Henry A. Giroux argues that countering the disasters of neoliberalism requires facing "the challenge of developing a politics and pedagogy that can serve and actualize a democratic notion of the social" (2011). The authors suggest that Immanuel Wallerstein's notion of "middle-run" temporality (2008) and Stuart Hall's discussion of "middle-level" theory (1986) point the way toward a framework for considering new interventions and producing new possibilities in these intemperate times. Gramsci's concept of hegemony is also helpful in understanding how practices of cultural persuasion support what Giroux calls "neoliberalism as a public pedagogy" (2005), and how pedagogies for the neoliberal subject can be analyzed, explained, and countered. They argue that its public pedagogy papers over neoliberalism's many contradictions, its simultaneous deployment and denial of its racial project, and its attempts to establish all sites outside of the market as "insubordinate spaces." The university is an important site of struggle in this argument. As a set of "insubordinate spaces," the university offers opportunity for critique and argument that can counter neoliberalism and its racial project. They also argue that educators need to expand their imagination about the spaces where counter-pedagogies take place. Both the university and the community offer possibilities for insubordinate spaces; in this article the authors delineate the challenges and opportunities in academia and activist community cultural work. (Contains 2 notes.)