Eric Laurier and the Lived Order of Ordinary Places (Revised 2026)
Eric Laurier and the Lived Order of Ordinary Places
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Introduction
Eric Laurier has spent nearly three decades showing that the most familiar places of modern life — the café, the car, the park, the pavement, the edit suite — are achieved, moment by moment, by the people who inhabit them. He is Professor of Geography and Interaction (a Personal Chair) at the Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh. His personal website carries a title that doubles as a research programme: ordinary life as it happens.
Laurier is a sustained and inventive practitioner of ethnomethodological geography. His studies bring the commitments of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks into geographical inquiries about public space, movement, material environments, and everyday understanding. Their central question concerns how places acquire their recognizable organization through the activities conducted within them. Architecture and infrastructure matter, but their practical significance emerges as people use them, interpret others’ conduct, and coordinate what happens next.
Laurier’s website, Ordinary Life as It Happens, names a demanding empirical commitment. He examines how strangers share café space, how passengers participate in driving, how people and dogs organize activities, and how editors assess a film sequence. Such description establishes relationships among actions that familiarity usually allows us to overlook. Its success depends on showing how participants make those relationships consequential, rather than collecting details simply because a camera has preserved them.
This essay reviews selected articles, explains Laurier’s approach, and assesses its importance for geography, sociology, mobilities research, human–computer interaction, and qualitative methods. It argues that his principal contribution is to connect questions about place with the observable organization of action. A balanced assessment must also distinguish what particular recordings establish from questions requiring comparative, historical, or institutional evidence.
Laurier completed his doctorate, City of Glas/z, at the University of Wales in 1996. His early work on maritime heritage and urban exclusion developed within cultural geography. His subsequent collaborations included research on smoking, neighbourhood sociability, and mobile work. These settings brought practical conduct and everyday understanding into focus and helped develop a research programme connecting ethnography with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
Those projects pushed him past interviews and toward recordings of what people actually did. They also put him alongside computer scientists and designers — Barry Brown, Alex Taylor, Oskar Juhlin, Alexandra Weilenmann — for whom ethnomethodological ethnography was already a working tool in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Two large ESRC projects followed: The Cappuccino Community: Cafés and Civic Life in the Contemporary City (with Philo, final report 2005) and Habitable Cars: The Organisation of Collective Car Travel (with Hayden Lorimer and Barry Brown, final report 2007). Together they produced most of the papers for which he is best known.
Ethnomethodology and geographical understanding
Laurier’s Edinburgh profile names Garfinkel, Sacks, Stanley Cavell, Stanley Raffel, Erving Goffman, and Bruno Latour among his intellectual reference points. These commitments combine empirical analysis with philosophical reflection on ordinary understanding. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, abbreviated here as EMCA, remain the central orientation: social activities become intelligible through procedures that participants themselves use and recognize.
Ethnomethodology investigates members’ methods: the practical procedures through which people produce recognizable, accountable activities. Accountability includes conduct’s observable and describable character, as well as its moral implications. A person’s actions can display that they are waiting, offering assistance, or preparing to leave. The researcher examines how others recognize and respond to those displays. Ethnomethodology therefore supplies a subject of inquiry rather than merely a technique for collecting qualitative data.
Place is investigated through its practical organization. A café’s tables become occupied, available, shared, or cleared through conduct that others can recognize. Its material arrangements enable and constrain those activities without determining them completely. Calling place an accomplishment means examining this work; it does not mean that participants freely invent their surroundings or that property, architecture, and institutional arrangements cease to matter.
Garfinkel’s concern with haecceity, the particularity of just this occasion, directs attention to how events unfold. Video allows repeated inspection of talk, gaze, gesture, movement, and object handling. Sequential analysis asks how an action responds to what preceded it and changes what can happen next. Details warrant analytical attention through their demonstrated relevance to the activity, rather than through their visibility alone.
Ordinary-language philosophy supports this inquiry by taking familiar distinctions seriously. People already distinguish assistance from interference, waiting from lingering, and welcome from intrusive attention. Those distinctions can be contested and revised, but they provide access to participants’ practical understanding. Laurier’s philosophical interests help make description an intellectual task rather than a preliminary stage to be quickly superseded by explanation.
Laurier’s engagement with theory includes his review essay on Latour’s Aramis with Philo and work on representation and everyday language. “Possible Geographies” offers the clearest empirical statement of his response to scepticism about description. A researcher cannot reproduce an encounter exhaustively, yet can still describe relevant features adequately. Partial representation need not entail withdrawal from empirical inquiry; its adequacy depends on what the account enables readers to understand and assess.
This position gives theory a disciplined relationship to evidence. Concepts can identify questions and make findings intelligible, but they should not decide in advance what every encounter exemplifies. Participants’ own understanding also requires investigation: the analyst must show how it becomes available through conduct. Simply asserting that an interpretation reflects the participants’ perspective does not establish that it does.
