"Since the historic events of 1989 --which included the fall of the Berlin Wall and the commercialization of the Internet --the processes of globalization have largely been described and explained in neoliberal terms. Indeed, the neoliberal reading of globalization has become part of a popular social imaginary. Most attempts to re-think educational aims and re-structure educational governance around the world are located within this imaginary. Such is the hold of this imaginary that even after the contradictions of neoliberalism became apparent after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) its appeal could not be dislodged. Educational reforms since 2008 have continued to be based on neoliberal assumptions. In this talk, I will discuss how this has become the case and why alternative readings of globalization are so difficult to promote."

Fazal Rizvi is a Professor of Global Studies in Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, as we well as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has written extensively on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalization and education policy and Australia-Asia relations. A collection of his essays is published in: Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi(Routledge 2014). Fazal is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and a past Editor of the journal, Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education, and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education.