Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

                                                  Doing Being Strangers:  The Social Organization of Encounters Among Unacquainted Persons A  review of classical sociology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and public interaction Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Introduction: Strangerhood as a practical accomplishment A remarkable feature of everyday social life is the ease with which people coordinate their activities with persons they have never met. Pedestrians negotiate crowded sidewalks without discussing the rules of passage. Passengers enter elevators, distribute themselves across limited space, and avert their gaze without explicit agreement. Customers wait in queues, strangers exchange directions, and travelers sometimes initiate conversations that end without either party expecting a continuing relationship. Such ac...

LIVING IN THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS: PARKER PALMER AND THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. May we no longer step blindly past the stranger who huddles in the cold outside the door! May I no longer pretend not to see the woman with massively disheveled hair crawling out of her wheelchair to sleep in a door well. Let no one continue to walk past the elderly Latino man riddled with dazed confusion begging for food in front of grocery store, because they are in such a hurry to grab their lunch. To live in the city is to live in the presence of strangers. For those of us living in cities, passing strangers on busy streets is unremarkable. We rush to our next appointments, preoccupied with our own thoughts, navigating through crowded sidewalks. On “autopilot,” we don't even think about our many brief encounters with unknown others in public spaces. This past week, I had the opportunity to hear Parker J. Palmer, a fellow sociologist and...

I was very fortunate to have Professor John Heritage as one of my teachers when he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1980s, just after he published Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology and before UCLA scooped him up. In this article Heritage is at his best--theoretically brilliant while grounded in the details of the real world.  And on top of it all, John is the nicest guy--humble and lovable to the core! Enjoy! http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/heritage/Site/Publications_files/CA_as_SOCIAL_THEORY.pdf

Doing gender, doing categorisation: Recent developments in language and gender research Elizabeth H. Stokoe Introduction In this paper, I consider the potential of membership categorisation analysis, an empirical tool in ethnomethodological inquiry, for language and gender researchers. To date, there has been no sustained attempt to incorporate this kind of approach into gender and language work. It is virtually ignored in feminist sociolinguistics, where the majority of research gets done and is seldom considered in overviews of the field (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003; Weatherall, 2002). However, I argue that MCA is a valuable method for examining the practical occasioning and construction of gender in discourse. To support this position, I begin by tracking the history and development of ethnomethodological approaches to gender and their practical translations. I argue that the ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constituted in people’s situated categorisation...

(Re-written  May 2025) ALIENATION AND EXCLUSION IN MODERNITY For Rev. Jon Lemmond “And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine.” —Mark 5:12 This essay reflects on what it means to live at the margins of modern society. It is a meditation on alienation and exclusion—not only as structural processes but as existential conditions. I offer here only a beginning, a few scattered thoughts stitched together with the hope of making some sense of the dislocation so many experience in the contemporary world. Emile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding figures, recognized early on that modern life brought with it a profound transformation in the glue that holds society together. In traditional societies, what he called mechanical solidarity bound people through sameness—shared norms, religious beliefs, kinship ties. A village or tribe was unified by likeness and conformity. But modernity, shaped by urbanization and industrialization, ushered in organic solidarity : a ...