His Edinburgh profile identifies continuing interests in friendship, assistive technologies, visual impairment, wayfinding, service interaction, and trouble in public places. These subjects extend recurring concerns with practical understanding and responsiveness. They also complicate any image of his research as exclusively concerned with comfortable or harmonious everyday settings.
Selected studies
The following studies are grouped by setting and analytical problem. Many are collaborative, and their findings should be attributed to the teams that produced them. The selection emphasizes the continuity of Laurier’s questions while preserving differences among individual investigations.
“Why People Say Where They Are during Mobile Phone Calls” (2001) investigates a familiar feature of mobile communication: geographical locating after greetings. Two recorded cases and a vignette show the value of examining location announcements within the unfolding conversation. The study encourages researchers to ask what making location available accomplishes on a particular occasion, rather than interpreting every announcement as evidence of a generalized cultural condition.
The paper also criticizes theoretical accounts that distance researchers from ordinary actors’ practical understanding. Its broader relevance survives changes in mobile technology. Automatically shared coordinates cannot establish everything people need to know about one another’s availability or activities. Location becomes useful through its relationship to a joint undertaking. Research therefore needs to investigate how geographical information acquires conversational relevance.
Cafés and public life
The café studies, developed through the Living Memory and Cappuccino Community projects, form a sustained investigation of public sociability. Commercial service, personal relationships, and encounters between strangers overlap in these settings. Laurier and his collaborators examine how that overlap is managed through conduct.
"An ethnography of a café" (2001, with Angus Whyte and Kathy Buckner). Published in the Journal of Mundane Behavior, this paper documented the routine order of a neighbourhood café: how regulars and strangers use tables, how background sound supports talk, how informality is organized rather than simply present.
“Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility” (2006), with Philo, uses ethnographic video to examine gestures between strangers and their contribution to cafés as cold, receptive, or accommodating places. The authors question what they identify as a misanthropic tendency in Goffman’s depiction of public relationships. Their contribution is to make responsibility and responsiveness empirically visible. Their characterization of Goffman, however, should remain open to debate: reserve and civil inattention can also express respect. Accommodation and restraint both require examination in context.
"Possible geographies: a passing encounter in a café" (2006, with Philo). Published in Area, this short paper intervenes directly in the debate over non-representational theory. Some geographers had argued that fieldwork encounters cannot be faithfully represented. Laurier and Philo reply that this impossibility should not become a reason to withdraw from the world. Close description of a single encounter is still possible, provided it attends to the sense-making work of the people involved. They describe a brief encounter between strangers to show what such description can yield.
"'A parcel of muddling muckworms': revisiting Habermas and the English coffee-house" (2007, with Philo). Here Laurier turns historian and theorist. Habermas made the early modern coffee-house a founding scene of the bourgeois public sphere. Laurier and Philo test that image against three lines of critique — spatiality, sociability, and practice — drawing on Habermas's own fragmentary notes and on republished primary sources. They conclude that Habermas's coffee-house, contained, egalitarian, and devoted to calm rational-critical debate, is an idealization. They recast coffee-houses, past and present, as sites for the practical conduct of public life.
“How Breakfast Happens in the Café” (2008) examines the temporal organization of a familiar event. Features such as the first customer, crowdedness, and quietness emerge through activity; the city’s daily rhythms become recognizable in the setting. “Drinking Up Endings” (2008) analyses two co-workers closing their conversation and café visit. Drinking, bodily movement, and architecture supply resources for organizing departure. Together these papers show that public sociability includes the practical work of starting, sustaining, and ending encounters.
Driving and the social road
A second major programme concerns driving and collective car travel. Cameras inside vehicles make available activities usually treated as incidental to transport. Laurier studies both interaction among occupants and the interpretation of other vehicles’ movements.
"Doing office work on the motorway" (2004). Published in a Theory, Culture & Society special issue on automobilities, this paper treats the motorway as a place where "the society of traffic" can be found and studied. Video of one driver doing paperwork while overtaking a slow vehicle allows Laurier to analyze, following Harvey Sacks, overlooked orderly features of mobility such as overtaking, tailgating, and cruising. Against theorists who use "speed" to characterize the age, he offers a brief re-specification of speed as something with practical and moral uses within traffic.
"Driving and 'passengering': notes on the ordinary organization of car travel" (2008). Written with Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, and eleven other collaborators, this Mobilities paper came out of the Habitable Cars project. It documents what people do in cars besides drive. Families, couples, colleagues, and friends are re-assembled inside the small, oddly arranged space of the car interior. Seating and sight lines complicate conversation. Car-sharing produces its own peculiar form of hospitality. The paper helped make the car interior a standard site in mobilities research.
