About the Authors

Thaddeus Atzmon is Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. He completed his M.A. at Texas State University in 2015. His master’s thesis is: “Understanding the Perceptions and Experiences of Jews in Texas,” which received funding support from the Texas Jewish Historical Society and the Texas State Liberal Arts College. Thaddeus’ primary research interests include Jewish identity, the sociology of music, racial and ethnic relations, and antisemitism in the contemporary United States. In his free time, he enjoys consuming any and all forms of music, reading, craft beers, and bike riding.

Andrea Baker (andee) is Associate Professor of Sociology, Emerita at Ohio University. She wrote an academic book about 89 couples that first met online on dating sites, in chat, playing games, or in discussion groups (Double Click, Hampton Press, 2005). More recently, she interviewed over 100 fans of The Rolling Stones from three discussion boards for You Get What You Need (Miniver Press, 2014), geared toward popular audiences. Her research interests and published articles include the topics of rock music fandom and celebrity, online communities, identities, and relationships, and qualitative methodologies.

Jonafa Banbury is a Graduate of Texas State University where she received her Master of Arts in Sociology. Jonafa serves as the co-chair of the Black Performing Arts subject area of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association. She is also an ordained minister and the creative director and host of an online religious talk show titled “Listen Radio.” Her current project expands on her thesis research of African American women in non-denominational ministry in a statewide effort to create a coalition of women ministers that seeks to focus on and counteract gender discrimination in religious settings. Her areas of interest and scholarship include diversity studies, multicultural relations, women and gender studies, popular culture, and religion. Jonafa enjoys spending time with her three children Joshua, A’leya, and Xavier and husband Alex, listening to music, and reading.

Scott W. Bowman is Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. Dr. Bowman earned his Ph.D. in Justice Studies from Arizona State University with an emphasis on racial and socioeconomic inequalities. His current teaching and research interests include race and crime, socioeconomic status and crime, hip-hop and positive youth development, and juvenile justice. His recent research appears as various academic journals and books on a variety of criminological and sociological topics, including a two volume, edited book on race and prisons entitled “Color Behind Bars: Racism in the U.S. Prison System.”

Joshua Childs is Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Educational Administration Department. His research focuses on interorganizational networks and the possibility of leveraging networks to efficiently and effectively address complex and urgent educational problems.

Maggie Colleen Cobb is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include the sociology of culture, specifically music and narrative, as well as social psychology, particularly the sociology of emotion and identity. Her current research combines social constructionism and symbolic interactionism to explore the cultural “work” accomplished by the synthesis of music and storytelling, and how this informs and is informed by emotional experience. Using the creative process of songwriting as an empirical platform, her dissertation examines how participants use stories in and around this process to assign meaning to their experiences, construct and maintain personal and collective identities, interpret and express emotionality, and purposefully evoke social change.

Robert Owen Gardner (Ph.D. University of Colorado-Boulder) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. His graduate fieldwork focused on the formation of “portable communities” within the vibrant bluegrass music festival scene in the Rocky Mountain West. An avid bluegrass guitarist, he continues to participate in and study the bluegrass and jamband subcultures in the Pacific Northwest. His previous work on music scenes and communities has appeared in the journal Symbolic Interaction and the edited series Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Currently, Robert is examining grassroots volunteerism and organizational emergence in post-disaster recovery.

Eugene Halton is the author of From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution (2014); The Great Brain Suck; Bereft of Reason; Meaning and Modernity; and coauthor, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of The Meaning of Things. He is also a professional harmonica player and guerilla philosopher, and professor in the sociology department of the University of Notre Dame. He recently contributed a chapter to a collection, Planet of the Apes and Philosophy. His song “Tow Truck Man” appears on the Delmark Records CD by Willie Buck titled, Cell Phone Man (2011), and he also wrote the lyrics to “Empty Bed Blues,” which appears on Rockin’ Johnny’s CD, Greetings from Greaseland (2015), on West Coast Records.

