Culture, Power and Education

Peter Mayo is Professor of Sociology of Education and Adult Education and UNESCO Chair in Global Adult Education at the University of Malta, Malta. His research focuses on the sociology of education, adult education, comparative education, social theory, critical theory and cultural studies. He is the author of Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism: Insights from Gramsci (Routledge, 2015) and co-author of Learning and Social Difference: Challenges for Public Education and Critical Pedagogy (Routledge, 2007). He is also the editor of Education in Small States: Global Imperatives, Regional Initiatives and Local Dilemmas (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor of International Critical Pedagogy Reader (Routledge, 2015).

"As one of the leading researchers in critical theory and education, Peter Mayo brings us ever new insights following this tradition and ever new possibilities for change. His new book focuses on Gramsci's confrontation with hegemony and elaborates it further through Paulo Freire's revolutionary educational touch along with Mayo's own search for heterotopian alternatives. The old alternative of "reform or revolution" in no longer needed, while Žižek's question on the actuality of a critical matrix turns out to be a rhetorical one. Critical theorists and pedagogues of the world, unite!"Eva D. Bahovec, Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia"In this well theorized and historically contextualized book, Peter Mayo explores the leading figures in critical education studies and shows how popular and elite culture are thoroughly embedded in wider social relations. His case studies reveal the symbiosis of culture, politics, hegemony, representation and resistance in different periods and countries."Bob Jessop, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK"Peter Mayo’s Culture, Power and Education allows us to read Gramsci’s account of cultural politics in new and inspiring ways. Drawing on the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Mayo reminds us of an ‘integrated politics’ that goes well beyond representative democracy and the bourgeois state with its separations between the private and the public as well as between seemingly autonomous spheres such as education, culture, politics, or economy. In doing so Mayo’s latest book paves the way for a timely understanding of the politics of education and the politics of both elite and popular culture. Moreover, Mayo’s reconstruction of the long history of writers, activists, and movements who engaged with the politics of education and culture makes it possible to find inspiration in them against the neofascism of the present."Ruth Sonderegger, Professor of Philosophy, Kunst Universiteit Wien, Austria

• Introduction 1. Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Power 2. Don Lorenzo Milani and the Schools of San Donato and Barbiana 3. Paulo Freire, Praxis and Power 4. Henry Giroux's Politics of Hope 5. bell hooks: Cultural Production as the Practice of Freedom 6. Critical Pedagogy, Culture and Power 7. Museums as Cultural Politics 8. The Cultural Politics of Fine Arts 9. Popular Culture: Engaging the Popular Imagination and the ‘Holy Week’ Culture Epilogue