Doing Modernity (Book Prospectus) by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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 Book Prospectus


Title:

Doing Modernity: Using Critical Interactionism to Study Everyday Life


Author:

Wayne Martin Mellinger, PhD






Book Overview:


Doing Modernity: Using Critical Interactionism to Study Everyday Life is a vital intervention in contemporary sociology, offering a groundbreaking vision of what it means to study social life from below. Synthesizing symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, critical theory, and autoethnography, this book presents a unique approach to social psychology that foregrounds the micro-level enactment of power, inequality, and meaning in everyday encounters. In this collection of 34 chapters, each originally crafted as a blog post, Dr. Mellinger builds a multi-layered sociology that bridges lived experience and structural critique, theory and action, biography and history. 


The book unfolds as both a theoretical manifesto and an accessible teaching tool. From foundational discussions of the interaction order to explorations of shame, racial categorization, ideology, and homelessness, each chapter is richly grounded in real-world scenes and embodied experience. Students are introduced not only to sociological frameworks but also to the tools of autoethnography, learning to see themselves as both subjects and analysts of modernity. The volume is ideal for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and anyone seeking to understand the interplay between self and society, meaning and domination, through a critical, reflexive, and deeply personal lens.


Table of Contents with Chapter Summaries


Part I: Foundations of Critical Interactionism


1. Understanding Micro-Sociology  

Introduces micro-sociology as the study of face-to-face interaction and everyday life. Emphasizes the value of small-scale analysis for understanding large-scale social dynamics.


2. On Interactionism  

Traces the history of symbolic interactionism, from Mead and Cooley to Goffman. Highlights its enduring relevance for grasping the social construction of reality.


3. Critical Interactionism: The Micro-Sociology of Domination  

Proposes a synthesis of interactionism and critical theory. Explores how everyday encounters reproduce systems of inequality.


4. On the Everyday in Critical Interactionism  

Explores the politics of the everyday using Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Benjamin. Suggests everyday life as a key site of resistance and domination.


5. Interaction Orders  

Introduces Erving Goffman's concept of the interaction order. Examines how social order is maintained moment-to-moment in public encounters.


6. On Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis  

Explains the core principles of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Demonstrates how talk-in-interaction produces social facts.


7. Note on the Santa Barbara School  

Discusses a distinctive local tradition of ethnomethodology and CA. Highlights the influence of UCSB and the field's methodological rigor.


Part II: The Self, Identity, and Socialization


8. The Self as Social Process  

Presents the self as emerging from social interaction and role-taking. Uses personal narrative to illustrate Mead's concept of the I and the me.


9. Socialization and the Making of the Subject  

Examines how individuals become social actors through internalizing norms and expectations. Reflects on adultism and power in shaping subjectivity.


10. Doing Gender, Doing Difference  

Builds on West and Zimmerman to explore gender as performed and enforced in everyday life. Connects gender performance to broader systems of power.


11. Racial Categorization and MCDs  

Explores Harvey Sacks' Membership Categorization Devices in the context of race. Analyzes how racial identity is invoked and resisted in ordinary talk.


12. Classed Performativity and Embodied Difference  

Examines how class is embodied, signaled, and interpreted through everyday behavior. Reflects on habitus, dress, language, and bodily comportment.


13. Group Life and Subcultural Belonging  

Uses subcultural theory to examine how group identities are constructed and maintained. Includes reflections on activist, queer, and spiritual subcultures.


Part III: Emotion, Shame, and Social Bonds


14. Shame and the Social Bond  

Draws on Thomas Scheff's work to explore shame as a glue of social relationships. Shows how shame can both stabilize and disrupt community.


15. The Shame-Rage Spiral  

Analyzes how unresolved shame can transform into rage and violence. Uses outreach experience and clinical literature to trace this cycle.


16. Stigma and Moral Career  

Applies Goffman's concepts of stigma and moral career to lived experiences of addiction, homelessness, and queerness. Reflects on strategies of identity management.


17. Emotion Work and Feeling Rules  

Introduces Hochschild's concept of emotion work. Discusses how individuals regulate feeling to meet social expectations.


Part IV: Interaction, Inequality, and Power


18. An Interactionist Approach to Power  

Argues that power operates not just through institutions but also in everyday talk and gesture. Analyzes micro-dominations and moments of rupture.


19. Doing Equality  

Explores efforts to enact egalitarian values in face-to-face interaction. Offers strategies for interrupting hierarchy in real time.


20. Unlearning Oppression  

Describes the internalization of structural domination. Offers practices for reflexive unlearning in dialogue and daily life.


21. Talking Back: Voice, Agency, and Disruption  

Explores moments when individuals challenge imposed roles or labels. Emphasizes the importance of speaking out in small, subversive acts.


22. Reflexive Praxis and Being an Ally  

Discusses the ethics of allyship as a form of reflexive practice. Centers humility, listening, and accountability in cross-difference relationships.


Part V: Public Spaces, Digital Orders, and the Urban Everyday


23. Encounters Among Strangers  

Analyzes civil inattention and sidewalk choreography. Reflects on the silent rules that govern public interaction.


24. Cellphones and Civility  

Explores how mobile technology alters norms of attention and social presence. Draws on field observations and interactionist theory.


25. The New Urban Micro-Sociology  

Presents a video-based method for studying public interaction. Merges multimodality, movement, and materiality in the analysis of everyday order.


26. The Treatment of the Unhoused as Non-Persons  

Examines how unhoused people are rendered invisible through gaze aversion and spatial exclusion. Analyzes stigma, dehumanization, and moral indifference.


27. Digital Interaction Orders  

Considers how digital platforms structure interaction. Compares online and offline norms, with a focus on civility, self-presentation, and boundary management.


Part VI: Ideology, Institutions, and Everyday Systems


28. How Ideologies Work  

Explains how ideology operates at the level of discourse and perception. Uses examples from everyday conversation and institutional life.


29. We Swim in an Ocean of Ideology That Passes as Common Sense  

Unpacks the naturalization of dominant ideas. Suggests that ideology is most powerful when invisible.


30. Reading the News  

Analyzes how media texts frame events and identities. Demonstrates preferred readings and discursive closure.


31. On Institutional Settings  

Explores how bureaucratic environments organize interaction. Highlights scripting, category-bound activities, and institutional reflexivity.


32. Doing Industrial Ontology  

Considers how industrial capitalism constructs categories of personhood and labor. Analyzes factory life, bureaucracy, and commodification as ontological projects.


Part VII: Autoethnography and the Sociological Imagination


33. How to Use Autoethnography to Study Everyday Life  

Provides a practical guide to conducting autoethnographic research. Covers methods, ethics, writing strategies, and pedagogical exercises.


34. Becoming a Reflexive Practitioner  

Concludes the volume by emphasizing reflexivity as sociological practice. Encourages readers to link biography and history, structure and agency, through mindful engagement with everyday life.


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