Announcing a New Subtitle for Doing Modernity

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Announcing a New Subtitle for Doing Modernity

From "Using Cultural Interactionism to Study Everyday Life" to "Studies in Critical Interactionism"

When I launched this site years ago, I chose the subtitle "Using Cultural Interactionism to Study Everyday Life." It was a placeholder—a gesture toward the intellectual territory I wanted to explore without committing to a specific theoretical program.  I was using the site to complement courses in sociological social psychology from an interactionist perspective.

That time has passed.

Over the past year, this archive has become something more focused: a systematic effort to document the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and to develop what I am calling Critical Interactionism—a theoretical framework that makes explicit the political and moral implications that were always latent in the work of Harold Garfinkel, Don Zimmerman, Thomas Wilson, Harvey Molotch and their students.

The Santa Barbara School demonstrated that social structure has no existence independent of the practices through which members produce and recognize it. But with few exceptions, its practitioners stopped short of drawing the critical consequences of this insight. If inequality is accomplished rather than merely reflected in interaction, then the micro-order is not politically innocent. Every encounter is a moral event. Recognition, respect, and accountability circulate according to norms that systematically advantage some and abandon others.

Critical Interactionism names this project: the integration of ethnomethodological rigor with critical social theory, connecting the sequential organization of talk to the structural production of oppression.

The new subtitle—Studies in Critical Interactionism—reflects what this archive has become and where it is heading. A note on form: despite the platform, this is not a blog. Blogs are informal, ephemeral, conversational. Doing Modernity is a scholarly archive of long-form, journal-length essays intended as contributions to the academic literature.

For those who wish to cite essays from this site, the recommended format (Chicago style) is now:

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "[Title of Essay]." Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism, [Date]. [URL].

The work continues.

—Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Santa Barbara, California
February 2026

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