ABSTRACT
Since January 2017, we have been witness to an extraordinary spectacle. Courtesy of the e-media we can get up each morning to gaze aghast at the latest episode. This spectacle, I will argue here, is the culmination of neoliberal ideology, its rapacious version of capitalism and its systematic undermining of democracy. U.S. President Donald Trump is neoliberalism’s ideal-typical product and its avid proponent; he provides a vivid manifestation of its ultimate weakness and with luck its imminent collapse. I may be being too optimistic on the imminent collapse front; I thought the global financial crisis heralded that collapse, but neoliberalism by then was the only discourse that leaders of capitalist countries had access to on both right and left. One of our tasks as qualitative researchers is to explore the entangled agencies that have made this spectacle possible, including the agencies of individual human lives, and the agencies of the assemblages and flows through which the spectacle is constituted. Our qualitative and post-qualitative methods have persistently run counter to the hallmarks of neoliberal control that have been aimed at closing down thought and silencing critique.
