Peter Webb

Biography

Dr Peter Webb is a writer, lecturer and musician who specialises in research into popular and contemporary music, subcultures, globalisation, new media, politics and social theory. He is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has previously worked at Cambridge University, Goldsmiths College the University of Birmingham and was an RA on an ESRC project on E-commerce and the music, fashion and financial services industries in the department of geographic sciences at the University of Bristol. His PhD was on the Sociology of networks of musicians and their negotiations with the music industry. He has published a book on these networks and on social and cultural theories of music scenes entitled; `Exploring the Networked worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures' (Routledge, 2010). Webb has also worked within an independent record label from 1996 – 2002 as an artist and tour manager and is a published musician with three albums, various singles and remixes under the names of Statik and Statik Sound System. As a musician he has worked with the physical theatre companies Blast Theory and Intimate Strangers and the film company Parallax Pictures. He has recently set up the publishing company PC-Press whose first publication is a book on Test Dept. called `Total State Machine' (2015).

Research Interest

My main areas of interest and expertise are in subcultures - music based and political ones, globalisation, new technology and its impacts on the music industry and social structures and interaction, and multiculturalism and questions of identity and subjectivity. I am very interested in looking at combinations of theoretical frameworks including Phenomenology. Marxism, symbolic interationism and cultural sociological approaches and theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Donna Haraway, Alfred Schutz, Celia Lury, Raymond Williams, David Harvey and Peter Sloterdijk amongst others. I am involved in the academic research network: The interdisciplinary network for the study of 'Subcultures, popular music and social change. The network organises conferences, has a book series with Palgrave Macmillan, devises research bids and works with a variety of other partners on research and publishing projects. My research always puts ethnography and primary research at its centre with a concentration on narrative, biography and reflection on the intersection of subjective and objective understanding and experience. I see this as central to the research process and to gaining a full understanding of social phenomena.