Nick Prior

Nick Prior is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His primary interests pivot to the sociology of music and particularly the attempt to understand the complex layers that fold round popular music in an increasingly digitally mediated present. His most recent book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, is published by Sage (2018) and explores how music′s devices, styles, sounds and personnel are implicated in post-1980s shifts in the nature and organisation of culture and society. He works in a post-Bourdieusian tradition, though his most recent work opens up the potentials of assemblage thinking when applied to electronic and digital vocalities and the role of virtual idols in Japan. His work has appeared in the journals Contemporary Music Review, Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, New Formations, Information, Communication and Society, Space and Culture, Réseaux, Sociology Compass and Poetics. He has been co-editor of Cultural Sociology since 2016.