Qualitative Sociology Review
2009
Volume V Issue 2


Contributors

J. Patrick Williams is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He studies youth subcultures, digital media, and identity and has published research in those areas in Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Deviant Behavior, and elsewhere. He has edited two books on gaming, Gaming as Culture: Essays in Social Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games (McFarland 2006) and The Players' Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming (McFarland 2007), as well as a book on identity and authenticity, Authenticity in Self, Culture and Society (Ashgate 2009). He is currently writing a book on subcultural studies for Polity Press.

Contact: patrick.williams@ntu.edu.sg

Robert Prus is a sociologist at the University of Waterloo. A symbolic interactionist, pragmatist ethnographer, and social theorist, his publications include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. Working as an ethnohistorian and theorist, Robert Prus has been tracing the developmental flows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c700-300BCE) to the present time. Focusing on the nature of human knowing and acting, this venture has taken him into several areas of western social thought -- including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, history, education, politics, and philosophy. Questing for the articulation and assessment of generic social processes pertaining to the study of community life, this project also is informed by comparative analysis of these transhistorical and transcontextual materials.

Contact: prus@uwaterloo.ca

Richard G. Mitchell practices the ethnographer’s craft from his academic home at Oregon State University. His long term interests include the human capacity to embrace uncertainty: curiosity, creativity, exploration, invention, entrepreneuring and culturecraft, avocational adventuring, and the quandaries of professional ethics. Publications include Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure and Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times published by the University of Chicago Press, and Secrecy and Fieldwork by Sage. After years of mountaineering and sea kayaking he now searches for the wonderments of social life in the journeying self, in road trips, travel rites of passage, and the role of intentional stranger, on his BMW motorcycle, and lately, his Rivendell bicycle, through North America and Asia.

Contact: mitchelR@onid.orst.edu

Katarina Jacobsson is an Associate Professor of sociology at Department of Social Work, Lund University. Her major research areas are qualitative studies of deviance, social control, and medical sociology.

Contact: katarina.jacobsson@soch.lu.se

Malin Åkerström is professor at Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. Her research interest covers areas such as qualitative studies of social problems, and medical sociology.

Contact: malin.akerstrom@soc.lu.se

D. Mark Austin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Louisville and also serves on the program faculty of the Urban and Public Affairs Ph.D. program. A good deal of his past and current research has focused on issues related to community and urban sociology examining matters such as perceptions of safety, attitudes about growth and the environment, reactions to crime, and factors related to neighborhood satisfaction. While much of his past research has focused on geographically stable communities, in more recent work he has examined issues related to geographically mobile communities with some of the research dealing with community, historical, and subcultural issues involving motorcyclists in American culture. Another ongoing project involves an examination of individuals that live or spend extended periods of time living on the road. Some of his recent works include "Graffiti and Perceptions of Safety: A Pilot Study Using Photographs and Survey Data" with Claudia Sanders; "Community in a Mobile Subculture: The World of the Touring Motorcyclist" with Patricia Gagne'; "Commodification and Popular Imagery of the Biker in American Culture" with Patricia Gagne' and Angela Orend; and "The Effects of Neighborhood Satisfaction on Perception of Safety Among Refugees From the Former Soviet Union," (with L. Allen Furr, Sarah Cribbs, and Steve Smoger).

Contact: austin@louisville.edu