Eric just sent this out and I'm reposting it here: "I attach a copy of a set of guidelines for case study research that have been composed by me, Greg, Helga and Jamie, as promised in Trout Lake. As Helga notes, these are a bit long and involved, but hopefully better than nothing."

What is your unit of analysis?
Are you analyzing a particular place, a particular social concern, a particular activist group, a particular neoliberal concern, a particular promoter of neoliberal ideas and/or practices, or a particular “network” involving all of the above?

You should be able to show how your case relates to processes of neoliberalization.
Remember, “neoliberalism” is both a particular ideal version of capitalist logic, and a particular method of actually-existing capitalism -- both have a very recent history but the two are not exactly the same and the two are not currently universal in the global mix of capitalist ideas and forms. Part of the goal of your project should be to help analyze and map out these ideals and patterns of neoliberalism themselves.
- Does your case seek to advance, or resist, the process of neoliberalization (defined as the application of state/political power in the extension of markets, market-like systems and market disciplines)?
- How is your case affected by neoliberalization (e.g., by privatization, entrepreneurialism, shifting funding priorities, shifting organizational goals).
- What are the impacts, if any, of your case on neoliberalization?
- What have you learned about neoliberalization, and capitalism more generally?

You should be able to show how your case relates to cities and urban theories.
Cities and urban theories are constantly being transformed, challenged and revised; think about what your case has to say about the usefulness (and limits) of these theories
- Does it occur in cities, or connect cities (and if so, why is this, and is it significant for the dynamics of the case study)?
- Does it have important implications for the functioning of cities and/or urban life?
- What have you learned about cities and urban politics?

Think about connections between cities.
- Where do new ideas and initiatives originate (e.g., in which cities and why)?
- How do they move across space, and time?
- How (and where) do agents in one city draw on/learn from initiatives from other cities? By what channels does this learning take place?
- Where are they rejected, or fail?

Think comparatively:
- How might I compare my case to another one in a different geographical/social/ political/historical context?
- How do similar networks and issues operate in cities in other regional contexts? (e.g., Europe, or Asia, vs. North America). (If there are no such comparative examples in the literature, well, that’s important to know as well.)
- How does your case compare to others that are being researched by class participants?

What does your case imply for democracy and social justice?
- Don’t just describe your case, but critically analyze it.
- Do the efforts under study deserve support, or merit suspicion? You should be engaging not only in empirical observations and theoretical analysis, but also in value judgments.

Think about networks in your case study:
- What kinds of networks seem to exist (e.g., local and non-local networks, networks of networks, actor-networks, hierarchical networks)?
- How are networks being represented and thus made visible or invisible? This involves several aspects: how you as the analyst are making a network of relations between actors visible; how the actors themselves “see” (or don’t see) the networks they operate within; and whether making networks visible (or invisible) is a conscious strategy of the actors themselves as they pursue their goals.
- How do networks come about?
- Who are the main actors in the network and how do they influence the network agenda?
- Are they networks? You should ask yourself: Is there even a “network” in play in your case, or is it another kind of pattern of relations and exchanges between actors (such as a decentralized market outcome or a formal hierarchical power structure)?
- Can your study help us understand what “networks” are? How do ideal network types or idealized visions differ from really existing networks?
- How do networks relate to states, and markets?
- What constitutes, and can be included in, a network (e.g., are silent partners in a collaboration part of its network)?
- What is traveling through a network, and how? Think about, and attempt to trace, the “currency” that might flow through a network. Are the actors trading knowledge, ideas, models, commodities, capital, or even people?
- Pay attention to (dark, naughty, elite) networks that contribute to, as well as those (light, nice, cuddly, non-elite) networks that resist neoliberalization
- Pay attention to nationwide think-act tanks and networks, providing expertise to networks resisting neoliberalization.
- What are obstacles and difficulties in networks/networking?
- Are there actual or possible unanticipated negative consequences stemming from the operation of ‘good’ networks?
- What have you learned about networks? What is the benefit of “network thinking”?

