About

I am a teaching sociologist whose scholarly interests primarily include the convergence of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and culture discourses at the site of popular music genres and subcultures. I am deeply fascinated by these convergences that coalesce into both a creolized national language and a meta-cultural dialogue.

Having spent the last four years both teaching sociology and creating performance art, I see a core commonality between these two seemingly disparate fields. This work has more deeply impressed upon me the significance of expressive and experiential popular theory and practice, especially for an ever broadening range of peoples within the urban dynamism that is Chicago. Now, more than ever, I am committed to a social practicum that emphasizes this “theorizing of the popular” and the utility of art as public discourse on a range of issues of –isms, often told from the perspectives of peoples directly impacted.

Art for social scientists has historically been and continues to be a powerful voice from the margins. Even when commercialized, art rooted in popular vernacular grippingly retains its unique articulations of and responses to the very processes that seek to commodify it. These expressions are clever and innovative, often contributing new or improved modes of communication and media, in ways that speak to and critique artists’ communities of origin and societies-at-large.