Race, Popular Media, and Global Culture

In the contemporary landscape, media is ubiquitous with digital technologies changing mediascapes everyday. The amount of media content produced in different modes, realized by various creators, and distributed for diverse audiences allows for a robust body of work to be catalogued, discussed, analyzed, debated, and critiqued. This series encourages engagement of sociological perspectives with contemporary media in order to become immersed in this wave of content.

Meanwhile, human interactions across the world have become more interconnected with technological advancements. This shift has facilitated the distribution of cultural practices, forms, traditions, and beliefs across global spaces. In doing so, messages about social characteristics such as race, and ethnicity have also traveled. Understandings of race and ethnicity are context specific, and thus, in their own right, develop multiple meanings in disparate cultures. Research on the sociological impacts of race, media, and culture in today’s world would help make sense of these cultural shifts.

Such a time of technological advancement, global shifts, and cultural contact is ripe for investigations of meanings and understandings of race and ethnicity in media cultures that enhances prior knowledge in the field of sociology. The aim of this series is to provide sociological insight into key theoretical shifts and empirical points of interest that define this era with respect to the intersections of race, media, and culture. The goal is to feature bold voices that use sociological approaches to make compelling arguments as to why race, media, and culture continue to matter in society and how digital technologies might shift our knowledge of these intersections.