Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.  He uses celebrations, festivals, and designed immersive spaces as lenses for understanding the sociology of the body, emotion, and place. Through media representations, ethnographic fieldwork, and interpretive analysis, Johnston examines how people craft meaning, negotiate identity, and experience belonging within both everyday environments and orchestrated cultural events.

He is a long-time host on New Books in Sociology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, where he has conducted more than 100 author interviews since 2017. At William Penn University, he teaches Introduction to Sociology, Introduction to Criminology, Marriage and Family in Society, Race and Ethnicity in Society, Sex and Gender in Society, Religion and Society, Social Organization, Sociology of Contemporary Issues, and Sociology Practicum.

Johnston’s current research investigates how emotions and rationality are designed, experienced, and performed in immersive cultural spaces such as escape rooms and small-town festivals. His study of escape rooms conceptualizes them as emotion labs that are created through narrative structure, spatial confinement, sensory cues, and artificial intelligence. These environments simulate crisis and collaboration and prompt players to navigate situations that require both cognitive problem-solving and embodied emotional expression.

His ethnographic work on rural festivals examines what he calls urban moments. Urban moments are fleeting, high-intensity encounters in small towns where public space, aesthetic design, and ritual performance temporarily create an urban sensibility. These moments arise through parades, pageants, heritage reenactments, tractor tours, and seasonal marketplaces. Such events animate downtown squares with symbolic energy, social density, and collective emotion. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in rural Midwestern communities, Johnston analyzes how festivals transform place into a stage for nostalgia, civic pride, and communal memory. His research highlights the temporal rhythms of rural life and shows how seasonal celebrations shape experiences of belonging, home, and continuity in places that are often overlooked within urban scholarship.

Collectively, Johnston’s scholarship connects affect, ritual, and place in order to illuminate how people make meaning through bodily action and shared social time. This includes the strategic problem-solving of escape rooms, the choreography of a parade, and the emotional work of becoming at home in unfamiliar institutions.

Johnston’s book The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) examines the tourist dynamics of the Mississippi River by analyzing media narratives surrounding Floatzilla, an annual canoeing and kayaking event. He argues that the event’s social meaning does not reside in the activity itself but is constructed through storytelling. These stories include accounts of near-collisions with yachts, costumed participants with live parrots, tattooed enthusiasts, and the memorialization of long-time organizers. Drawing from interdisciplinary research, Johnston demonstrates how news media shape perceptions of nature, bodily experience, and sense of place. He ultimately shows that meaning-making is essential for sustaining human attachment to environment and event.

His previous book, Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington Books, 2022), investigates how local media construct the interstate Tug Fest, a yearly tug-of-war spanning Iowa and Illinois. Johnston illustrates how the festival is embedded within environmental conditions, economic aspirations, local political identities, and bodily performances, particularly those related to age and gender.

He also authored The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant (Gender Issues, 2020). This article analyzes a decade of media interviews with Tulip Queens and attendants. The study reveals how social, cultural, and economic capital shape who becomes part of the royal court. It also highlights the personal, developmental, and communal benefits that participants gain. Johnston argues that festivals such as the Tulip Time celebration and its pageant hold deep cultural significance. He emphasizes the need for communities to critically examine and reform the exclusionary practices that sometimes accompany longstanding traditions.

Taken together, Johnston’s work offers a rich and multidimensional account of how people transform place into meaning through ritual, representation, emotion, and the ongoing work of belonging.