Krista E. Paulsen

Associate Professor of Sociology
(Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara)
Community and urban sociology, culture, qualitative methods, organizations, gender.

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2000. UCSB’s Sociology Department is known for its emphasis on culture, feminist studies, and qualitative methodology, and these areas of sociology continue to shape my approach to the discipline. I currently teach Urban Sociology, Gender and Society, Introduction to Sociology, Qualitative Methods (undergraduate and graduate) and the department’s Junior Seminar, in addition to occasional Special Topics courses. I will be on sabbatical during the 2006-7 academic year, but will be available for periodic consultations with students.

My research examines intersections of culture and locality through a variety of approaches. First, I have an ongoing interest in theoretical and methodological questions regarding place distinction. A number of scholars argue that globalization has led to increasing homogeneity among places, while others contend that small distinctions between places—differences in local character—play an important role in attracting increasingly mobile migrants and capital. While residents and visitors routinely notice and articulate these subtle distinctions among places, traditional social science measures have provided little insight into how they might be documented and understood. Harvey Molotch, William Freudenburg and I offered a model for understanding how elements of place combine in distinct ways, how these patterns persist over time, in a piece published in American Sociological Review (2000). I later extended our work with an examination of methods appropriate to studying place distinction in City and Community in 2004.

A second strand of my research examines how cultural institutions fare in dynamic local environments. Toward this end I have studied how and why county fairs continue to thrive in urbanizing areas. This work engages scholarship in urban and community sociology as well as works in institutional theory, the production of culture, and collective memory. As I contend in a 2005 piece published in Poetics, one explanation for fairs’ durability rests in the conservative institutional logic of their competitive exhibit programs—displays of pies, quilts, doilies, and the like—that reward conformity to established aesthetic norms. A second explanation rests in locals’ commitment to fairs as important symbolic events within their communities, and their subsequent willingness to defend fairs and fairgrounds against urban development pressures. Works published in Research in Community Sociology and accepted for publication by Qualitative Sociology examine how fairgrounds become sites of meaning and memory, and how these meanings in turn motivate political action.

My current work examines a third dimension of the place/culture nexus: the role of routine marketing practices in defining new residential communities. Working in collaboration with students at UNF, I have sought to understand how taken-for-granted practices within residential marketing suggest what type of household would be “at home” in a given community. Preliminary findings reveal that in seeking to address promising “target markets,” developers represent communities as home to homogeneous residents. Furthermore, marketing materials produced by developers and realtors become cultural resources that individuals might draw upon in order to understand what makes for a desirable home or community.

Recent Publications:

Krista E. Paulsen and Kristin Staggs. 2005. “Constraint and Reproduction in an Amateur Craft Institution: The Conservative Logic of the County Fair.” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 33(2): 134-155.

Krista E. Paulsen. 2004. "Making Character Concrete: Empirical Strategies for Studying Place Distinction." City and Community 3(3):243-262.

Krista E. Paulsen. 2003. "County Fairs" and "Institutionalization." Christensen, Karen and David Levinson (General Editors). 2003. Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Krista E. Paulsen, Harvey Molotch and William Freudenburg. 2002. "Data Happen, but How?" American Sociological Review 67(6): 917-924.

Krista E. Paulsen. 2000. “Saving a Place for the County Fair: Institutional Space and the Maintenance of Community.” Research in Community Sociology, Volume 10.

Harvey Molotch, William Freudenburg and Krista E. Paulsen. 2000. “History Repeats Itself, but How? City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place.” American Sociological Review 65(6): 791-823.


Contact information:
Office: 51/2229
Phone: 904-620-1650
Email: kpaulsen@unf.edu

Links:
Curriculum Vitae