Use theory to inform your case, but also let your case question the theory.
We will be covering a lot of background material on spatial and urban theory, theories of capitalism and neoliberalism, theories of social movements and social justiceand theories relating to networks. The first challenge (especially for the non-geographers in the group) is to be able to use this set of terminology, concepts, and processes to shape and analyze your own case; but the second challenge is to see what your case has to say about those theories in the first place.

Examine your case study from the outside as well as the inside.
- What did your case study teach you about broader issues (e.g., networks, social movements, cities, neoliberalization)?
- What can you learn from stepping outside your network and examining it critically, rather than just tracing how it works (e.g., don’t just narrate how a network is represented in the Internet, but try and read that representation critically—what lies behind it?)

Consider collaborative research.
Think broadly about this -- not just people working on the same city or the same social justice concern or the same network, but people coming to the same conclusions about neoliberalism, social movements, urban futures, or network functioning in the first place.
- Are there others in the seminar with whom you could do a joint project of common interest?
- Are there others in the seminar with who you should be in constant touch, to your mutual benefit?
- Even if you are working on substantively different topics, are there others you might usefully compare notes with, or share elements of your background research?

How can I use the work that others have already compiled? (especially Anant and Mike)
Check through their lists of networks, articles, and web sites (posted on our web site). Scour the bibliographies and footnotes of everything you read for this course. And don’t be afraid to ask the faculty for references too.

This is a conference to be held here at UW which might fit in with several folks' research interests in urban futures and urban neoliberalization...

The European Union Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
invites faculty and graduate students to a conference April 4 & 5, 2003

National Feminisms in a Transnational Arena: The European Union and Gender Politics

Feminist movements in every European country have taken distinctive forms due to specific national political factors. Despite these differences, European feminist movements increasingly share common political terrain due to the
expansion of the powers and boundaries of the European Union.

This conference considers questions such as: How are feminist movements adapting to the opportunities and obstacles that the EU poses for their particular national political traditions?
How much does "soft law" and the "boomerang" effect from the EU on member states influence the gender politics of individual countries?
What can the EU offer feminists in relation to specific issues and by means of particular strategies?
What are the costs of trying to work in and through a system that is widely viewed as suffering a "democratic deficit"?
And how do disagreements among feminists over what policies are most in women's interests get aired, negotiated and perhaps resolved in the context of transnational work in Europe?

Note: All panels and keynotes run serially, not concurrently.

Confirmed speakers include: Laura Agustin, Lisa D. Brush, Carol
Hagemann-White, Barbara Hobson, Jacqueline Heinen, Cathryn Hoskyns,
Amy Elman, Sally Kenney, Don Kulick, Rosa Logar, Renate Klein,
Patricia Yancey Martin, Amy Mazur, Sonya Michel, Claudia Neusuess,
Joyce Outshoorn, Silke Roth, Jill Rubery, Chiara Saraceno, Dorothy Stetson,
Mieke Verloo, Angelika von Wahl, Sylvia Walby, Fiona Williams, Alison
Woodward and Katrin Zippel.

Registration:
Non-UW Participants. Registration fees are $40 for students and $60 for
non-students (registration on-site is $50 and $70 respectively) and covers
ALL three meals on Friday (April 4) and Saturday (April 5).
Those coming from out of town should plan to arrive on Thursday night
since the program begins promptly at 8:30 on Friday and runs
through Saturday night.
UW faculty, Staff and Students. Registation is free. However, UW
associates must register to reserve a seat.

To register, please e-mail the EUC Project Assistant,Anne Genereux, at eucenter@intl-institute.wisc.edu.
Include the following information: Name, Status (Faculty, Staff, Graduate, Undergraduate),
Address, Phone Number, E-mail Address and Departmental Affiliation.
Pre-registration is available until March 31.
Registration forms and details of the schedule are available through the conference web site.

