific evidence. Through a qualitative analysis of the lead article in every issue of HFG from 2005 to 2017, we question its endorsement by New Zealand public health agencies, arguing that it acquires revenue through the intensification of health anxiety within its target readership. It does this through constructing its ideal reader as a health entrepreneur within the discourse of new public health, able to collect the right information to make the appropriate consumer choices, within a risk-saturated marketplace. A key contribution of this article is bringing a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the broad area of public health, which has been so far under-applied. By linking Lacanian theory to the health entrepreneur, we developed that concept by foregrounding the roles of desire and anxiety in healthism discourse. We argue that the consumer of HFG is bound to its libidinal economy in a relation of domination, whereby they are given the task of allaying anxiety through the collection of data on their bodies, information which only produces more anxiety.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2019
When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 201... more When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply "doing their job" by interrogating Turei's story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This paper examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson's concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.
This article analyses newspaper editorial representations of the New Zealand education policy Nat... more This article analyses newspaper editorial representations of the New Zealand education policy National Standards. Following Laclau, it argues that the coverage constructed a populist articulatory logic where 'parents' functioned as a synecdoche (a part representing the whole) for 'the people'. 'Parents' became the hegemonic name for the alignment of demands between the media and government fields, an identificatory signifier which partly required the exclusion of educationalists for its cohesion. Overwhelming newspaper support in the 42 editorials analysed is argued to be strongly linked to the policy's carving out of a niche for the New Zealand journalistic identity in its traditional role as liberal democracy's fourth estate. This is a form of political agency which uniquely affords its disavowal, permitting its deferral to a constructed public, who desires the neutral transmission of data in order to make informed consumer choices. Hence, the analysed discourse exhibited significant boundary-crossing between the concepts of the parent, the citizen and the consumer. The article concludes by considering the benefits of furthering dialogic, rather than instrumental, relations between journalism and their publics.
Neoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the socia... more Neoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the social application of moral objectives. Yet it also presupposes a particular moral code, where acting on the assumption of individual autonomy becomes the basis of a shared moral-political praxis. Using a discourse theoretical approach, this article explores different articulations of morality in neoliberal discourse. We focus on the case of Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who reinvented herself from 2012 to 2016 as a prominent charter school advocate and antagonist of teachers unions. We examine the ideological significance of a campaigning strategy that coheres around an image of the moral superiority of corporatized schooling against an antithetical representation of the moral degeneracy of America's public schools system. In particular, we highlight how Brown attempts to incorporate the fragments of different progressive discourses into a neoliberalized vision of educational justice.
The recent challenges of populist movements to the ‘postdemocratic
horizon’ in Greece and elsewhe... more The recent challenges of populist movements to the ‘postdemocratic
horizon’ in Greece and elsewhere have highlighted its
possibilities as a political force able to mount a challenge to the
technocratic logics of the neoliberal consensus. The theoretical
perspective of Ernesto Laclau, which focuses on the rhetorical act
of naming ‘the people’ and extrinsic representative form over
intrinsic content, thus becomes increasingly valuable to explore
such possibilities and to account for the current ubiquity of
populist articulations both here in New Zealand and further afield.
However, the need to clarify and iron out any inconsistencies in
Laclau’s approach also increases, and the main task of this article
is to raise the consideration of how it could be supplemented by,
and articulated with, the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of
fantasy and jouissance. Analysis of a selection of John Key’s
populist articulations in the New Zealand media, and photographs
from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) protests, reveal that both
forms of populist articulation, while constructing very different
visions of ‘the people’, hinge on the fantasmatic representation of
an other; an antagonistic power who steals our enjoyment.
However, I conclude that a normative assessment of populist
articulations is both possible and necessary.
My confirmation proposal document
National newspapers remain a primary site whereby the events of foreign wars are conveyed to the ... more National newspapers remain a primary site whereby the events of foreign wars are conveyed to the public sphere in the UK. Operation Moshtarak, launched on 13 th February 2010 in Afghanistan was widely represented in the British media, including newspapers.
Drafts by Leon Salter
The phras emedia use as social action can be understood in a dual sense.On one hand, it
refers to... more The phras emedia use as social action can be understood in a dual sense.On one hand, it
refers to the use of media to achieve predetermined political and/or social objectives.On
the other, it implies that the very act of using media has communicative consequences
that contribute to the founding of new genres of social action, and even the formation
of new social action fields. In other words, in the latter sense,media use is social action.
This understanding of media use has become more widespread since the 1990s, which
have witnessed a global explosion of access to media production and its communication
through digital communication technologies, access that was previously prohibitively
expensive. This entry considers both senses of the phrase, providing a historical as well
as a multiparadigmatic view of media use as social action.
Conference Presentations by Leon Salter
Drawing on a psychoanlytically inflected discourse theory, this paper analyzes newspaper editoria... more Drawing on a psychoanlytically inflected discourse theory, this paper analyzes newspaper editorials in order to compare the rhetorical traction of three education policies introduced by the National Party within four years of winning the 2008 election in Aotearoa, New Zealand: National Standards, class sizes increase, and charter schools.
