Dr Joseph Kotarba
- Biography and education
My interest in sociology can be traced back to high school in Chicago, where it served as an intellectual context for the fascinating social and cultural changes taking place in the 1960s. I majored in sociology all the way through my doctorate at the University of California at San Diego. My wife, Polly, and I raised three children while I taught at the University of Houston for 30 years and chaired the Department of Sociology. We moved to Wimberley in 2010 to engage in the rich intellectual fervent being generated at Texas State University and to enjoy the peaceful, small town/country lifestyle of the Texas Hill Country.
- Teaching interests
I love to teach popular music in society, qualitative research methods, the sociology of everyday life, social theory and the sociology of culture at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I generally teach graduate seminars in the classroom and my undergraduate courses online.
- Research interests
I am conducting studies of music experiences across the life course, with a special focus on the elderly. I am also conducting funded research on the social-cultural organisation of Frontier Medicine, in areas ranging from NASA space flight to the West Texas Post-Rural areas. I am also examining the relationship of music and science, the social organisation of translational bio-medical research and storytelling as lay ethnography.
Selected works
- Director, Sociological Views on "Systems". October 1, 2023 - May 2024.
- Showings: College of Liberal Arts. January 1, 2023 - May 1, 2024 Internet system, Texas State University.
- Kotarba, J. A. (2023). Exploring Team Dynamics During the Development of a Multi-Insitutional Cross-Disciplinary Translational Team: Implications for Potential Best Practices. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 6(October), 1–7.
- Kotarba, J. A. (2023). Music. In The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interaction. London, UK: Oxford University Press.
- Kotarba, J. A., & Melnikov, A. (2023). Existential Sociology. In Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science (pp. 12–22). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
- Kotarba, J. A. (2023). Music in the Course of Life. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Routledge.
Contact
- Dr Joseph Kotarba jk54@txstate.edu
- More information: https://faculty.txst.edu/profile/1922313
