JY
Josh Yates
University of Virginia | Thriving Cities Group
CEO
Charlottesville, Virginia
Joshua J. Yates is Research Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the study of culture and cultural change in the late modern world, with an emphasis on moral and ethical life. At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, he is the Research Director of the Thriving Cities Lab. He has written on the cultural imperatives of humanitarian and human rights organizations, on the rise of the anti-globalization protest movement, on the ways modern institutions contend with disaster and catastrophe, and, most recently, on the cultural significance of sustainability as a leading paradigm of social, political, and ethical action.
He is currently working on two separate, but related lines of research. First, he is Director of the Thriving Cities Project, a multi-year interdisciplinary initiative within the Program on Culture, Capitalism, and Global Change. The project is developing a new form of community assessment based on a holistic understanding of “thriving” in twenty-first century cities. The second is a book project on the moral and ethical dimensions of contemporary globalization entitled: The Problem of the Good World: Global Culture, Urbanization, and the Dilemmas of Reform.