Doing Modernity: A Manifesto for Interaction at the Speed of Life by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

                                                             Doing Modernity: 

A Manifesto for Interaction at the Speed of Life

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Why Journals Are No Longer Adequate

Traditional sociology journals are not merely slow.

They are interactionally misaligned with the phenomena they claim to analyze.

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are concerned with how social order is accomplished in real time—turn by turn, sequence by sequence, moment by moment. Yet the dominant institutions of academic publishing operate on timelines measured in years, governed by editorial cycles, prestige hierarchies, and retrospective accountability rituals that lag far behind the worlds they describe.

By the time an EMCA paper appears in print, the interactional conditions it analyzes have often already changed.

This is not a failure of effort.

It is a failure of fit.

Doing Modernity exists because the traditional knowledge economy can no longer keep pace with interaction itself.

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The Structural Refusal

Doing Modernity is not an alternative journal, a blog, or an outreach project.

It is a structural refusal of an outdated interactional order.

We refuse:

Reviewer #2 as an epistemic authority

Peer review has become a moral economy of caution, flattening conceptual ambition in the name of “clarity,” “scope,” and “fit.” Doing Modernity prioritizes conceptual density, theoretical risk, and analytic seriousness over arbitrary readability metrics.

Editorial latency as a measure of rigor

Interaction unfolds now. Analysis that arrives two years later is not more rigorous—it is simply delayed. Doing Modernity operates at the tempo of the phenomena it studies.

Artificial length constraints

The 8,000-word limit is not methodological discipline; it is a formatting convenience. If a theory needs space to unfold, it is given that space. Compression is earned, not imposed.

Paywalls as epistemic boundaries

High-caliber theory should not cost $45 per PDF. Knowledge about social order belongs in public circulation, not behind institutional toll gates.

This is not anti-academic.

It is post-gatekeeping.

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What We Are Building

Doing Modernity is a Living EMCA Laboratory.

It is a site where ethnomethodological and interactional analysis can be pursued at full strength, without distortion by publishing conventions that no longer serve the work.

Iterative Theorizing

Social order is fluid. So is theory. Essays are revised in public, extended across posts, and allowed to accumulate conceptual depth over time.

Moral Seriousness

We address contemporary conditions—AI systems, administrative cruelty, homelessness, abandonment, institutional failure—without waiting for editorial consensus or disciplinary trend cycles.

Methodological Integrity

There is no “literature review theater.” No obligatory signaling. No performative citation rituals. The work proceeds from data, lived worlds, and analytic problems as they present themselves.

Public-Facing Rigor

This is not popularization. It is serious theory in public, written for readers who care about how social order actually works.

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A Different Understanding of Rigor

Rigor is not slowness.

Rigor is not obscurity.

Rigor is not insulation from the world.

Rigor is analytic accountability to the phenomena themselves.

Doing Modernity treats sociology not as a prestige economy, but as a practice of attention—one that must remain in contact with the worlds it describes if it is to retain its critical force.

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After the Journals

Doing Modernity is not bypassing gatekeepers.

It is rendering them irrelevant.

Not through outrage.

Not through disruption.

But by demonstrating—again and again—what state-of-the-art ethnomethodological and interactional analysis looks like when it is allowed to breathe, to move, and to remain contemporaneous with the social worlds it studies.

This is not the future of sociology.

It is sociology after the delay.