Laura Grindstaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a faculty affiliate in Gender Studies, Performance Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural dimensions of sex/gender, race, and class inequality, with a particular emphasis on American media and popular culture. She is the author of The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows as well as numerous articles and essays on aspects of popular culture ranging from sports and cheerleading to reality TV and social media.

Ming-Cheng M. Lo is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Lo's research focuses on culture, illness experiences, and civic engagement. She is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002; Japanese edition, 2014). A recent series of articles addresses the roles of cultural capital and non-dominant cultural resources in health, healthcare, and environmental activism.

John R. Hall is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Davis. His published works include Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity (Polity, 2009), Visual Worlds (Routledge, 2005, with co-editors), Sociology on Culture (Routledge, 2003, with co-authors), and Cultures of Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Introduction: culture, lifeworlds, and globalization (Laura Grindstaff, Ming-Cheng M. Lo, and John R. Hall)Part I: Sociological programs of cultural analysis1. The Strong Program in cultural sociology: meaning first (Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith)2. "Culture studies" and the culture complex (Tony Bennett)3. Sociologies of culture and cultural studies: reflections on inceptions and futures (Jon Cruz)4. Lost in translation: feminist cultural/media studies in the new millennium (Suzanna Danuta Walters)5. The cultural turn: language, globalization, and media (Mark Poster)6. Cultures of colonialism (Nicholas Wilson and Lucas Azambuja)7. Critique and possibility in cultural sociology (Nancy Weiss Hanrahan and Sarah S. Amsler)Part II: The place of "culture" in sociological analysis8. What is "the relative autonomy of culture"? (Jeffrey K. Olick)9. Formal models of culture (John W. Mohr and Craig M. Rawlings)10. Three propositions toward a cultural sociology of climate change (Zeke Baker)11. The sociological experience of cultural objects (Robin Wagner-Pacifici)12. It goes without saying: imagination, inarticulacy, and materiality in political culture (Chandra Mukerji)13. The mechanisms of cultural reproduction: explaining the puzzle of persistence (Orlando Patterson)Part III: Aesthetics, ethics, and cultural legitimacy14. Cultural traumas (Giuseppe Sciortino)15, Modern and postmodern (Peter Beilharz)16. Social aesthetics (Ben Highmore)17. From subtraction to multiplicity: new sociological narrative