Joseph A. Kotarba is Professor of Sociology at Texas State University in San Marcos. He left the University of Houston in 2010 to establish the Center for Social Inquiry at Texas State, to enhance the research profile of the department of sociology there. Dr. Kotarba received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, in 1980. He has published nine books and over 100 articles and essays. Over time, Joseph has consolidated his broad interests in everyday life into a focus on culture. His first love remains the sociology of popular music, which culminated in his book on Baby Boomer Rock ‘n’ Roll Fans in 2013 for which he received the Charles Horton Cooley Award for Best Book from SSSI. Dr. Kotarba recently expanded his interest in adult music culture by means of a Fulbright Award that allowed him to study with colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden. His second love is the culture of science. He is examining the evolving self-identity of contemporary bio-medical scientists through his appointment to the faculty at the Institute for Translational Sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Kotarba received SSSI’s George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, and the Mentor’s Excellence Award in 2010. Joe served as the president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 1998.

Thaddeus Müller is Senior Lecturer at the School of Law of Lancaster University (criminology) and has worked for the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His PhD-dissertation, “The warm city” (2002) is based on a micro-sociological study of the (positive) meanings of fleeting interactions among strangers in the public realm. These public interactions help to create the experience of feeling at home and included in urban society. His main interests are the daily (back stage) practice of qualitative research (“ethnic”) youth in late modernity, perspectives on safety in public spaces of multicultural neighborhoods and the production, regulation, and consumption of drugs, especially cannabis. He has also published on music (Lou Reed) and academic fraud (and its relation to academic organizations), especially on the case of Diederik Stapel. He has been an active member of the board of the European SSSI and has edited several publications on European qualitative research.

Dina C. Nash had a long career in Social Work and PhD level graduate work and teaching in Criminology. Her hobbies are singing, organic gardening, and environmental advocacy. Dina belonged to two different Sweet Adelines groups for a total of two and a half years. She and Jeff sing as a duet, and they are the darlings of the nursing home circuit.

Jeffrey E. Nash is Professor emeritus (Missouri State University) and former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is author of The Meanings of Social Interaction with James Calonico and he co-edited with Paul Higgins two editions of Understanding Deafness Socially. He has articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics from bulldogs to barbershop singing. With Charles Edgley, he is co-editor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and he has been a barbershop singer for 12 years.

Christopher J. Schneider is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. Dr. Schneider’s recent research and publications focus on social media and everyday life. He has published three books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. His forthcoming book Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media (Lexington Books | Rowman & Littlefield) examines social media and related changes to police work in Canada. Dr. Schneider has received awards for his teaching, research, and service contributions. In 2013, he received a Distinguished Academics Award awarded by the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia. Dr. Schneider’s research and commentary have been featured in hundreds of news reports across North America, including The New York Times.

Raphael Travis’ research, practice and consultancy work emphasizes positive youth development over the life-course, resilience, and civic engagement. He also investigates the role of music in people’s lives, especially Hip-Hop culture as a source of growth and risk. Dr. Travis is an Associate Professor at Texas State University in the School of Social Work. He is Executive Director of FlowStory, PLLC, using social work skills and research for health promotion. FlowStory also promotes the empowering aspects of Hip Hop culture as a critical tool for growth in families, education, therapy, and afterschool and summer programs. His recent research appears in interdisciplinary academic journals, and he is the author of the new book entitled, “The Healing Power of Hip Hop.”

Renee Villanueva is a Graduate of the Texas State University School of Social Work. Her expertise is in mental and behavioral health among youth.

J. Patrick Williams is Associate Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University. He has many research publications related to youth cultures and subculture, music, and media. He has edited and authored several books, including Authenticity is Self, Culture and Society (Ashgate, 2009), Subcultural Theory: Traditions and Concepts (Polity Press, 2011), and Understanding Society through Popular Music (Routledge, 2013).