About

David L. Brunsma is a professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Sociology. His research interests include sociology of race and ethnicity, (multi)racial identity, sociology of culture, and human rights. Brunsma has received multiple awards in his field, including the Founder’s Award for Scholarship and Service of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities in 2020, the E. Gordon Ericksen Award for Outstanding Graduate Faculty in 2013, and the W.E.B. DuBois Award from Sociologists Without Borders in 2008. He and his coauthors also received an honorable mention for the Gordon Hirabyashi Human Rights Book Award for The Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights, for which he was an editor in 2014. Prior to joining Virginia Tech in 2011, Brunsma taught at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he was involved in the Black Studies Program. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Notre Dame.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• History
• Visual arts
• Art

Selected publications

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humanism

  Humanity & Society · 2026-01-19

  articleSenior author

  In this article, we provide readers with a brief history of the philosophy, origin, and institutionalization of four seemingly-distinct disciplines (Anthropology, Psychology, Mathematics, and Medicine) to illustrate the undercurrents of humanistic paradigms that guide each. In delineating these undercurrents, and in reflecting on their histories with the philosophy of humanism, we aim to show readers that we collectively share a legacy of disciplinary-specific humanistic struggle, which can unite us on our campuses and beyond. In contextualizing this overview through the concept of sociological hypnagogia within and outside of the structures of academia, we encourage readers to reflect on the role and responsibilities we have as humanistic sociologists toward contemporary sociopolitical and humanistic crises, and encourage the development of interdisciplinary solidarities with scholars who share similar histories of disciplinary-specific humanistic struggle.

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South

  2025-04-04

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2025-10-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  Cultural intermediaries (hereafter CIs) are market actors whose performances manipulate social and cultural tastes within societies (Bourdieu 1984)—a manipulation that is fundamentally based on the matrix of social relationships and the positionalities of those within that relational matrix. They construct value and meaning for products, practices, and consumers within a wide variety of consumer industries, especially, but not necessarily limited to, cultural and creative industries. CIs may be salespeople, marketers, brand ambassadors, or other industry representatives. They play a large role in framing how others (end consumers and other market agents) engage with goods and affect the perception of goods, services, ideas, and behaviors as meaningful, legitimate, and worthy within various social and cultural fields (Smith Maguire and Matthews 2014). These folks are emissaries who build relationships, maintain accounts, and, most importantly, share provocative narratives about the product and the consumers who consume it. This is different from the world of marketing and advertising, where this kind of regular and maintained interaction with buyers seldom happens. Through their practices and work, CIs also alter meanings of what is good, desirable, worthy, and, importantly, works to establish such meanings often for the comfort and resonance for certain actors, from certain social worlds and to the benefit (and profit) of some, not all, within that matrix. From literary agents (Tekgul-Akin 2023) to marketing personnel (Rottinghaus 2024), from sports agents (Ng 2023) to booksellers (Pareschi 2015), from realtors (Korver-Glenn 2021) to wine representatives (Withers 2019), from critics (Corciolani, Grayson, and Humphreys 2020) to social media influencers (Hutchinson 2017), from the historical gatekeepers (Foster and Ocejo 2015) to the contemporary algorithms on social media platforms (Hutchinson 2021; Hutchinson and Hutchinson 2017), CIs actively work to connect and exclude, channel and erect barriers, forge and dissemble products, participation, opportunities, and markets in complex ways.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards a New Debate on Urban Dispossession in the Global South

  2025-09-10

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Preliminary Material

  2025-09-10

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  Since the early writings of Marx and Engels, scholars have analyzed capitalism's dispossessing tendencies.As we enter an era of elite revanchism and state gangsterism at the commanding heights of world capitalism, understanding the causes of dispossession and the emergent politics of the dispossessed has become more urgent.Mondal and Brunsma's Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South sheds light on these dynamics through an impressive synthesis of 200 years of scholarly writing, the development of a novel theoretical framework of urban dispossession regimes, and case studies from leading experts on urban livelihoods in South and West Asia, Africa, and Central and South America.Collectively, this volume highlights the social forces driving the advanced marginality of the world's urban poor, while drawing attention to an emergent subaltern politics of urban repossession and resistance in the 21st century.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Review of “Moving from the Margins: Life Histories on Transforming the Study of Racism”

  Social Forces · 2025-05-04

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Punishing the Urban Poor: a Violent Logic of Dispossession in Neoliberal Bangladesh

  2025-09-10

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Arbiters of Race

  2025-10-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Review of “The Making of White American Identity”

  Social Forces · 2024-04-13

  articleSenior author

  Journal Article Review of "The Making of White American Identity" Get access Review of "The Making of White American Identity" By Ron Eyerman Oxford University Press, 2022, 304 pages. Prices (cloth / paper): $110.00 / $32.99 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-making-of-white-american-identity-9780197658932?cc=us&lang=en Elizabeth B Roberts, Elizabeth B Roberts Virginia Tech Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar David L Brunsma David L Brunsma Virginia Tech Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, soae053, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae053 Published: 13 April 2024 Article history Received: 18 January 2024 Accepted: 31 March 2024 Published: 13 April 2024

  PublisherDOI

• The Cultural and the Racial: Stitching Together the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Sociology of Culture

  Sociological Inquiry · 2022-04-05 · 3 citations

  article1st author

  Sociology subdisciplines are notorious for being siloed in their respective fields of study. This is sometimes more noticeable in those arenas that surprisingly (to some) do not make sense, as there are bound to be greater sociological insights gleamed from an intra‐subdisciplinary approach that allow for better synthesis of theory(ies) or even epistemology(ies). In this piece, we issue a challenge to the need for more sociological engagement that weaves together the cultural, those structured stories that render our lives and the order of those lives meaningful, and the racial, those storied structures of white supremacy that give rise to that order of our lives and undergird our identities and institutions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nathaniel G. Chapman

  Arkansas Tech University

  28 shared

• Kerry Ann Rockquemore

  13 shared

• Keri E. Iyall Smith

  11 shared

• Brian Gran

  Case Western Reserve University

  9 shared

• David G. Embrick

  7 shared

• Megan Nanney

  6 shared

• J. Slade Lellock

  Virginia Tech

  6 shared

• Hephzibah V. Strmic‐Pawl

  Manhattanville College

  4 shared

Labs

• Department of Sociology, Virginia TechPI

Awards & honors

• Founder’s Award for Scholarship and Service of the American…
• E. Gordon Ericksen Award for Outstanding Graduate Faculty (2…
• W.E.B. DuBois Award from Sociologists Without Borders (2008)
• Honorable Mention for the Gordon Hirabyashi Human Rights Boo…