This comparison has the aim of addressing the questions: to what extent are institutional media political agents in their right within the education field, and to what degree is the articulatory logic of media populism central to the agency and embeddedness of neoliberalized education reform agendas?
This paper identifies three key fantasies which overdetermine the newspaper editorials discourse on the three policies: educational decline, the free-market and equality of opportunity, and it is the ability to articulate these fantasies together which largely determines their success within the media space. Within the fantasy frames, the three sublime objects of ‘the data’, ‘the quality teacher’ and ‘choice’ offer different wholeness images of policy certainty; and only former is able to integrate fully with the logic of media populism.
Book Reviews by Leon Salter
Thesis Chapters by Leon Salter
On 13 April 2013, New Zealand’s primary teachers union the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZE... more On 13 April 2013, New Zealand’s primary teachers union the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) organized protests across the country, attended by approximately 10,000 members and sympathisers. Protesters held aloft two-sided placards – on one side read “Stand Up For Kids, Save Our Schools” and on the other a grotesque cartoon figure accompanied “Fight the GERM”. The GERM stood for the Global Education Reform Movement and was intended to represent the policy programme of the Government as a threat to New Zealand’s “world class” public education system. Following the launch of their flagship National Standards policy in October 2009, the governing National Party had become involved in a series of struggles with teachers, schools and their unions, contributing to the splitting of the discursive landscape into two antagonistically opposed sides. This situation was then intensified by the introduction of two more controversial policies without sector-consultation: charter schools and an increase to class size ratios.
This thesis aims to investigate the underlying discursive ground structuring the three policies. By doing so, it aims to uncover the logics behind them, addressing such questions as why would the National Party, already scarred by previous battles with a powerful and relatively unified education sector, seek to implement policies on the premise that schools were failing the nation and that many teachers were not doing their jobs properly? And, conversely, why would the NZEI seek to represent the Government’s policy agenda through this combative frame?
I demonstrate that the three policies, while divergent from each other, are distinctly neoliberal; each emphasizing diverse, overlapping facets of
education within neoliberal governance, by setting them within a context of two previous decades of the neoliberalization of education in Aotearoa New Zealand. By employing the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau, the Government’s and the union’s mediated framings of the policies are understood as a series of interlinked but contingent discursive struggles to fix meaning. Both sides employ a populist articulatory logic, which constructs different symbolic enemies, in order to attempt to make their version of events hegemonic.
Through an analysis of diverse texts such as policy documents, speeches, newspaper editorials, blogs and interviews with activists, I argue that definitions of three subject-positions, together with the relations between them, were integral to this struggle: the teacher, the parent and the student. While neoliberal discourse progressively colonized these identities with individualistic, self-centred traits that emphasised entrepreneurial capacities, articulations of a holistic educational ethos contested these meanings, instead emphasising an ethics of care, humanism, democracy, justice, fairness and collectivity. In other words, the level of the subject provided the limits to neoliberal discourse, providing a place of continuous disconnect.
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Papers by Leon Salter
horizon’ in Greece and elsewhere have highlighted its
possibilities as a political force able to mount a challenge to the
technocratic logics of the neoliberal consensus. The theoretical
perspective of Ernesto Laclau, which focuses on the rhetorical act
of naming ‘the people’ and extrinsic representative form over
intrinsic content, thus becomes increasingly valuable to explore
such possibilities and to account for the current ubiquity of
populist articulations both here in New Zealand and further afield.
However, the need to clarify and iron out any inconsistencies in
Laclau’s approach also increases, and the main task of this article
is to raise the consideration of how it could be supplemented by,
and articulated with, the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of
fantasy and jouissance. Analysis of a selection of John Key’s
populist articulations in the New Zealand media, and photographs
from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) protests, reveal that both
forms of populist articulation, while constructing very different
visions of ‘the people’, hinge on the fantasmatic representation of
an other; an antagonistic power who steals our enjoyment.
However, I conclude that a normative assessment of populist
articulations is both possible and necessary.
Drafts by Leon Salter
refers to the use of media to achieve predetermined political and/or social objectives.On
the other, it implies that the very act of using media has communicative consequences
that contribute to the founding of new genres of social action, and even the formation
of new social action fields. In other words, in the latter sense,media use is social action.
This understanding of media use has become more widespread since the 1990s, which
have witnessed a global explosion of access to media production and its communication
through digital communication technologies, access that was previously prohibitively
expensive. This entry considers both senses of the phrase, providing a historical as well
as a multiparadigmatic view of media use as social action.
Conference Presentations by Leon Salter
This comparison has the aim of addressing the questions: to what extent are institutional media political agents in their right within the education field, and to what degree is the articulatory logic of media populism central to the agency and embeddedness of neoliberalized education reform agendas?
This paper identifies three key fantasies which overdetermine the newspaper editorials discourse on the three policies: educational decline, the free-market and equality of opportunity, and it is the ability to articulate these fantasies together which largely determines their success within the media space. Within the fantasy frames, the three sublime objects of ‘the data’, ‘the quality teacher’ and ‘choice’ offer different wholeness images of policy certainty; and only former is able to integrate fully with the logic of media populism.