Conference website:
http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/eucenter/Conferences/Feminism/index.htm.
Further questions should be directed to the EUC Program Assistant, Anne
Genereux, at: eucenter@intl-institute.wisc.edu or 608-265-8040.

____________________________________________________________________________
Rebekah D. Pryor, Program Assistant
cges@intl-institute.wisc.edu

Center for German and European Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
213 Ingraham Hall
Madison, WI 53706
http://daadcenter.wisc.edu
Phone: 608/265-8032 Fax: 608/265-9541

And here are the compiled questions on Urban Neoliberalism from Madison:

Discussion questions

1. Defining neoliberalism

a) Is it possible to identify the core characteristics of neoliberalism? To what extent phenomena such as conservatism or revanchism are characteristics of neoliberalism varieties? or when do they become a constitutive part of it?
b) How useful can be the neoliberalism concept both theoretically and empirically?

2. What is the scope of neoliberalism? What is its capacity for reshaping social discourses, cultural patterns, everyday life meaning? What for? Does it imply a gender or race/ethnic project/dimension? Does it become the (main) reference discourse against to which other social discourses are built?

3. Alternatives
If, as is suggested by the readings, neoliberalism differs locally is it still possible to identify a common alternative to it? To what extent its representation as monolithic and homogenous undermines the emergence of alternative projects (even within the liberal tradition)?

4. Institutional (re)building
How can we account for policies or moments in the creative destruction process that do not respond to the neoliberal agenda?
What are the contradictions and reinforcements between political structure and parallel forms of local governance?
What are the sources of the neoliberal program? Where and in what scale is its agenda defined?



Tom Hove

Why do most of these critiques of neoliberalism repeatedly insist on a radical break with the liberal tradition? For many liberals in the traditional 19th-century sense of the term, "neoliberalism" is not liberalism at all. Instead, it represents a powerful oligarchic exploitation of government welfare programs for the benefit only of the elites. If it were truly a liberal program, then it would acknowledge the ideological self-contradictions of eradicating state-imposed welfare programs for the underprivileged while increasing state-funded welfare programs for wealthy corporations and elites.

Many of us who call ourselves liberals are disgusted with Reaganite and Thatcherite economic and social policies. But conversely, we're skeptical and suspicious of paternalistic, state-enforced notions of the good.
Again, I wonder if these radical critiques of neoliberalism are misdirected when they single out the liberal political tradition as a primary source of neoliberal abuses and downright perversions of that traditions ideals.
Instead, what's more at issue is the misapplication of ideals, rather than the politically neutral ideology that provides many of these conservative misapplications with a rhetoric of public concern that masks the private abuses greedy elites and corporations are actually carrying out.
So, to put it more briefly, why do these critiques of neoliberalism tend to resist calls to reform FROM WITHIN the liberal tradition? Why don't they criticize neoliberal urban development projects by appealing to the very humane and public-minded ideals that still remain a central part of the liberal ideology?


Anna Smith
How does neoliberalism play out in the cultural sphere? Is there any value in looking at it from this angle?

Claudia Hanson Thiem

I appreciated Keil’s addition of a Foucauldian perspective on neoliberalism. That neoliberalism consists of ?technologies of power? in addition to political-economic restructurings can help explain the power and success of the neoliberal discourse, and the production of neoliberal subjects. Questions about this? One would be,can/should we incorporate this thinking into our work (e.g. how are our various resistance efforts challenging neoliberal subjectivities?)? A second question involves the utility of the ?politics of the everyday? as a concept. Is it useful?
I don?t know my Lefebvre very well, so I don?t understand what?s being described here and how it helps us understand the contests around neoliberalization.

