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Norman Denzin's career as a symbolic interactionist spans many years and has produced an incredible amount of high-quality scholarship. His work as editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction has served as a platform for disseminating a wide range of innovative ideas, research, and reviews in our discipline. In this chapter, I will discuss two features of Studies that point to the great value of its work to symbolic interaction in general and to the areas of music studies in particular. Those two features are planting the seed of interactionist scholarship in an initial paper, and growing collective interactionist projects through special issues. My examples will be drawn from my own experiences with Studies over the years, and my approach to research and writing on music phenomena.

Writing is one of the key features of the life and work of the symbolic interactionist. The foundation of good writing is the establishment of the self and identity of the interactionist qua writer. The best writers are those who write constantly – not necessarily in formal text form but also in term of journals, note-taking, and so forth. Writing does not retrieve our ideas from our minds and memories; it creates them as retrievable gems of our work. My argument is that, as symbolic interactionists, we have the opportunity, if not responsibility, to position the drama of everyday life in our writing because our respondents experience their everyday lives dramatically.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine an evolving role in the translational science team: that of the consultant. The role of the consultant has long been a key feature of complex organizations in business and government. The consultant provides flexibility to an organization's employee base while providing specific expert knowledge and skills in a timely manner. The role of the consultant in Translational Science is innovative largely because they are attached or assigned to particular research teams, for varying lengths of tenure, to provide both basic and applied/evaluative skills to the increasingly central and defining team concept.

The concept of the music scene has served sociologists well in providing a template for studying the organization of various musical styles and the people who work together to create the musical experiences. Writers including Howard Becker, Richard Peterson, Andy Bennett, David Grazian, and Joseph Kotarba have explored music scenes ranging from jazz, blues and rock to country and Latino styles. Although there is no one consensual definition of music scene, the notion of place, in a physical, empirical, and geo-local sense, seems to be a universal concern in the literature. In this chapter, we will outline a more inclusive, interactionist-oriented, and updated concept of the music scene that is at once interactionist in tone and perspective, while sensitive to dramatic changes occurring both in the world of politics and in the world of digital media. Perhaps most importantly, the concept of music scene can provide insight into the historical fact that, in spite of technological advancements, the live music experience is still at the heart of musical experiences across communities and cultures.

The establishment of Science Cafés has become a popular strategy to enhance informal yet instruction-oriented interaction between medical and scientific experts and members of the relevant local communities. The purpose of this chapter is to report on two significant findings of a mixed-methods evaluation of the SCI (Science and Communities Interact) Café. Method: The Clinical and Translational Science Award in the Institute for Translational Sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston established an SCI Café program in 2013 to enable local residents to engage in dialogs with clinicians and researchers regarding their scientific interests and health concerns. A mixed-methods approach was used to evaluate the program. Results: The essential experience of SCI Café (SC) is updating one's knowledge of a topic. The primary comparative and analytical feature of SC participation is expertise. Expertise varies in terms of the social position of the participants: graduate student, university staff, engaged participant, topical participant, and curious participant.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of women’s experiences of living with and surviving HIV/AIDS. We argue that strong conceptualization of this experience will lead to more efficient health care delivery for this growing population, within the general framework of managed care. Our analytical strategy is to integrate the nursing concept of inner strength with ideas from the sociological concept of the existential self. There are numerous definitions of the increasingly popular concept of inner strength in the health care literature, largely developed through the experiences of women living with breast cancer. In general, this concept is useful because it focuses research attention on patients’ experiences and perceptions of illness. Nevertheless, current definitions can be critiqued for their tendency: (1) view inner strength as a thing-like phenomenon, as if it were like a disease, to be measured, treated and supplemented; (2) describe inner strength in overly metaphoric and romanticized terms that do not reflect the everyday life of living with a serious illness; and (3) assume that inner strength is equivalent to doing well. We argue that this concept can be of greater scholarly and clinical use if it is defined as follows: Inner strength refers to the different ways women with serious illnesses experience and, subsequently, talk about the deepest, existential resources available to and used by them to manage severe threats to body and self. We developed this concept through a series of 19 biographical and conversational interviews with women living with HIV/AIDS. Our interviews found that these women describe their experiences in terms of three types of narratives or stories. Faith stories recount the ways reliance upon a higher power (spiritual or religious) provides a sense of inner strength. Character stories recount the ways women experience inner strength as a resource available to them before as well as during their illness. Uncertainty stories recount the ways women perceive their inner strength as problematic. We conclude with specific suggestions for the application of our revised concept of Inner strength to the role of nursing in the delivery of managed care to women living with HIV/AIDS.

Music is an important feature of human group life. A wide range of journals, books, and other academic avenues pertaining to the study of music now exist to address its increasing scholarly significance. Although the primary theme in the literature seems to be the description and analysis of the role of music in daily life, the time has come for more theoretical examinations of the way music contributes meaning to individuals and the groups to which they belong (DeNora, 2003). Our goal as editors of this special issue is to apply the symbolic interactionist optic to the sociological study of music. We hope to build upon the earlier interactionist work of scholars such as Kotarba and Vannini (2006) through the concepts of identity, technology, and music communities. In the present section, we explore the relationship of music and identity.