Abandonment in Real Time (MiniBook) by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 

Dear friends and colleagues,

I’m writing to share a completed five-part essay series that has occupied me deeply over the past months. The series is titled Abandonment, and it brings together critical theory, theology, sociology, and ethnomethodology to examine what abandonment looks like—not as an abstract concept, but as a lived, structural, and interactional reality.

The project emerged from my work in street outreach, from long-standing theoretical commitments, and from moments of profound moral and analytic difficulty. Rather than smoothing those tensions away, the series stays with them. Each essay takes up a different analytic lens, and together they form a cumulative argument about how abandonment is known, lived, reproduced, and—sometimes—unwittingly enacted even by those who care.

Here is a brief overview of the five parts and what each contributes.

1. Maladjustment as Insight  

The series begins by reframing “maladjustment” not as pathology, but as epistemic position. Drawing on critical theory and interactionist traditions, this essay argues that those who cannot fully adjust to an unjust world often perceive its contradictions most clearly. What is diagnosed as dysfunction frequently turns out to be moral clarity in a disordered social system. The lesson here is that suffering is not merely something to be managed; it can also be a form of knowing.

2. The Epistemology of Abandonment (Critical Theory)  

The second essay develops a critical theoretical account of abandonment as a way of knowing the world. Abandonment is treated not primarily as a feeling, but as a structural location from which social reality becomes intelligible in distinctive ways. Those who are repeatedly dropped, deferred, or rendered disposable come to understand power, institutions, and moral claims differently. The lesson of this essay is that knowledge is socially situated—and that abandonment produces its own hard, often unwelcome, truths.

3. Abandonment as a Site of Revelation (Theology)  

The third essay turns theological, asking what abandonment discloses about the sacred, the moral, and the real. Drawing on liberation theology and religious naturalism, it treats abandonment as a site of revelation—not because suffering is good, but because truth often appears where the world has withdrawn its care. The theological lesson is that revelation does not arrive only in wholeness or harmony; it also arrives in wounds, refusals, and unanswered cries.

4. The Career of Disposability (Sociology)  

The fourth essay offers a sociological account of abandonment as a career rather than a moment. Disposability is shown to unfold across institutions, interactions, and bodies over time. One is not simply abandoned once; one is sorted, managed, sanctioned, and eventually expected to disappear. The lesson here is that abandonment is patterned, cumulative, and socially organized—not accidental, and not reducible to individual failure.

5. Abandonment in Real Time (Ethnomethodology & Autoethnography)  

The final essay turns the analytic lens inward. Using a reconstructed interaction analyzed through ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it examines a moment in which care, recognition, and good intentions fail in real time. The focus is on sequential organization, moral accountability, and what the Santa Barbara School has long emphasized: how social and moral order are accomplished turn by turn. The hardest lesson of the series emerges here—abandonment is not only something institutions do to people; it can also be reproduced interactionally, even within relationships of care, when suffering exceeds the available forms for holding it.

Taken together, the series argues that abandonment must be understood across multiple levels at once: epistemic, theological, sociological, and interactional. It also insists on something more uncomfortable—that no analytic position, however reflexive or well-intentioned, is fully outside the structures it seeks to diagnose.

I offer this work in a spirit of shared inquiry rather than closure. The series does not end with redemption or resolution. It ends with clarity—about limits, about fragility, and about the moral seriousness of paying attention to how abandonment is produced and reproduced in everyday life.

If you read any part of it, I hope it provokes thought, disagreement, or conversation. And if you find yourself unsettled by it, that too may be part of what the topic demands.

With gratitude for the conversations that made this possible,

Wayne

The five chapters are all found on this blog, Doing Modernity, in the opposite order of the book, meaning chapter V Abandonment in Real Time comes first, followed by Chapter IV The Career of Disposability, follow by Chapter III Abandonment as a Site of Revelation, followed by Chapter II The Epistemology of Abandonment, and Chapter I Maladjustment as Insight.