Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He received his Ph.D. of Public Administration from Walden University. Johnston uses celebrations and festival as a lens to capture the sociology of both the body and place.  He uses media representations from local newspapers and online videos to understand the local history and culture that people share and incorporate into their construction of place and identity. He is a host on New Books in Sociology (a podcast channel on New Books Network) where he has conducted nearly 50 author-interviews since 2017. 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 focuses on how affective states (e.g., fear, anxiety, triumph, distrust, and moral resolve) are intentionally crafted through narrative structure, spatial confinement, and artificial intelligence. These rooms function as emotional laboratories, where players navigate simulated crises that prompt both cognitive problem-solving and performative emotional expression.

In his ethnographic work on small-town festivals, Johnston explores what he calls urban moments. Urban moments are those fleeting, concentrated experiences in rural settings where public space, aesthetic design, and embodied performance converge to produce a distinctly urban feel. These moments occur in parades, pageants, heritage reenactments, and seasonal marketplaces, where residents and visitors alike engage in rituals that foster belonging, nostalgia, and civic pride. Drawing from extended fieldwork in rural Midwestern towns, Johnston examines how festivals transform downtown spaces into stages for identity performance and community memory. His research interrogates how seasonal temporality and emotional rhythm shape the experience of “home” in places often overlooked in urban sociological studies.

Johnston is also the creator of Capital, Cultivation, and Performativity (CCP) Theory, a sociological framework that brings together the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, and Erving Goffman. CCP Theory analyzes how individuals navigate institutional transitions (e.g., high school, college, career, retirement, and so on) by leveraging forms of cultural capital, undergoing processes of cultivation, and performing identities that signal belonging and legitimacy. He is currently applying CCP Theory in a qualitative study of student belonging at a small liberal arts university, investigating how students articulate home, exclusion, and institutional fit in emotionally charged and socially stratified academic environments.

Johnston’s research as a collective connects affect, ritual, and place to illuminate how people craft meaning and identity in both ordinary and extraordinary settings—whether through strategic gameplay, seasonal celebration, or the slow labor of becoming at home in unfamiliar institutions.

In The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington, 2023), Johnston concentrates on the tourist element of the Mississippi River by focusing on the media construction of an annual floating event that occurs on the river. In this book, he shows that the canoeing and kayaking event itself is void of meaning; it is the news media that brings these events to life through real world accounts about a kayaker who nearly collided with a fifty-five-foot yacht, a person dressed up as a pirate with a live parrot as a prop, a guy with a Floatzilla logo tattooed on his hand, and the death of a longtime friend and cornerstone of the event. Johnston draws from research across multiple disciplines to explain how the media constructs the natural and bodily experiences canoers and kayakers say they have while attending Floatzilla. He discusses the importance of meaning and sense of place in maintaining a connectedness between the built environment, nature, and the people who attend this event. Ultimately, the author contends that social meaning is essential for humans to make sense of their surroundings.

His book, Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington, 2022),  is about media representations of an interstate tug of war festival that occurs annually between Iowa and Illinois. The interstate Tug Festival was founded as a recreational activity that also stirred economic growth in the two cities. Tug Fest was found to be embedded in environment, economy, local politics, and body politics (associated with age and gender in particular). 

​He also recently published The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant (2020) in Gender Issues. This was a content analysis of responses to interviews that tulip queens and royal attendants over a 10-year-period shared with local news media. The article details the significance of social, cultural, and economic capital in having the proper clout to become a tulip queen or a royal attendant as a member of the royal court. The article, however, does not completely dismiss the tulip pageant as a tragic event that is in need of being cancelled. The findings of this study also show the positive outcomes for the girls who are part of the tulip pageant. The culmination of this article is an argument that celebrations and festivals (like Tulip Time Festival and Tulip Queen Pageant) are critical to the culture of cities and their heritage. The findings of this study recommend that stakeholders and residents of communities that host annual festivals must acknowledge and bring change to the exclusionary practices that have become part of their celebration.