Meaning making

Cultural sociology is the study of meaning making explains Mears. ‘How do people form ideas about the world and how do those meanings simultaneously shape the world? This chair emphasizes media as a part of those processes, including social media and interactions in digital spaces.’

Bringing the discipline of sociology up to date

‘Sociology has been relatively slow to center questions of new media and digital change, though the world, and sociology’s core topics, have been fundamentally transformed by them’, states Mears. This chair brings the discipline of sociology up to date to consider the future of work on platforms, stratification via algorithms, and cultural production and consumption as it happens online.   

One of the best places in the world

Mears is really excited to join a creative group of scholars, ‘my future colleagues’, who have been advancing cultural sociology with innovative methods and a range of timely research topics.  ‘I was a visiting scholar in the Sociology department in Fall 2013, when I was still a junior faculty, and back then I was mighty impressed with the caliber of their research and their engagement with one another’s works. Meanwhile at the UvA, media and digital cultural studies have blossomed, making UvA one of the best places in the world in my view for research on cultural sociology in the digital age.’ 

The chair will start 1 January 2024.