Brenner/Theodore and Peck/Tickell provided similar ways to categorize aspects of the neoliberal offensive (neoliberalization as creative destruction, or as moments of ?roll-back? and ?roll-out?). Throughout the readings these categories are applied to specific examples of neoliberalization (Table 2 in Brenner/Theodore gives plenty
of examples). It seems to me fairly straightforward to explore these moments in concrete case studies (MacLeod an example here?). But is there space to explore urban moments that don?t fit neatly into these categories? That is, is there any interest in policies or movements that are not explicitly neoliberal in origins or reference, but yet interact with and/or respond to a neoliberal environment in some (interesting?) way? I am probing for grey areas here, I think.



Karl Maxwell Grinnell

1. Once again, we find that the prognosis for urban areas laid out by most of these authors is rather gloomy, which is not surprising given that most of them also make reference to Harvey’s 1989 article (or in one case his book, Spaces of Hope (2000).
What I found most unusual was that none of them offered any possible alternatives to alleviating these ongoing spatial injustices, etc. That being said, are there any? I breathed a sigh of relief when several of these authors acquiesced and admitted that this pattern of neoliberal governance/public policy development takes different forms across the broad spectrum of urban areas, but I was still puzzled that none of
them offered any creative solutions…do we attempt to “infiltrate from within”? Do we stage massive protests in Genoa, Seattle, etc? Also how are we to examine the various sophisticated or unsophisticated ways in which smaller urban areas attempt to adopt a neoliberalistic policy agenda for urban development and so on?

2. This one is real simple: What is a quango? It is referenced in a table in the Brenner&Theodore piece, but I have never read or heard tell of such a beast.



Dawn Biehler

1. Maybe folks worked on the issue of Neoliberalism's novel history when I was sick in bed last week, but if it's still a live topic... In looking at the MacLeod and Swyngedouw et al pieces, I again wondered, what makes this stuff new? How are these projects and policies different from things that occurred over one hundred years ago up through the 70s? I have some ideas, mostly relating to the role of the state and of globalizing processes, but I think it's still worth discussing to really precisely articulate what is distinct about it.

2. As Brenner and Theodore and Peck and Tickell discuss the embeddedness of NL in local specifics, I wondered about what's embedded in what. I expect that our tendency in this course will be subsume other relations to Capitalist relations (and this is a major question for Marxism in general), but what about those of racism, patriarchy? It seems that these, along with environmental profligacy, will intersect with K-ist relations. And MacLeod's piece might suggest, relations of revanchism (and just how tied to NL is revanchism, anyway? I agree that one is tightly implicated in the other, but is that necessarily the case)? Also, there seems to be a lot of assumptions that social movements will arise in response to NL; how will already actually-existing networks ;) respond when NL comes to town?


Maureen R. McLachlan

By the time I got to MacLeod and Swyngedouw et al, I started feeling both discouraged, but also wondering if the theories of neoliberalism and its manifestations, while important, are enough. I was frustrated because with all this talk of all the negative impacts and what happened in Glasgow or the various EU cities, no one took the time to offer alternatives. Peck and Tickell (401) state that there will be no change “until extralocal rule regimes are remade in ways that contain and challenge the frorces of marketization and commodification”, but what propositions are being made?
Swyngedouw et al discuss that there were alternatives in Dublin and London, but barely discuss what made them successful. And, can neoliberalism go hand in hand with social inclusion…can we have UDPs and social welfare?

MacLeod seems to equate neoliberalism with revanchism? Is this always the case? Are we always to view neoliberal policies as revenge on the poorer classes? Aren’t there some who support neoliberalism and have good intentions, hoping that “trickle down” will indeed occur to the benefit of all (rightly or wrongly)?

Two quick questions more: What are the prominent discourses against
neoliberalism from the disenfranchised groups?
Harvey talks about “place vs. territory”; Swyngedouw et al talk about territorial decisions. Are there distinctions that we need to make in these two works?


