Ben Carrington

Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism

University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

Ben Carrington is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the sociology of race, politics and popular culture. Prior to joining USC Annenberg, Carrington taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin for 13 years, and before that he worked at the University of Brighton in England. He is also a visiting Carnegie research fellow at Leeds Beckett University. Outside of USC Annenberg, Carrington holds courtesy appointments with USC’s Department of Sociology and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Carrington studies a broad range of topics generally concerned with mapping the circulation and reproduction of power within contemporary post/colonial societies. More specifically, he is interested in how ideologies of race, gender, class and nationalism shape — and are themselves shaped by — cultural forms and practices, and how popular culture is often a key site of both cultural resistance and domination. His work examines mass media and sport as way to understand key sociological dimensions of everyday life as well as focusing on how racialized, gendered and classed social structures constrain and enable social life.