Taking Stock: A Critical Assessment of 2025 (Revised)
Taking Stock: A Critical Assessment of My 2025 Work in Critical Interactionism
Wayne Martin Mellinger, December 2025
The year 2025 has been, without exaggeration, the most productive year of my writing life. I say that not with triumph but with a complicated mixture of gratitude, disbelief, and reflective unease. Gratitude, because multiple projects long incubating finally found sustained articulation. Disbelief, because the sheer volume of work still feels disproportionate to ordinary limits of time and energy. And unease, because productivity can so easily masquerade as coherence. The accumulation of pages is never itself the measure of intellectual clarity or moral adequacy. What matters is whether this labor has genuinely advanced understanding, honored the traditions from which it emerges, and opened pathways for others rather than closing around itself.
This essay is therefore not a victory lap. It is a reckoning—an attempt to take stock of what my work on the Doing Modernity blog and related projects in 2025 has actually accomplished, what remains unfinished or under-theorized, and what the future of Critical Interactionism now demands. It is written not only as a scholarly assessment but as an ethical accounting, because the questions that organize this work—power, inequality, accountability, suffering, resistance—are not merely technical matters. They implicate real lives.
The Gravitational Center: From Archive to Articulation
The gravitational center of my 2025 work has been the transformation of Doing Modernity from a heterogeneous pedagogical archive into a sustained public site for articulating Critical Interactionism as a distinctive micro-sociological perspective within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA). This transformation did not arrive through programmatic declaration. It emerged gradually through a long sequence of essays—especially in the final three months of the year—in which I returned again and again to the Santa Barbara School of EM/CA as my intellectual home.
What took shape was neither nostalgic memoir nor detached intellectual history, but the beginnings of a genealogy: a reconstruction of a tradition whose deepest questions about social order, institutional power, and moral accountability remain unresolved and urgently alive. Traffic nearly doubled in the final month of the year to almost 6,000 visitors—hardly a guarantee of scholarly merit, but undeniably a signal that careful micro-sociological reflection on everyday power still finds resonance beyond the academy.
At my best, the blog has become a working manuscript—not a finished book, but a public draft in which ideas are exposed, tested, revised, resisted, sometimes misunderstood, and therefore sharpened. Thinking matured this year not through insulation, but through exposure.
Recovering the Santa Barbara School: Structure as Accomplishment
The bulk of my 2025 writing focused on documenting and critically analyzing the Santa Barbara School tradition, so often overshadowed by the more canonized Sacks–Schegloff lineage of conversation analysis. I wrote extended essays on the work and careers of Don Zimmerman, Harvey Molotch, and Thomas P. Wilson, as well as on the generation of scholars who emerged from UC Santa Barbara in the 1970s through the 1990s.
This was not undertaken for sentimental reasons. It was driven by the conviction that the Santa Barbara School represents a distinctive and under-theorized approach to ethnomethodological inquiry—one that never abandoned Garfinkel’s radical focus on local practices, yet consistently pressed that focus into the terrains of institutions, organizations, media, urban life, and political economy.
Across these essays, one theme emerged with increasing clarity: the problematic of structure-in-action. This is not simply a methodological orientation; it is a radical ontological claim. It asserts that institutions, organizations, and hierarchies are not external frameworks imposed upon interaction, but are accomplished, invoked, resisted, and repaired in and through interaction itself. What we call “structure” is not elsewhere. It is made present in situated, accountable practices.
Zimmerman’s studies of bureaucratic and institutional talk, Molotch’s analyses of news production, land use, and urban development, and Wilson’s sustained deconstructions of sociological categories all converge on this point in different registers. What became especially clear to me is that the Santa Barbara tradition was never merely methodological in orientation. It was always—whether explicitly acknowledged or not—a moral and political sociology of everyday life.
Yet my own treatment of structure-in-action remains unfinished. I gesture repeatedly toward the micro–macro linkage but do not yet offer a fully specified analytic apparatus for tracing how local interactional practices scale into durable patterns of domination or transformation. The intuition is conceptually strong; the methodological account remains too thin. This remains, in many ways, the central unresolved theoretical task of Critical Interactionism.
