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<H1>Michael Bell - environmental sociology, sustainable agriculture, dialogics, composer</H1>
<P>Mike is principally an environmental sociologist, but he also conducts research on culture, economic sociology, sustainable agriculture, community, place, rural society, inequality, gender, the body, democracy, social theory, and whatever else catches his fancy. Two central themes can be heard in all of his work: dialogics and the sociology of "nature," broadly conceived.</P>
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<P><img src="Images/BWMike.jpg" alt="Michael Bell - environmental sociology, composer" width="262" height="372"></P>
<P>Mike's most recent books are Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and
the Cultivation of Sustainability (with Gregory Peter, Susan Jarnagin, & Donna
Bauer; Pennsylvania State University Press and the Rural Studies Series of the
Rural Sociological Society, 2004); An Invitation to Environmental Sociology
(with Michael S. Carolan, Pine Forge Press [Sage], 2004; second edition); and
Walking Toward Justice: Democratization in Rural Life (co-edited by Fred Hendricks,
with Azril Bacal; JAI/Elsevier, 2003). Mike also co-edited (with Michael Gardiner)
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998; Theory, Culture and
Society Series), and is the author of Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country
Village (University of Chicago Press, 1994), which was co-winner of the 1995
Outstanding Book Award of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological
Association.</P>
<P>Currently, Mike is writing a social theory book on dialogue and dialogics, co-editing (with Hugh Campbell and Margaret Finney) a volume on rural masculinity, and conducting a range of research projects on participation, sustainability, and agroecology.</P>
<P>Mike had an earlier life as a geologist, and is also the author of The Face of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (State of Connecticut, 1985), which won an American Library Association Roundtable Award.</P>
<P>And Mike continues to have a second life as a part-time composer of contemporary classical and folk music, and as a folk musician. Mike composes for, and plays mandolin in, the Barn Owl Band, and he appeared with them on Prairie Home Companion in 2002. The "Owls" released their first CD, Dance Owl Night, in 2000, and their second CD, Barn Owls Live, in 2003. They will soon release their third CD, The Cloud Forest. In the area of contemporary classical music, Mike has recently completed a piece for string quartet or mandolin quartet, a piece for five violins, and several pieces for solo piano. He is at work on several other chamber works and his first symphony.</P>
<P>How to describe my contemporary composition? Not "modern," certainly. I am
too fond of tunes for that. Not "postmodern" either, however. My music is not
aimed at the sonic erasure of boundaries and categories, nor the solipsistic
declaration of self through the ceaseless search for the claim of originality.
Rather, my musical purpose is the delight of engagement—that is, communication
through the shared of something that renews the cultural conversation. If music
is unintelligible, there can be no communication, no sense of the musical act
as a commons. But as well, if music is a mere stale repetition, there is no
renewal—no sense of interconnected aliveness, of the on-going and the going-on,
of the past made future in the unexpected joy of an unpredicted present.</P>
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