Learning in neoliberal times: Private degree students and the politics of value coding in Singapore

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2014 in Singapore, I offer a case study of how students are shaped by and pushing back against neoliberal discourses, by focusing on the ethnographic context of a local private education institute. Drawing on theorizations around the corporeal politics of value, this article examines the actual production of neoliberal subjectivities in light of a new rhetoric around the ‘learning citizen’ in the globalising city-state. I demonstrate how private degree students engaged with practices of value coding that attempt to fashion themselves into ‘employable’ future workers, but in ways that are informed by a different circulation of value meanings. These value practices – often defensive, anti-elitist, and subversive of a dominant subject of value (i.e. the ‘proper’ university student) – were aimed at recuperating and creating a separate domain of value worth. I argue that the actual production of neoliberal citizenship in education spaces need to be (re-)interpreted through a politics of value coding. This allows for a clearer view of how students themselves negotiate embodied forms of value, with and against those practices of alienation and exclusion that mark them as human capital.