Notable Books, Films, Art, Etc.
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.