Todd Courtenay

A couple of comments/questions from some of the readings this week:
1. One of the nice thing characterizing political movements from the early 20th century and before is that they often took the time to construct and lay down some form of manifesto, thus outlining their main beliefs and objectives, and perceived logic and reasoning behind these tenents. The neoliberalist agenda that we are trying to describe within this class seems to inherently lack any sort of concrete and specific list of their views and why. Given this ephemeral nature, are there any key works, by academics or intellectuals, which extoll the logic and applicability of neoliberal economic and political strategies? If so, I would like to know what these are. The readings we are currently examining are insightful; however, it is one thing to read anti-neoliberalists documenting neoliberalism and another to read the work neoliberalists explaining the system.





Sean J Gutknecht

1. One of the primary characteristics of neoliberalism appears to be the imposition of market logic (perhaps more specifically, pure markets as conceived by neoclassical economists) on all areas of public policy. However, neoliberalism in practice has existed for perhaps a quarter century, while there have been markets of various forms, scales, and scopes for many centuries. What is the conception, if any, of the separation between markets and neoliberalism? Are all policy
initiatives that utilize market logic "neoliberal" as seems to be implied by many of the readings?

2. Since pure neoliberal conceptions of markets exist in theory only, and assuming there are both "neoliberal" and "non-neoliberal" conceptions of markets, in what way could we determine the difference in action on the ground?

Jesse Norris
1)If, as one article claimed, the 80's were characterized by orthodox neoliberalism, while the 90's were dominated by soft neoliberalism, what can we say about the 00's?
How might the war on terror and US military agressiveness affect the trajectory and nature of neoliberalism, and global world order (as the drug war was essential in the 90's, and the cold war before that?)
2) A lot of the articles we read seem very thin empirically, consisting of little more than an informal, broad overview of a given case, followed by ambitious, sophisticated theorization. What should we make of this kind of approach when we think about the form our research this semester should take?


Landy Sanchez

Swyngedouw et al’ article points out the democratic deficit of UDPs; to me it address the general question about the relations between the political structures (such as congress, presidential powers, or corporatist structures) and parallels forms of local governance. In the literature about unionism or welfare states reforms have been highlighted that certain political structures seems to be more favorable for the advance of the neoliberal program while others are more capable of confronting or at least diminishing the international pressures in favor of neoliberal reforms. To what extent is also possible to make such argument in the case of urban policies? In one hand, it seems that the building of parallels structures of local governance undermine the relevance of traditional (classical) power structures, or even more they can advance their neoliberalization. At the same time, local initiatives might promote social participation. I think my question is about the mutual roll-back and roll-out between existing institutions and neoliberal initiatives.







Brenda Parker

1.) What about issues of gender and race as they
relate to neoliberalism? (e.g. who propogates
neoliberalism in cities, who is affected by
neoliberalism)

2.) Most of the studies point to the neoliberal focus
on the city as spectacle and site of consumption. Yet
few discuss in what ways the demand for such
consumption has risen? Are we to follow the Marxist
logic of commodity fetishism or a complex cultural
understanding of consumption? What are patterns of
consumption in cities that help fuel neoliberalism
(and don't they spread beyond the urban elite)? How
might understanding these patterns help us understand
how to combat neoliberalism?

3.) The articles raised interesting issues about where
neoliberalism comes from versus where it is materially
manifested. Where are the primary sources of
neoliberalism? Is the city just a site of experiments
pressured by external incentives and logic or are the
origins of neoliberalism more fundamentally urban? To
what extent is urban neoliberalism non-local?

4.) What is the primary difference between the various
authors arguments about "destructive/creative"
neoliberalism and "roll-back/roll-out neoliberalism"?



Tyrone Siren
Is there more to the story of neoliberalism than Thatcher/Reagan and the "heartland" of neoliberalism (America and Europe)? I mean to say, could, for example, the Japanese management techniques that spread around the world in the 1980s have played any part in the "socialization" and "disciplining" of subjects? Could it have been another way in which "competition" became naturalized?