Oliver Wang talks about hip-hop and immersing CSULB students in sociological research
For the past 19 years, Oliver Wang has been a go-to authority on popular culture, hip-hop, and Asian American culture and societal issues. When significant things happen in the world of hip hop – such as the passing of De La Soul cofounder David Jolicoeur in 2023 – media outlets search out Wang, a sociology professor at Cal State Long Beach and NPR contributor, for insight and commentary.
Generations of Beach students have taken Wang’s foundational Principles of Sociology course, and others have learned from him about music, popular culture and doing research with cultural communities in California. He’s also been an integral part of CSULB's University Honors Program, serving on the advisory committee and guiding honors students through the challenging thesis process.
Wang shared some thoughts about his research and teaching at The Beach since 2006.
Q: What got you into sociology?
Oliver Wang: Getting into hip-hop was the domino falling that set everything else into motion. It probably fueled my interest in taking Asian American studies classes at UC Berkeley. I’m sure it factored on some subliminal, subconscious level into being drawn into sociology, because so much of hip-hop of (the early ‘90s) was deeply sociological in its themes and politics.
Q: Why is it important to study popular culture, and what does it reveal about sociological shifts?
OW: I’ve always found a lot of wisdom in this quote from George C. Wolfe, producer of the Broadway musical “Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk”: “If you actively unearth popular culture and look inside it, you can find all kinds of secrets and truths and rhythms of a time period, much more than you find in written history.” And I think that’s because popular culture isn’t necessarily beholden to “official” narratives about “what happened and/or why?”; if anything, pop culture is a great way to learn about the tensions, conflicts and contradictions that exist in any particular sociological era or community precisely because, as a creative outlet, it allows for people to say, write, draw, film, record, etc. things they may not otherwise feel empowered to do elsewhere.
Q: You are the curator for “Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community,” an exhibition for the Japanese American National Museum now on view at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Why is your research into Japanese American car culture important?
OW: I started on this research in 2016. As someone who studies Asian American popular culture … it always seemed really, really odd to me that no one was doing substantial work around Asian Americans and car culture. I grew up in L.A. in the 1980s, and I was certainly aware there was this whole import car movement that was dominated by young Asian Americans like myself.
Asian Americans, especially Japanese Americans, have been thoroughly involved in the world of cars/trucks for over 100 years in practically every way one can imagine, but their presence and their contributions have rarely been acknowledged, let alone highlighted.
Q: What did CSULB students learn from their involvement in the “Cruising J-Town” research and exhibition?
OW: They were integral to several dimensions of the project, especially in helping process geographic data that allowed us to create maps of Japanese American car owners and gas stations. They also helped with cleaning up interview transcriptions and summarizing interviews.
In both cases, I wanted my students to learn a few things. One of the most important is understanding how far back the Nikkei community in Los Angeles goes. Asian Americans, in general, often deal with the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, and so it’s always important for people to understand just how far back these communities go in the U.S. and how long they’ve been part of the local social fabric. Second, it was to demonstrate methods of collecting and converting data …. Crowd-sourcing is a useful way of collecting data based on community knowledge and learning how to “clean up” that data to make it usable is a valuable, necessary skill for any prospective researcher.
Q: What skills or lessons learned from sociology (and sociological research) can students apply to their careers?
OW: One of the great advantages to sociology, in my opinion, is the lens through which we can understand our social world: how people and groups relate to one another, how power works in a society, how common forces – such as forms of cultural expression – unite groups and/or help establish cross-cultural contact and collaboration. In my opinion, that kind of lens is invaluable in practically any setting in which people interact with one another, be it understanding the formal and informal hierarchies that organize a workplace or having sensitivity toward community-specific challenges facing certain groups around race, gender, language and class.
