Bishnupriya Ghosh's new book Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular is a thorough but at times confounding account of the Icon in our media-saturated global age. In her book, Ghosh treats dominant and popular representations of three women -- Mother Teresa, Arhundhati Roy, and Phoolan Devi -- to see what kind of politics they might provoke once they've become iconic objects of devotion. She argues convincingly that these figures register at the levels of the global, where they are sensationalized by mass media, and the local, where they are constantly taken up and repurposed, imbued with new, insurrectionary meanings. Icons such as Teresa, Roy, and Devi are immediately affective even if they reside in collective imaginaries, and just as they may...>>

The stardom of Lady Gaga has stimulated academic studies in ways that few celebrities typically have (aside from icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson), including an entire journal called Gaga Stigmata, edited volumes like The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays, Mathieu Deflem's "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame" course at the University of South Carolina, and my own Journal of Popular Culture article on the trope of monstrosity on which much of Gaga's cultural project is based. A central concern of this research has always been the relationship between the anxieties of the present day and the works of the pop superstar, upheld as she is by a powerful record label and a fan base brought together via social media. But the initial phase of scholarship focused on Gaga's cultural project--made up mostly of interpretive readings of her performances and videos--is gradually giving way to a new wave of writing, one engaged in more thorough contextualizations of her work in broader social crises and the responses of Occupy movements and others engaged in imagining alternative futures.>>

Even though it was over 30 years ago, I remember well the anxiety about entering the penal system: how would I fare in this harsh new world of repression, of regimentation, reputedly rife with violence? For me, for many of us, the saving grace was solidarity from other prisoners as those already established helped us learn to navigate these rocky shoals. But what if you're someone who faces an extra dimension of hostility from the guards, with many prisoners joining staff in abusing you -- not for anything you did but just for who you are? That's the situation for many trans gender and queer prisoners. The isolation, disdain, and violence can be vicious and incessant. This isn't just a problem for trans/queer (T/Q) prisoners; it's an important issue for all of us. Every time we join the dominant powers in society in mistreating others, every time we miss a key dimension of how this anti-human system rules over us, we undermine our ability to resist and to work for strong and supportive communities that can provide the sane and humane alternative to the punitive and damaging prison industrial complex (PIC).>>

Under Review:

Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Temple University Press: Philadelphia, PA, 2011. Translated by Enda Brophy.

Thought follows action. A new precarious generation of cognitive workers knows this all too well, for their struggles trace the crumbling edifice of both the university and the global economy that increasingly depends on knowledge, affects, and information for its operations. If we begin with these struggles, we can dare to know much more about how our present circumstances are shaped by the knowledge economy.

This is the provocative thesis of Gigi Roggero's The Production of Living Knowledge, part treatise on the changing role of the university in contemporary capitalism, and part manifesto for a movement to expropriate the expropriators of the present economy, to build up autonomous institutions that organize our commonwealth, and to set sail toward a new society.

Roggero's first book to be translated into English is the product of an extended, indeed nomadic, inquiry into transformations currently besetting the "global" university. Interviews and case studies are based in the U.S. and in his native Italy, but the book is hardly a comparative study. Instead, it is a partisan critique of the university as organizational setting and incubator for transnational processes undergirding a global knowledge-based economy. Roggero's insights traverse national and academic borders far wider than his field sites, and instead emanate from his affiliation with Edu-Factory, a global research network, that explores struggles around knowledge production in and beyond the university.

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