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Welcome to Doing Modernity: Using Critical Interactionism to Study Everyday Life



Olá! 你好! नमस्ते! Привет! こんにちは! Xin chào! Hallo!
Greetings and welcome—whether you are joining from Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Russia, China, Germany, or Vietnam. Wherever you are in the world, I’m glad you’ve found your way here.

Doing Modernity began as a teaching experiment—a way to extend my classroom conversations at Antioch University Santa Barbara, where I taught Sociological Social Psychology. What started as lecture notes and reflections for students evolved into an ongoing inquiry into the dramas, rituals, and moral negotiations that make up everyday life.

At the heart of this blog is a perspective I call Critical Interactionism: a fusion of micro-sociological approaches—especially Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis—with the moral and political commitments of Critical Social Theories. Critical Interactionism takes seriously both the small details of social interaction and the large structures of power, inequality, and meaning that shape our lives. It draws upon:

  • Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EM/CA) — Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, Heritage, Maynard, and Zimmerman, who taught us that the social world is an ongoing accomplishment.

  • Symbolic Interactionism — Mead, Blumer, and Goffman, who revealed how identity and meaning are constructed through symbolic exchange.

  • Other micro-sociological traditions — Thomas Scheff’s theories of shame and solidarity, Randall Collins’s interaction rituals, and the affective dimensions of social life.

  • Critical Theories — Feminism, Marxism, Anarchism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Disability Studies—all of which remind us that no interaction is free of history, hierarchy, or struggle.

My own training took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology under the mentorship of Don H. Zimmerman, Harvey Molotch, Thomas P. Wilson, Tomatsu Shibutani, Thomas Scheff, Richard Appelbaum, and Dick Flacks. My dissertation applied ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to the study of institutional talk and professional interaction—work that continues to shape my thinking about everyday social order.

But this space isn’t just about me. I’m deeply interested in who you are—how you came to this site, what draws you to these questions, and what experiences of everyday life you’d like to explore. Please introduce yourself in the comments, or write to share your story.

The readership of Doing Modernity has grown wonderfully international, with regular visitors from across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. I see this as an invitation to cultivate a global conversation about interaction, meaning, and justice.

If you have suggestions for topics you’d like me to write about—or questions about concepts you’d like clarified—please reach out. I welcome dialogue, critique, and collaboration. After all, interaction is not just what we study—it’s how we think, how we teach, and how we live.

My email is waynemellinger@gmail.com

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Santa Barbara, California

November 2025

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