The Respecification of Social Psychology
Throughout the year, I worked to show how EM/CA radically reconceptualizes core social psychological concepts—identity, emotion, intention, agency, cognition—not as hidden inner states that cause behavior, but as publicly constituted, interactionally achieved phenomena. This respecification carries immense implications for how we understand selfhood and subjectivity in late modernity. This longer project is still in draft form and has not yet been posted, although a lot of the work has been done.
Here I leaned heavily on the Santa Barbara figures who taught me to distrust mentalistic explanations and to attend instead to how persons display, negotiate, and repair selves in interaction. Yet I must also acknowledge intellectual limits. I relied too narrowly on the Santa Barbara lineage while insufficiently integrating the Manchester School and the philosophical work of Sharrock, Watson, and Coulter.
The danger of parochialism is real. Any attempt to define a “school” risks overstating novelty and obscuring deeper genealogies. If Critical Interactionism is to avoid intellectual provincialism, it must situate itself more fully within the broader international and philosophical currents that shaped EM/CA from the beginning.
Technology, Work, and Organizational Power
Drawing on the legacy of Lucy Suchman and the Xerox PARC studies by Zimmerman students Jack and Marilyn Whalen and Peggy Szymanski, I explored how artifacts, infrastructures, and technological systems enter constitutively into the organization of practical action. These essays reaffirmed something long implicit in my thinking: interaction is always already socio-technical. It unfolds through bodies, yes, but also through screens, files, algorithms, architectural arrangements, and surveillance dispositifs.
At the same time, my own analyses in this domain remained more suggestive than demonstrative. I invoked technology more as context than as interactional machinery. If Critical Interactionism is to remain credible in an era of platform governance, AI triage, algorithmic policing, and datafied welfare, it will require far more detailed studies of how technologies reorganize turn-taking, discretion, visibility, and moral blame.
Similarly, while the Santa Barbara tradition made seminal contributions to workplace and organizational studies, my 2025 essays did not yet fully trace how organizational interaction links to contemporary forms of managerial control, precarity, and neoliberal governance. That work remains undone.
The Moral Economy of Interaction and Layered Oppression
Running through all of this work, however, was a deeper unifying concern: the emergence of what I have come to call the moral economy of interaction, and more recently, the layered moral economy of oppression. This framework begins with Garfinkel’s discovery that social order is fundamentally a moral order—an order achieved through members’ oriented-to accountability. But it pushes further by insisting that local moral orders are never autonomous. They are embedded within broader moral economies structured by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, property, and state power.
A police stop, a welfare interview, an emergency room intake, a harm-reduction exchange, or a sidewalk encounter between housed residents and unhoused neighbors each unfolds within a locally organized moral field that is also saturated by historical and political asymmetries. These moral economies are not singular. They are plural, stratified, and often conflicting. This recognition forced me to abandon any residual attachment to the idea of a unified “interaction order” and to think instead in terms of multiple interactional regimes.
Many of my 2025 essays explored this layered moral economy through empirical material drawn from street outreach, housing activism, and harm-reduction settings. In doing so, my autoethnographic practice underwent a decisive shift—from confessional narrative toward what I now call empirical micro-autoethnography: the disciplined use of one’s own embodied participation as a site for documenting interactional sequences, moral accountabilities, and institutional logics as they unfold in real time.
This also gave rise to what I tentatively call critical urban microethnography, an attempt to analyze urban space itself as an interactional and moral accomplishment. Sidewalks, shelters, police perimeters, clinics, and encampments appear not merely as backdrops but as dynamically produced moral geographies organized through practices of permission, exclusion, surveillance, and resistance.
A key impetus for developing critical urban microethnography emerged from my ethnographic work with unhoused people in public spaces, where the ordinary ritual of civil inattention is routinely suspended. In these interactional zones, unhoused individuals are rendered not merely stigmatized but interactionally de-personed: they are made endlessly visible as problems while being denied the minimal social ratification ordinarily extended to strangers. It was this patterned withdrawal of interactional personhood—this everyday production of “non-personhood”—that first compelled me to theorize urban space itself as a moral ecology structured through practices of recognition, exclusion, and surveillance.
