There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about 'free markets' stands in considerable tension with 'really existing' neoliberalizing processes.However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between 'pure' economic and political theory and 'messy' empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using FriedrichHayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term 'science', techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the 'pure' neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.Bruff & Starnes -Framing the Neoliberal Canon 2

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There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about 'free markets' stands in considerable tension with 'really existing' neoliberalizing processes. However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between 'pure' economic and political theory and 'messy' empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term 'science', techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the 'pure' neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.

The political question of who can produce knowledge and how we delineate epistemological standards without reproducing epistemic marginalization is central to critical pedagogy in international relations (IR) scholarship. While critical pedagogies often attempt to enact an emancipatory agenda, they largely rely on the educator as knowledge (re)producer and student as passive consumer, with little to say on what it means to be emancipated, the oppressions at stake or the means of enacting this project. Drawing on Simon Bronner’s definition of folklore, this article explores folklore as a creative practice allowing us to explore who the ‘folk’ are in the process of teaching and how we constitute disciplinary ‘lore’ to incite students to revise and reflect on disciplinary boundaries. The article focuses on IR pedagogy as a creative practice, arguing that deploying a folklore lens allows us to challenge the uncritical reproduction of disciplinary boundaries.

Women's exclusion from the international relations (IR) canon has been widely documented, and many have undertaken to systematically address these exclusions. However, consideration of how women's exclusion is written into canonical texts is less well explored. This paper draws on folkloric approaches to understanding canon constitution to perform a close reading of disciplinary history texts. This paper considers these texts in parallel to Cinderella stories to understand the absence of “founding mothers” and illuminate how women's exclusion has been written into the canon as a natural absence. This paper builds on the growing literature about women's exclusion to document the specific ways in which how we write can reiterate exclusions within the canon. This is relevant to understanding these historical practices of exclusion and to reconsidering how we write the contemporary IR canon.