Prof. Peter Mayo's 27th book, Culture, Power and Education: Representation, Interpretation, Contestation (Routledge 2025), has just been published. Only 8 of these books are edited or co-edited. The rest are mainly single authored or co-authored. It contains chapters on such cultural critics as bell hooks, Henry Giroux, Antonio Gramsci and Lorenzo Milani besides chapters on the Cultural politics of Museums, Critical Pedagogy, the Cultural Politics of Fine Arts (there are 8 illustrations from MUZA, Malta's premier art collection, and two from St John's Co-Cathedral) and a long chapter on the politics of popular culture in Spain, Malta and Sicily, namely the politics of the Semana Santa. Originally written as Power, Culture and Society, it was a publisher's decision to include Education in the title. There can be after all no discussion on culture without discussion on education/learning conceived in its wider sense, not confined to institutional provision.
- "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" is 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 theorised 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
The book is being translated into and also published in Spanish. It is based, for the most part, on Peter Mayo's second PhD, this one in Estudios Artisticos, Literarios y Cultura.
