NeoLiberalism Unshaken: A Report from the Disaster Zone

We report here on our experiences working, in a large university, in Christchurch, New Zealand in the wake of the 22 February 2011 earthquake. The state of emergency, our experiences suggest, produces the idealised condition of neoliberalism, expediting, operationalising and realising to perfection the modes and methods of neoliberal agendas—urgency, crisis, instability and “the bottom line.” At the University of Canterbury, which like so many universities elsewhere has been experiencing the processes of corporatisation and marketisation for the last two decades, neoliberalism, we argue, thrived within the disaster zone.