Jonathan Wynn

Lecturer

Starting out in Architecture, Jonathan Wynn realized that there was more to life than designing parking spaces and handrails. Having switched to Educational Psychology, Jon was looking for a class in his last semester of undergraduate coursework to round out his minor in Sociology. Previously nonplussed by the discipline, Sociology of Gender opened a window for him: an altogether different framework through which to see how people build and are shaped by the worlds around them.

Upon moving to New York City , Jon was amazed at the millions of stories that made up the lore of the Big Apple. As Michel de Certeau once wrote, we “must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name, folded up inside this thimble like the silk dress of a fairy.” Interest in his new home led to his dissertation work, The Walking Tour Guide: Cultural Workers in the Disneyfied City : a theoretically informed ethnographic study of how unconventional culture workers serve as ‘cultural intermediaries' in urban spaces that are marked by ever-increasing homogeneity, commodification, and banalization. Guides, he found, serve as a ‘bubble of resistance' to those trends—offering up multiple, contrarian, and re-enchanting narratives of urban spaces and history. Segments of his work have been published in Qualitative Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, Radical Society, Contexts Magazine, and an upcoming edited volume on emotional labor and sociological inquiry.

Ever mindful of that training in spaces and the ways that people come to understand the world around them, Jon is currently working on how cultural institutions and participants of large cultural events create the image of a ‘ Creative City .' The first step of this project examined the ways that local musicians, municipal officials, CMA executives, artist management, and local media work to create a ‘festivalization' of Nashville through the Country Music Association Festival. Future research will develop this as a comparative study.

Raised in Buffalo and fresh from Brooklyn, Jon is hoping to hone his fishing skills in Western Massachusetts and is excited about not having to dodge taxis on his bike rides to school.

Phone: 413-585-3678
Office Location: Pierce Hall 205
Office Hours: T 10:30-12:30 (office), W 10:00-11:00 (Haymarket Cafe) and by appt.
Email: jwynn@email.smith.edu

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