urban development
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Today was the first day I tried commuting via bike to school from Belmont. As a kid, I was not allowed to bike in the road. That street, Salmon Falls Rd., was once a country road that has now become a dense cut through where cars drive like they are in the country – with…
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University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK July 13-17, 2009 The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Liverpool was full of excellent papers from scholars around the globe. Sociologists, anthropologists, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, geographers, urbanists, and others presented work on the practice, expressive meanings and significance of popular music in a wide…
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June 14-30, 2008 Following up preliminary fieldwork in Taiwan, this summer I delved deeper into the indie music scenes of Taipei City and Taizhong, Taiwan. I couldn’t help but notice the significant number of Waigoren (English speaking foreigners) on the scene. Digging a bit deeper I found that Waigoren, first American GIs of the Cold…
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I had the opportunity to work with colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University and other area colleges as a member of the local arrangements committee. Lead by Sarah Jane Brubaker and Denise Bissler, we organized all local aspects of the conference, including the venue, accommodations, and literature about amenities, history and culture in the city of…
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Millikin University, Decatur, IL April 2-5, 2009 In April I found myself in the Midwest listening to old time music and learning that the South is overrepresented in American music history and that “Peterson had it wrong” about country music – he couldn’t feel what the music meant to people. As a sociologist from the…
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This past summer, I taught a course in the Sociology of Culture at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). In this class we discussed issues of urban space, development and consumption from the perspective of cultural sociology. After reading Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class and Sharon Zukin’s chapter on North Adams in the Cultures of…
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I had the wonderful opportunity to present with my idols in the field of culture and urbanism at the ASA this year. David Grazian presented work from his forthcoming book On the Make, while Elizabeth Currid detailed the networks of actors who made up the Warhol-era New York Art Scene. Richard Lloyd [Neo-Bohemia: Art in…
jacob alden sargent 