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Rima Wilkes, Media Practices and Protest Politics: How Precarious Workers Mobilise By Alice Mattoni Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2012. 197 pages. $89.96 cloth, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 4, June 2015, Page e99, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot001
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Extract
One quick click on the link to the Serpica Naro website (http://serpica.tumblr.com/) reveals a series of trendy fashion and lifestyle images. Among them are pictures of three hand-crocheted skulls, a picture of a lace “installation” along the Baltic Sea and written quotes from Voltaire, Joe Strummer and Lady Gaga in upscale fonts. As a collectivity, the images, and the others that sit by their side, give the impression of a new modern lifestyle where anything goes. Websites like this are now a de jure form of self-expression and representation among the designers, architects and fashionistas who pervade the culture industry. The Serpica Naro site and its images do, however, differ from the other such sites in one important way: said to be the product of an Anglo-Japanese fashion designer, Serpica Naro is a media hoax. She is the fictitious creation of the Italian social movement group Chainworkers Crew. Not only did Chainworkers Crew set up the site, but it also succeeded in enrolling Serpica Naro in the February 2005 Milan Fashion week show. There, Serpica Naro was attacked via a staged conflict about precarious work practices with activists from the Chainworkers Crew.