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Abandonment in Real Time Book Proposal

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Abandonment in Real Time Institutional Recognition and Premature Death Among the Homeless Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Independent sociologist and social justice writer Santa Barbara, California Book proposal for Doing Modernity 1   Overview Abandonment in Real Time examines how people experiencing homelessness can remain exposed to serious harm despite repeated contact with organizations established to help them. It follows the relationship between recognition, documentation, access, and continuing responsibility across outreach, shelter, emergency medicine, treatment, case management, and housing services. Its central question is how institutional recognition can fail to become sustained care and protection. The Santa Barbara County Homeless Death Review Team’s report for 2017 provides a starting point. Among the 44 decedents identified in that report, 33 had made a combined 124 emergency-department visits in the year before death. These figures establish substantial contact wit...
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Strangers in Common by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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  Strangers in Common A Critical Interactionist Sociology of Stranger Relations Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.  25 September 2026  Introduction Most of the people any of us encounter in a day are strangers. We pass them on sidewalks, stand beside them in elevators, wait behind them in line, sit next to them on buses. Almost none of these encounters becomes an event. That uneventfulness is an achievement. Strangers must see one another without staring, share space without claiming it, and—on the rare occasions when talk begins—find something to say to someone about whom they know almost nothing. The order that makes a world of strangers livable is produced moment by moment, by the people who inhabit it. That order is also unequal. Some people move through public space as unremarkable members of the crowd. Others are stared at, commented on, approached without invitation, told to move along, or looked through as if they were not there. Women walking alone learn that their pr...
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