This interview is based on Rob Walker and Kay Sidebottom‘s article ‘If you tolerate mis(ogyny), then fascisms will be next: rewriting the classroom script through affirmative ethics’
This interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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In the article you discuss how neoliberal logics provide fertile ground for misogyny and microfascism to flourish in classroom settings. Could you explain how this process unfolds?
Rob: Firstly, may I just say thank you for asking me/us to answer these. So, I would encourage anyone reading or listening, to check out the work of Dr. Stephen Ball; his writing helped me quite a lot in my understandings of neoliberalism within education. For me, he’s up there with Giroux.
So to me, neoliberalism has transformed mainstream education into a marketplace of competition, performance, and individual accountability. It’s within this system that students and teachers are judged by productivity and compliance with measurable outcomes… A bit ‘human capital theory’-ey. The neoliberal school fosters efficiency and control, with care, empathy, and collective well-being all becoming commodified; it essentially becomes a performative tick-box exercise. As this logic takes root in schools, a sort of hierarchy of value emerges… Masculine-coded traits are rewarded, whilst the more feminist-seen lose value. That’s where the process begins… What gets measured and rewarded shapes how people learn to behave. Students absorb that logic and see competitiveness and control as strength, while anything outside it seems weak. Misogyny grows from that dynamic, as the system privileges traits over others. That’s where the microfascist stuff fits in too; schools built on competition and surveillance teach students to self-police and police each other. You see it in the jokes, the ‘banter’, the subtle pushing out of difference. Those little moments seem small, but they keep order in place. The neoliberal model trains young people to internalise control and to see hierarchy and conformity as the norm.
Kay: Absolutely, yeah. Just to add to this, it’s that encouraging of compliance, and the flattening of difference… The uniformity (where all institutions are pretty much the same)… It’s the conformative culture of that is not just rewarded but expected, coupled with the ‘them vs us’ competition, that has success defined in such a way… All adds up to help fascistic tendencies to thrive. It encourages difference to look like a threat. We can see this with the treatment of (and language surrounding) SEND children, which mirrors macro-discourses surrounding scroungers. It all fosters a culture of hatred.
Rob: Yeah, spot on. I mean, the process is so subtle but so powerful. Neoliberal ideology builds the structure, the structure rewards domination, and from that, both misogyny and microfascism take root, feeding off one another.
How could the approach of affirmative ethics, which you draw on in the article, help educators push back against some of these reactionary trends in schools?
Kay: I think we explain that in the paper. It’s not a checklist, but it’s a kind of process; a shift from critique and control toward relation and care.
Rob: Exactly. We’ve drawn Affirmative ethics from Braidotti and grounded it in Spinozian thought, to offer educators a way to resist reactionary and exclusionary trends by shifting focus from control to connection and care. It begins with the idea that ethics is not about judgement or discipline but about enhancing our capacity to act and relate well with others… Rather than meeting misogyny or microfascist behaviour with sanctions or moralising, affirmative ethics invites dialogue, empathy, and accountability. A kind of reimagining of the classroom as a space of becoming together, not competing apart. I believe that three practices make this possible: rehumanising pedagogy, so valuing compassion and recognition as ethical acts… Affective awareness, where emotions such as fear and resentment are engaged with and not ignored; and creating counter-spaces of care and creativity, through small, collaborative acts that disrupt the culture of competition. It seeks transformation over punishment… Classrooms become spaces of ethical and communal resistance when connection and care are placed at the forefront.
In the UK, Nigel Farage has recently claimed that teachers are ‘poisoning our kids’ by telling certain children that they are oppressors and others that they are oppressed. Instead, he suggested that schools should ‘teach critical thinking.’ How can the theoretical framework you develop in this article help us make sense of Farage’s comments?
Kay: This is a common Far-Right argument. Our framework reminds us that education is always political, that the curriculum is always based around someone’s ideology. Farage is referring to Freire here I guess. I don’t know anyone who uses that language or framing (it belongs to a particular context). I would agree though that binaries are never helpful. To think critically is to question power: who holds it, how it is enacted etc at the same time as encouraging students to appreciate different positions and emphasise with difference
Rob: Yeah, exactly. Reminds me of the late Tony Benn. I’d say that Farage’s comments are a textbook example of the reactionary logic that the article’s theoretical framework seeks to expose. Reframing social justice education as indoctrination, using the language of ‘critical thinking’ to defend a neoliberal/neoconservative, depoliticised vision of schooling.
This co-option of the word… His invocation of ‘teaching critical thinking’ functions as ideological camouflage. It sounds progressive but its hollowed out of substance; it implies neutrality and detachment rather than genuine critique. It reminds me of OFSTED’s ‘Cultural Capital’, where the word was hollowed out and metamorphosed into something that’d have Bourdieu spinning in Père Lechaise. In the neoliberal sense, ‘critical thinking’ becomes a skill for employability, not a practice for questioning power.
Farage’s framings consistent with neoliberal and reactionary ideologies that treat inequality as individual failure over structural reality, reinforcing the meritocratic myth. Such framing erases histories of gendered, racial, and class inequality, simultaneously casting educators who address them as ideological threats. The rhetoric feeds on fear and resentment, inviting loyalty to patriarchal and authoritarian hierarchies. Affirmative ethics offers a counterpoint, favouring connection and care over control. It helps reveal how neoliberal and reactionary discourses hollow out progressive language to defend privilege, while education’s role is to keep that unsettling of power alive as learning.
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Rob Walker is a PhD researcher at the University of Stirling, focusing on the interplay between masculinities, misogynies, and their bridging for fascist ideologies. Drawing on post-structural and post-humanist lenses, his research explores how gender norms and misogynies act as gateways to extremist political beliefs, within the context of neoliberal and neoconservative politics in contemporary Western societies, particularly within education. Rob also examines wider educational inequalities, with an emphasis on the Othering of marginalised groups, promoting social justice by addressing disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes.
Kay Sidebottom is a Lecturer in Education and programme lead for the MSc Education at the University of Stirling.
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