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Roderick Graham / Sociology

Graduate Student Researcher
June 2006 – 2007

Roderick Graham

I am a 4th year graduate student in the Sociology program here at the graduate center. I moved here from South Carolina in the summer of 2003, for the main purpose of completing my Ph.D. here. My interests include different aspects of cultural production, social status, and evolutionary sociology. Graduate study is certainly my main goal. However I would like to think that I have managed to diversify myself quite well. Aside from academia, I also write non-fiction essays for progressive magazines and newspapers.

One of my interests is cultural production (particularly as it relates to the production and consumption of images), and the New Media Lab gives me the opportunity to explore the production and consumption of images. My current project, entitled Media2Politic, is a collaboration with Stephanie Jeanjean, a Ph.D. student in art history. This project has as its underlying assumption that all media—in this case photographs—have values, and that these values are oftentimes political. We wish to explore these values by tapping into the current contemporary art field in New York City and soliciting images from artists. These images will then be brought before laymen who will give us their interpretations of these works.