Ultra-Neoliberalism and Higher Education: A Critical (but Hopeful) View from Brazil

In this essay, I analyze the educational crisis of global cognitive capitalism, focusing on the responsibility of the University as a social institution concerned with democratic education, critical awareness, and eco-social sensibility. With this aim, first I discuss the context of ultra-neoliberalism and its discontents regarding economic, social, political, epistemological, and scientific macrotrends. Secondly, I introduce the case of Brazilian education and its dialectics of reproducing cycles of transgenerational power relations. Third, I propose a political agenda for education as a fundamental human right, analyzing higher education as a condition of concerned, responsible planetary citizenship. Fourth, I elaborate a conceptual agenda for the University based on epistemologies of the Global South to help overcoming authoritarian, destructive threats of ultra-neoliberalism in contemporary societies.