Where the Music Takes You : The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures

Today's students access a variety of media to keep abreast of new and up-and-coming musical artists. Where the Music Takes You turns this interest into a successful vehicle for educating readers about some of the most fundamental sociological and methodological concepts, including rituals, symbols, ethnography, participant observation, and symbolic interactionist theory.

Today''s students access a variety of media to keep abreast of new and up-and-coming musical artists. Where the Music Takes You: The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures turns this interest into a successful vehicle for educating readers about some of the most fundamental sociological and methodological concepts, including rituals, symbols, ethnography, participant observation, and symbolic interactionist theory.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I introduces readers to subcultures, subcultural theory, and the jamband subculture. It also discusses methods and analyses used in researching such subcultures. Part II provides a social psychological perspective on subcultural phenomena, including measuring subcultural embeddedness and identity. Part III paints a colorful ethnographic portrait by examining a day in the life of jamband subculture members.

Where the Music Takes You provides numerous examples of deviance, social psychology, and sociological theory. The text includes a glossary of relevant terms, and a How-to Festival Guide. It successfully introduces students to the interconnectedness of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Where the Music Takes You can be used in courses such as social psychology, deviance, cultural anthropology, and research methods.

Pamela M. Hunt earned her Ph.D. at Kent State University. In 2007 she was the recipient of the American Sociological Association''s section on Emotions Graduate Student Paper Award. Since 2008 Dr. Hunt has served as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of West Georgia. In 2010 she launched the Center for the Study of Social Dynamics, a teaching and research laboratory for social science faculty and students. Dr. Hunt has done extensive field research in the jamband music subculture and has conducted both survey research and laboratory experiments on the subjects of emotion, identity, deviance, language, and social psychology. Her work has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly and Deviant Behavior, and she is the co-editor of the journal Studies in the Social Sciences.