Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

  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...

The Cynical Cycle of Mindless Inaction Recognition, Critical Consciousness, Disruption, and the Praxis of Doing the Next Right Thing Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. A Prayer Before Beginning Spirit of Life, Mystery in which we live and move, Sacred depths of this astonishing world: Wake us. Interrupt the sleepwalking routines by which we move through our days seeing without seeing, hearing without listening, knowing without understanding. Startle us with a black beetle on a red rose bush. Stop us before the dead horseshoe crab washed upon the shore. Let the ordinary trip the switch. Turn our attention toward what we have learned not to notice: the neighbor sleeping beneath a freeway, the joke that diminishes another human being, the worker whose labor disappears behind what we consume, the species vanishing without ceremony, the child frightened by authorities, the lonely, the despised, the discarded, the person standing directly before us whom our categories have prevented us from seein...