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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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About Me

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 About Me About Me I’m Wayne Martin Mellinger, a sociologist, writer, educator, activist, and lifelong student of the strange and beautiful ways human beings make worlds together. I was trained as a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my Ph.D. My intellectual home has long been in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, phenomenology, and critical social theory. I have taught sociology and related subjects at several universities and colleges, and I continue to write about interaction, institutions, homelessness, inequality, recognition, and social justice. But scholarship is only part of my life. Years of community organizing, homeless outreach, recovery work, and advocacy have convinced me that ideas matter most when they return us more attentively to the world and to one another. My three blogs explore different territories of that larger project. Doing Modernity examines sociology, social theory, interaction, ins...
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Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Critical Interactionism: An Annotated Bibliography of My Writings, 2025–2026

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  Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Critical Interactionism: An Annotated Bibliography of My Writings, 2025–2026 Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. This bibliography gathers the essays published on Doing Modernity that together constitute my ongoing development of Critical Interactionism — a synthesis of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, symbolic interactionism, and critical social theory aimed at showing how power, moral order, and institutional harm are accomplished in the fine grain of everyday interaction. The entries run in reverse chronological order, from the most recent essay back to April 2025. Read forward from the top, the list is a map of where this work currently stands; read backward from the bottom, it traces how the project's central concerns — the Santa Barbara School's intellectual lineage, the abandonment and street-outreach research, the theory of interaction orders, and the turn toward human-AI interaction — developed, one essay at a time, in...
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