A Return to Strauss: Imagining the City

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Space and Place

Abstract

This paper applies Lofland’s 2011 call to revisit both urban sociology as a concern of symbolic interaction, and to revisit Strauss in particular as an urban interactionist. This article will outline visions of a Straussian city, and use interview data from a multi-sited ethnographic investigation in early 21st-century Philadelphia to discuss what sociologists can learn from the ways in which arts and culture advocates imagine a multiracial utopia, a city of symbolic and social interaction rooted directly community-based arts. I argue that fusing symbolic interationism and urban sociology enables a new understanding of the ways people “see” their cities, and the way these visions impact ongoing concerns over diversity, alienation, segregation, and racialized patterns of inequality.

Author

• Carolyn Chernoff, Skidmore College