How is cultural activity shaped by the places where it unfolds? One answer has been found in the scenes perspective, a development within popular music studies that explains change and transformation within musical practices in terms of the social and institutional histories of scenes. Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective takes up this framework and the mode of analysis that goes with it as an important contribution to cultural analysis and social research more generally.

In a series of focused case studies ranging across practices like drag kinging,...