Arbiters of Race

Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-73845-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 244 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Advancing the conversation on cultural intermediation by adding the muchoverlooked reality of racism, this edited collection offers a much-needed critical and contemporary focus on the ever-changing landscape of race in the marketplace.

Arbiters of Race: Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries addresses the pressing need, in the third decade of the 21st century, to push social theory to incorporate race and racism in our understanding of cultural intermediation—to recognize that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in framing goods, services, ideas, and behaviors as legitimate and worthy, instilling goods with meanings by engaging in specific cultural narratives that have a fundamentally racial character of consumer industries.

Having changed dramatically since the 1980s and 1990s, cultural and creative markets have become unrecognizable such that cultural intermediaries today manipulate social and cultural tastes as actors in the consumer market to construct value and meaning for products, practices, and consumers—particularly in the cultural and creative industries.

The essays in this collection acknowledge the very real risk of reproducing the very racist structures these markets and industries were founded on, and go beyond past work on cultural intermediaries to challenge the exclusionary racial structures within which cultural markets historically and currently operate.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brunsma, David L.

Withers, Erik T.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Volkswirtschaftslehre Allgemein Verhaltensökonomik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction Erik T. Withers and David L. Brunsma; Section I: Arbitering Race in the Media; 1. Organizations as Cultural Intermediaries? A Case Study of a Conservative Think Tank, Annie Jones and J. Scott Carter; 2. Cultural Intermediaries Promoting Critical Racial Consciousness: The Potential Public Pedagogy of Podcasts, Jan Martin Meij; Section II: Arbitering Race in Creative Industries; 3. Behind the Scenes: The Institutional Uses of “Diversity” in the Production of MoMA’s Film Curatorship, Tania Aparicio; 4. Curating Music Festivals: The Racialized Entanglements in the Curation of Music Festivals, Jo Haynes; Section III: Arbitering Race in Bodies; 5. “The Darkest Shade”: Mediating the Politics of Skin Tone, Jordan Foster; 6. Cosmetic Surgeons as Arbiters of a Beautiful Nose: The Nariz Negroide in Brazil, Carole Myers; Section IV: Arbitering Race in Consumer Goods and Services; 7. Becoming Tastemakers: The Affective Labor of Latinx Millennials in the Specialty Coffee Industry, Karina Santellano; 8. Justice, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Déjà Vu: Cultural Intermediaries in the Fashion Apparel Retail Industry, Sherita M. Cuffee and Shelly L. Brown-Jeffy; 9. Racial Capitalism on the Retail Sales Floor: Examining Cultural Arbiters as Organizationally Embedded Actors and Informal Practices that Perpetuate the Racial Ordering of Consumers, Cassi Pittman Claytor; Section V: Arbitering Race in Racialized Space; 10. “You Almost Can’t Describe It”: A Case Study of the National Urban League Conference for Black Space, Social Movement Communities, and Cultural Intermediaries, Candace C. Robinson; 11. Commercial Gentrification and Local Businesses as Cultural Intermediaries in the Racialization of Space, Steven Tuttle

Über Autor(innen)

Erik T. Withers is Assistant Professor in the Sociology, Criminology, and Anthropology Department at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, where he also serves as the coordinator of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies program. He researches and teaches in the subject areas of race and ethnicity, gender and sexualities, and consumer culture. He and his wife (Vanessa) have three daughters (Harper, Ellison, and Hope). In his free time, he explores Western Wisconsin with them and coaches their ice hockey and softball teams.

David L. Brunsma is Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. He is founding coeditor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the official journal of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities at the American Sociological Association, as well as the founding coeditor of the University of Georgia Press book series of the same name. His research is currently focused on understanding the ways that whitespaces function across multiple domains of social and cultural life. He lives, learns, and loves in Blacksburg, VA, with his family.