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About Michael Johnston
Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He received his Ph.D. of Public Administration from Walden University. He uses celebrations and festival as a lens to capture the sociology of both the body and place. He uses media representations from local newspapers and online videos to understand the local history and culture that people share and incorporate into their construction of place and identity. His book, Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington, 2022), is about media representations of an interstate tug of war festival that occurs annually between Iowa and Illinois. The interstate Tug Festival was founded as a recreational activity that also stirred economic growth in the two cities. Tug Fest was found to be embedded in environment, economy, local politics, and body politics (masculinity and young age in particular). He also recently published The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant (2020) in Gender Issues. This was a content analysis of responses to interviews that tulip queens and royal attendants over a 10-year-period shared with local news media. The article details the significance of social, cultural, and economic capital in having the proper clout to become a tulip queen or a royal attendant as a member of the royal court. The article, however, does not completely dismiss the tulip pageant as a tragic event that is in need of being cancelled. The findings of this study also show the positive outcomes for the girls who are part of the tulip pageant. The culmination of this article is an argument that celebrations and festivals (like Tulip Time Festival and Tulip Queen Pageant) are critical to the culture of cities and their heritage. The findings of this study recommend that stakeholders and residents of communities that host annual festivals must acknowledge and bring change to the exclusionary practices that have become part of their celebration.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.
NBN Episodes hosted by Michael:
May 1, 2024
Culture is Not an Industry
According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded ar…
March 27, 2024
Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics
Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In…
March 26, 2024
Everyday Life in the Spectacular City
Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai (U California Press, 2024) is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-c…
February 21, 2024
The City and the Hospital
An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically un…
February 17, 2024
Naked Fieldnotes
Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is anal…
February 4, 2024
Blood and Lightening
Any tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a…
December 19, 2023
Body Art
Body art, especially tattoos and piercings, has enjoyed an explosion of interest in recent years. However, the response of many health professionals…
November 24, 2023
Trailer Park America
In rural northern Idaho in the winter of 2013-2014, Syringa Mobile Home Park’s water system was contaminated by sewage, resulting in residents’ water …
November 7, 2023
Waste and the City
In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Colin McFarlane, through Was…
October 31, 2023
The Authenticity Industries
In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive vi…
October 20, 2023
Traders and Tinkers
Michael O. Johnston sits down with Maitrayee Deka, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex to discuss her new book Traders and Tinkers…
October 19, 2023
Intoxication
For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties…
October 13, 2023
Beyond Bars
The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associat…
September 14, 2023
Technosleep
Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, li…
July 26, 2023
The Peer Effect
For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as pare…
June 23, 2023
Mining the Heartland
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in t…
June 19, 2023
The City Authentic
The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by …
May 25, 2023
The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune
Luck greatly influences a person's quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens soci…
May 24, 2023
Decolonize Self-Care
For twentieth-century feminists, it was a rallying cry for bodily autonomy and political power. For influencers and lifestyle brands, it’s buying fanc…
April 11, 2023
Betting on Macau
A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet. Betting on …
February 26, 2023
Fair Share
If you’ve ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jarg…
February 18, 2023
Urban Play
Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers. …
January 29, 2023
Stacked Decks
Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The buil…
December 20, 2022
How Artifacts Afford
Technologies are intrinsically social. They reflect human values and affect human behavior. The social dynamics of technology materialize through desi…