This introductory essay outlines some of the issues that surround contemporary engagements with the “popular” as a site of political struggle and change. This piece notes that in the 30 years since Stuart Hall published his seminal essay, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” the power relations that define the term as well as the way in which scholars study the popular have shifted in profound ways. The authors argue that, rather than simply equating the popular with popular culture, it is necessary to recognize that the popular is a contingent term that marks the possibility of constituting forms of collective agency and the potential for bringing about social and political change.

In this article, I explore the contemporary political and governmental enthusiasm for the participation of ordinary people in fields of economic, social, and political life. I sketch some examples of this growing enthusiasm, beginning with the transformation of welfare states. I then explore different accounts of the centrality of ordinary people to contemporary political and governmental strategies, considering the emergence of advanced liberal efforts of construct “responsible” subjects; the role of popular participation in neoliberalism's de-politicizing tendencies; and the ambiguous place of the people in authoritarian populist politics. I consider the capacity of the idea of “ordinary people” to connect different sites of political and governmental innovation—and the failure of ordinary people to live up to their idealized status.

This article analyzes the new social type of the “yummy mummy” in British culture, which both marks a substantial cultural shift—given that the Western Christian tradition has typically positioned mothers as asexual—and is simultaneously produced by increasing economic inequalities (which are particularly marked in relation to childcare). Drawing from a range of sources, particularly celebrity guidebooks and “hen lit” novels, this article argues that the yummy mummy functions to elide such social contexts and espouses a girlish, high-consuming maternal ideal as a site of hyperindividualized psychological “maturity.” “Successful” maternal femininity is articulated by rejecting “environmentally conscious” behavior and by rendering what are presented as excessive eco-delusions both abject and transparent. This tendency is indicative of the conservative nature of the phenomenon, which is forced to disavow wider structures of social, political, and ecological dependency in order for its conservative fantasy of autonomous, individualizing retreatism to be maintained.

This study isolates the phenomenon of “'Hood Work,” encompassing street-level youth advocacy agencies employing hip-hop's core elements (b-boying, aerosol art, DJing, and MCing) to engage disenfranchised teens in urban environments. By mobilizing hip-hop's popular practices and inculcating critical media literacy in an attempt to guide and “empower” teens, 'Hood Workers seek to assist their young wards in interpreting, deconstructing, and challenging mainstream or commercial media representations of urban youth. Yet while 'Hood Work agencies occupy an intermediary role, navigating the complex relationships between urban youth and adult entities, they also emerge as agencies of neoliberal expediency, assuming responsibilities—and authority—once assumed by other formal institutions and social actors.

Camp is a queer sense-making practice that subverts dominant gender norms and heteronormative practices and institutions. Scholars have posited that camp is an artifact of oppression-era queer history and that an age of relative queer conspicuousness neither allows for nor necessitates its existence, thereby resulting in its death. This study challenges that supposition by offering a camp reading of Karen Walker (Megan Mullally) from NBC's Will & Grace (1998–2006). Though the show has been criticized for its relatively safe queer representations, this study demonstrates the ways in which it relied on camp humor to deconstruct normative gender and sexuality practices. Future research should use empirical measures to address the role that camp plays in the lives of contemporary queer spectators.

The NIKE(RED) Lace Up, Save Lives campaign debuted during the 2010 FIFA World Cup and invoked multiple discourses of nationalism, global citizenship, and sport to promote conscious consumerism. By co-opting symbolism of Africa's first World Cup, NIKE(RED) sold activist identities through myths of postracial harmony. The global appeal of NIKE(RED) relied upon support from soccer superstars who endorsed consumerism as cool. We argue that NIKE(RED) and the subsequent INSPI(RED) partnership exemplify commodity activism and reproduce colonial stereotypes of powerful Western consumers acting as saviors in the Third World. We critically examine news, Web sites, grassroots soccer organizations, and advertisements from the United States, UK, and Italy to address the multimedia global nature of NIKE(RED) and grassroots soccer activism.

In this article, YouTube is examined as an evolving news medium in the context of global journalism. The article examines what the news is made of and YouTube's distinctive features as an emerging news culture and style. The article is based on netnography, in which the construction and circulation of a news story have been tracked by tracing the so-called “flotilla” news event. It is found that YouTube promotes visually motivated, amateur-driven news culture that alters the truth claims of news and the professional hegemony of news making, and affects the ways in which we, as the audience, maintain relations with professional news institutions, people, places, and practices related to news making and the globalized world beyond “our own.”