Book Reviews by Leon Salter
Thesis Chapters by Leon Salter
This thesis aims to investigate the underlying discursive ground structuring the three policies. By doing so, it aims to uncover the logics behind them, addressing such questions as why would the National Party, already scarred by previous battles with a powerful and relatively unified education sector, seek to implement policies on the premise that schools were failing the nation and that many teachers were not doing their jobs properly? And, conversely, why would the NZEI seek to represent the Government’s policy agenda through this combative frame?
I demonstrate that the three policies, while divergent from each other, are distinctly neoliberal; each emphasizing diverse, overlapping facets of
education within neoliberal governance, by setting them within a context of two previous decades of the neoliberalization of education in Aotearoa New Zealand. By employing the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau, the Government’s and the union’s mediated framings of the policies are understood as a series of interlinked but contingent discursive struggles to fix meaning. Both sides employ a populist articulatory logic, which constructs different symbolic enemies, in order to attempt to make their version of events hegemonic.
Through an analysis of diverse texts such as policy documents, speeches, newspaper editorials, blogs and interviews with activists, I argue that definitions of three subject-positions, together with the relations between them, were integral to this struggle: the teacher, the parent and the student. While neoliberal discourse progressively colonized these identities with individualistic, self-centred traits that emphasised entrepreneurial capacities, articulations of a holistic educational ethos contested these meanings, instead emphasising an ethics of care, humanism, democracy, justice, fairness and collectivity. In other words, the level of the subject provided the limits to neoliberal discourse, providing a place of continuous disconnect.
horizon’ in Greece and elsewhere have highlighted its
possibilities as a political force able to mount a challenge to the
technocratic logics of the neoliberal consensus. The theoretical
perspective of Ernesto Laclau, which focuses on the rhetorical act
of naming ‘the people’ and extrinsic representative form over
intrinsic content, thus becomes increasingly valuable to explore
such possibilities and to account for the current ubiquity of
populist articulations both here in New Zealand and further afield.
However, the need to clarify and iron out any inconsistencies in
Laclau’s approach also increases, and the main task of this article
is to raise the consideration of how it could be supplemented by,
and articulated with, the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of
fantasy and jouissance. Analysis of a selection of John Key’s
populist articulations in the New Zealand media, and photographs
from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) protests, reveal that both
forms of populist articulation, while constructing very different
visions of ‘the people’, hinge on the fantasmatic representation of
an other; an antagonistic power who steals our enjoyment.
However, I conclude that a normative assessment of populist
articulations is both possible and necessary.
refers to the use of media to achieve predetermined political and/or social objectives.On
the other, it implies that the very act of using media has communicative consequences
that contribute to the founding of new genres of social action, and even the formation
of new social action fields. In other words, in the latter sense,media use is social action.
This understanding of media use has become more widespread since the 1990s, which
have witnessed a global explosion of access to media production and its communication
through digital communication technologies, access that was previously prohibitively
expensive. This entry considers both senses of the phrase, providing a historical as well
as a multiparadigmatic view of media use as social action.
This comparison has the aim of addressing the questions: to what extent are institutional media political agents in their right within the education field, and to what degree is the articulatory logic of media populism central to the agency and embeddedness of neoliberalized education reform agendas?
This paper identifies three key fantasies which overdetermine the newspaper editorials discourse on the three policies: educational decline, the free-market and equality of opportunity, and it is the ability to articulate these fantasies together which largely determines their success within the media space. Within the fantasy frames, the three sublime objects of ‘the data’, ‘the quality teacher’ and ‘choice’ offer different wholeness images of policy certainty; and only former is able to integrate fully with the logic of media populism.
This thesis aims to investigate the underlying discursive ground structuring the three policies. By doing so, it aims to uncover the logics behind them, addressing such questions as why would the National Party, already scarred by previous battles with a powerful and relatively unified education sector, seek to implement policies on the premise that schools were failing the nation and that many teachers were not doing their jobs properly? And, conversely, why would the NZEI seek to represent the Government’s policy agenda through this combative frame?
I demonstrate that the three policies, while divergent from each other, are distinctly neoliberal; each emphasizing diverse, overlapping facets of
education within neoliberal governance, by setting them within a context of two previous decades of the neoliberalization of education in Aotearoa New Zealand. By employing the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau, the Government’s and the union’s mediated framings of the policies are understood as a series of interlinked but contingent discursive struggles to fix meaning. Both sides employ a populist articulatory logic, which constructs different symbolic enemies, in order to attempt to make their version of events hegemonic.
Through an analysis of diverse texts such as policy documents, speeches, newspaper editorials, blogs and interviews with activists, I argue that definitions of three subject-positions, together with the relations between them, were integral to this struggle: the teacher, the parent and the student. While neoliberal discourse progressively colonized these identities with individualistic, self-centred traits that emphasised entrepreneurial capacities, articulations of a holistic educational ethos contested these meanings, instead emphasising an ethics of care, humanism, democracy, justice, fairness and collectivity. In other words, the level of the subject provided the limits to neoliberal discourse, providing a place of continuous disconnect.