About this ebook
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.
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About the author
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.
