35 research outputs found
Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective
Employing visual and autoethnographic data from a twoâyear research project on distance runners, this article seeks to examine the activity of seeing in relation to the activity of distance running. One of its methodological aims is to develop the linkage between visual and autoethnographic data in combining an observationâbased narrative and sociological analysis with photographs. This combination aims to convey to the reader not only some of the specific subcultural knowledge and particular ways of seeing, but also something of the runner's embodied feelings and experience of momentum en route. Via the combination of narrative and photographs we seek a more effective way of communicating just how distance runners see and experience their training terrain. The importance of subjecting mundane everyday practices to detailed sociological analysis has been highlighted by many sociologists, including those of an ethnomethodological perspective. Indeed, without the competence of social actors in accomplishing these mundane, routine understandings and practices, it is argued, there would in fact be no social order
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Review of Aaron Fox. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
One of the principal tools for acquiring and maintaining cachet in the so-cial commonwealth of the barroom or roadhouse springs from a person's capacity to tell a story, and the more humorous or idiosyncratic the better. Ethnographic efforts to convey the ethos of just such an environment and means of communication often, sadly, sap the life out of this kind of infor-mal discourse and render routine what would otherwise be irregular and idiosyncratic. Aaron Fox's Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture constitutes one of those rare occasions when conjuring up a world most readers, certainly those from the academic domain, rarely en-counter does not compromise either its citizens or their self-determined means of communication
Stories we could tell: words to American popular music
How has the history of rock ânâ roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genreâs primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is the cost of failing to question such assumptions? "Stories We Could Tell:Putting Words to American Popular Music" identifies eight typical strategies used when critics and historians write about American popular music, and subjects each to forensic analysis.ăThis posthumous book is a unique work of cultural historiography that analyses, catalogues, and contextualizes music writing in order to afford the reader new perspectives on the field of cultural production, and offer new ways of thinking about, and writing about, popular music
Did Wigan have a Northern Soul?
After the British marketing of Detroitâs take on electronic dance music in 1988, with the compilation Techno! The New Sound of Detroit, techno music has been interwoven with a particular representation of this North American city. Resonating internationally with other electronic dance music scenes, a unique mythology of Detroit techno draws new audiences to what was the capital of the Fordist automobile industry. Opening the discussion with Movement, the electronic festival central to Detroitâs annual Techno Week, we argue that Detroit and its citizens activate techno music to promote the renaissance of this once powerful industrial metropolis. Techno, and its associated cultural capital, act as value producers in the context of macro-economic urban regeneration processes within the local history and African-American futurist music aesthetics. From Detroit in the current era we trace back key issues, such as the mythology of Detroit as the âTechno Cityâ and its DJ-producers, contrasting politics in Detroitâs techno scenes, and the appropriation of abandoned industrial spaces. Finally, the chapter addresses a dialogue of emerging techno music producers with the aesthetics of house music in Midwestern American industrial metropolis, Chicago. It is argued that techno dance music has articulated the technoculture since the late 1980s: in other words, it signifies lived experience of culture dominated by information and communication technologies in a city that had partly morphed into a post-industrial ruin