Yet the promise of this framework exceeds its present analytic precision. The layered moral economy remains closer to a generative metaphor than to a fully operationalized analytic apparatus. I have not yet adequately specified the mechanisms through which broader structures of oppression shape local interaction without collapsing micro processes into macro causation.
Harvey Molotch and the Critical Interactionist Stance
Among all the figures I revisited this year, Harvey Molotch emerged as particularly central to my understanding of what Critical Interactionism might become. His work exemplifies ethnomethodological fidelity without political innocence. His studies of news production, urban power, and material culture demonstrate that one can attend relentlessly to the details of practice while asking unapologetically critical questions about power, capital, and harm.
Molotch exemplifies a stance I want Critical Interactionism to sustain: a refusal of the false opposition between micro-analysis and political economy. At the same time, I remain wary of retroactively drafting him into a framework he did not name. Critical Interactionism may ultimately be less a system than a sensibility—a way of approaching social phenomena that combines micro-analytic rigor with ethical and political consequence.
Public Sociology and the Transformation of Ideas Through Exposure
Alongside this conceptual labor, I undertook the slow work of curating and revising the Doing Modernity archive, transforming it into something closer to a public manuscript. This exposed unresolved tensions between blog-based scholarship and traditional peer-reviewed publication. At times the blog risks functioning as a productive avoidance of the slower disciplines of academic review. At other times it performs a vital function the journal system increasingly fails to fulfill: creating dialogical space between micro-sociology and people who live inside the interaction orders being theorized.
If 2025 taught me a single methodological lesson, it is this: thinking deepens through accountability to readers, not insulation from them.
Critical Reflections: Gaps and Silences
Several limitations stand out with particular urgency:
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Insufficient integration of critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and decolonial scholarship. These remain too often invoked rather than structurally centered.
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The micro–macro problem remains under-theorized. The layered moral economy points forward but does not yet deliver a solution.
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The empirical base remains thin and unsystematically documented. Memory too often stands in for recorded data.
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Resistance and transformation remain understudied. I have analyzed domination more effectively than collective challenge and reordering.
These are not minor correctives. They strike at the ethical credibility of Critical Interactionism itself.
Intellectual Debts and Street Pedagogies
None of this work would exist without teachers, colleagues, and companions in struggle. Don Zimmerman taught me to see institutions in the grain of talk. Harvey Molotch taught me to see power where politeness claims it is absent. Thomas Wilson taught me to distrust sociological categories. Feminist scholars taught me that neutrality is a politics.
Equally important are my unhoused neighbors, outreach colleagues, and activist partners. They are not research subjects. They are theorists of survival who continually test the adequacy of my abstractions against hunger, exposure, surveillance, and bureaucratic humiliation.
Two Synthesis Projects That Now Stand Before Me
As I enter 2026, two synthesis projects have become unavoidable:
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A comprehensive critical history of the Santa Barbara School—inclusive, unsentimental, and analytically honest.
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A defining theoretical essay on Critical Interactionism—specifying its ontology, methods, and limits, and grounding it in systematic empirical demonstration.
These projects require slower, riskier, more disciplined labor than 2025’s exploratory essays. They will fail in public if they overreach. But their time has come.
Conclusion: Obligation, Not Triumph
I enter 2026 with neither triumph nor despair, but with obligation:
to slow down,
to document more carefully,
to integrate more honestly,
to remain answerable to those whose lives constitute the substance of my theories.
Critical Interactionism will succeed only if it helps ordinary people understand how domination works in everyday life—and how it might be challenged through collective action. That is the standard by which my work should be judged. Not prestige. Not productivity. But usefulness in the struggle for justice.
The work continues—not as celebration, but as responsibility.
Dr. Wayne Martin Mellinger
Independent Scholar and Sociologist
Doing Modernity Blog
December 2025
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