We are delighted to introduce all the new journal Editors for 2021-2026: Nadya Jaworsky (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), Ming-Cheng Lo (University of California, Davis, USA), Marcus Morgan (University of Bristol, UK), Christopher Thorpe (University of Exeter, UK) and Rin Ushiyama (Queen’s University Belfast, UK).

We asked the Editors about their vision for future directions of Cultural Sociology.

Nadya Jaworsky
I am so pleased to have joined the editorial team of Cultural Sociology! I’m excited to work with my colleagues and to usher the journal into its next phase. I distinctly remember when Cultural Sociology was established in 2007. As a graduate student at Yale, and an enthusiastic, fairly new devotee of cultural sociology, I thought to myself: ‘This is it – we are on the map!’ I could hardly fathom that we now had an entire journal dedicated to cultural sociology. I quickly came to realise that there was a wealth of research and theorising about culture that involved multiple methods and perspectives and different disciplines. For me, such an awakening speaks to the continued potential of the journal’s mission. Its dedication to intellectual diversity stands at the core of my vision for the journal’s future.

Ming-Cheng Lo
I am so pleased to have joined the editorial team for Cultural Sociology! To me, how social actors make sense of their worlds has always been a key component of sociological research. Since its foundation, Cultural Sociology offers an important and vibrant forum for conversations about cultural sociological analyses of a broad array of topics, not just for British scholars but also sociologists from many other regions. I am excited to join my co-editors to carry on and expand this mission, especially at a time when cultural approaches are becoming increasingly important for many emergent social issues.

Marcus Morgan
Editing Cultural Sociology from the beginning of 2021 has been a rewarding experience. Since gathering a full new editorial team together, we’ve been able to develop our collective vision for the journal. What I’m most excited about in this respect is encouraging scholarship demonstrating how a cultural sociological perspective can help illuminate, and possibly even indicate solutions for, a variety of social phenomena that are often considered non-cultural. In other words, as well as publishing research addressing culture in the narrower sense of that word, we wish to also encourage work aimed at showing how political, economic, environmental, and material issues are every bit as ‘cultural’ as such things as the arts, food consumption, or religion. In this way, we aspire to show how cultural sociology can be relevant to addressing many of the pressing issues of the day, from the climate crisis to the return of authoritarian populism in mainstream politics.

Christopher Thorpe
As someone for whom culture matters in all its manifestations, (re)appointment to the editorial team for Cultural Sociology means a great deal to me – both personally and professionally. Currently, issues of culture and cultural issues loom large within sociology as well as wider public discourse. It is a very exciting time indeed to be involved with the journal. Moreover, that the new editorial team includes scholars from a diverse range of cultural and intellectual backgrounds serves to enrich the collaborative dimensions of the work that journal editorship entails.

Rin Ushiyama
It has been a pleasure to be part of Cultural Sociology’s diverse editorial team since I joined in summer 2021. I have always thought of Cultural Sociology as a broad church, which appeals to authors and readers that work on academic debates well beyond ‘culture’ as a narrowly defined area of research. In this respect, I am especially excited to carry on and expand this vision of the journal as a truly global forum that hosts scholarly discussions ranging from new readings of classic texts to theoretical and methodological innovations for understanding emerging social problems.

Cultural Sociology was launched in 2007 by founding Editor David Inglis to create a dedicated journal for the cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. This year the journal saw its highest ever impact factor of 1.792.

Cultural Sociology publishes peer-reviewed, empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous papers, which explore from a broad set of sociological perspectives a diverse range of socio-cultural forces, phenomena, institutions and contexts. The journal publishes original articles which advance the field of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture.

The editors welcome submissions to the journal to continue its contribution to the field. We are seeking innovative, sociologically-informed work concerned with cultural processes and artefacts, broadly defined. The editors are particularly interested in submissions on the following topics:

• Cultural analyses of contemporary issues, such as climate change, populism, and racism
• Research that serves to globalize, diversify, or decolonize cultural sociology
• Sociology of arts, music, literature, or other cultural products

To submit: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/CUS