Brown and Laurier’s “The Normal, Natural Troubles of Driving with GPS” (2012) analyses fifteen recorded journeys, identifying difficulties involving destinations, routes, maps and sensors, timing, and relevance and legality. Drivers and passengers interpret instructions in relation to circumstances on the road. The study challenges the design assumption of a driver who simply obeys the device. “The Trouble with Autopilots” (2017) examines publicly posted videos of Tesla’s Autopilot and Google’s self-driving car, asking how automated movements become intelligible to occupants and other drivers. Its findings concern the systems available at that time. The broader implication is that automated vehicles participate in an existing social order: technical capability must be considered alongside the legibility of their actions.
“A Bip, a Beeeep and a Beep Beep” (2020), with Daniel Muñoz, Rebekah Miller, and Barry Brown, takes the analysis to Chennai. Horn sounds become intelligible through their timing and relation to developing traffic configurations. The study makes sound available alongside vehicle position and movement as a resource for coordination. It cautions against hearing unfamiliar traffic practices simply as noise or aggression: participants can distinguish uses that an outsider overlooks.
Maps and practical reasoning
“Rotating Maps and Readers” (2008), with Barry Brown, examines tourists finding a building in Edinburgh and day-trippers consulting a road atlas. Navigation, orientation, and alignment become publicly inspectable in gestures and conversation. The authors explicitly present this as an inquiry into practical reasoning, rather than a comprehensive rejection of cognition. Their findings show how people share, demonstrate, and revise an understanding of where they are; they do not establish the absence of internal mental activity.
"Mediated pedestrian mobility: walking and the map app" (2016, with Brown and Moira McGregor). This Mobilities paper brings the analysis into the smartphone era. It shows how walking actions such as stopping, turning, and restarting are tied to on-screen map actions such as rescaling the map and watching the you-are-here dot. Walking with an app turns out to be a collaborative, intersubjective accomplishment.
Animals and family meals
"Putting the dog back in the park: animal and human mind-in-action" (2006, with Ramia Mazé and Johan Lundin). Published in Mind, Culture, and Activity, this is one of the earliest EMCA studies of human–animal interaction. Where much of psychology and philosophy begins with scepticism about animal minds, the authors accept the positive possibilities of anthropomorphism. They describe dog walking as a joint accomplishment in which owner and dog methodically display intent and produce shared social objects. Laurier returned to dogs in "Dissolving the dog: the home made video" (Cultural Geographies, 2014) and in a recent ESRC project on assistance-dog partnerships.
“Finishing the Family Meal” (2011), with Sally Wiggins, examines how claims of being full participate in mealtime organization. Parents or siblings can question those claims, encourage further eating, or offer dessert. The study investigates the practical consequences of expressing bodily experience within relationships. It does not deny physiological satiety. This distinction is valuable for health research, where bodily experience and the social handling of reports about it are connected but analytically distinguishable.
Media work and editing
With Barry Brown and Ignaz Strebel, Laurier investigated professional work with video. “Video Analysis: Lessons from Professional Video Editing Practice” (2008) invites researchers to learn from practitioners who routinely inspect and organize recorded material. “The Reservations of the Editor” (2011), with Brown, studies an editor and director assembling a documentary. Side-by-side work around screens involves unequal access to controls, joint assessment, and responsibility for audience intelligibility. Creativity becomes observable as collaboration, while researchers gain a sharper awareness of their own practices of selecting and presenting evidence.
Neighbours strangers and hospitality
A strand running through Laurier’s research concerns how people become identifiable and responsive to one another. This work speaks to the sociology of strangers associated with Simmel, Goffman, and Lofland while examining the conduct through which familiarity, distance, and welcome are organized. Strangerhood can be a practical relationship as well as a social position.
"Neighbouring as an occasioned activity: 'finding a lost cat'" (2002, with Angus Whyte and Kathy Buckner). Published in Space and Culture, this study shows neighbouring as something people do when an occasion calls for it, not a standing attribute of living near one another. A lost pet gives residents a warrant to approach each other, exchange information, and activate relationships that otherwise lie dormant.
"Acknowledging, recognising and responding to one another: ordinary hospitality in the café" (2025, with Sylvaine Tunçer). This Geoforum paper re-examines Clive Barnett's ethics of hospitality, which draws on Derrida and Levinas, against video of staff and customers. It traces how participants move from welcoming one another as anyone to recognising one another as someone. Routine phrases and categorizing practices do much of this work, and both parties make, pursue, or sidestep invitations to reveal more about themselves.
“Customer Agency in Interactive Service” (2026), with Tunçer, challenges accounts that make rapport exclusively the service employee’s responsibility. From 55 payment encounters recorded over three days in one café, the authors examined 18 involving small talk. They identify recurring trajectories, including resuming a conversation, initiating a topic through an observation, and expanding a response to a routine staff question. Customers actively contribute to sociability, while brief responses and embodied disengagement can decline it. Rapport is collaboratively accomplished; conviviality should not be inferred from the employee’s script alone.
The distinction between an invitation and an obligation is especially useful for the sociology of strangers. A person can accept, acknowledge briefly, or decline an opening. More talk is not inherently evidence of better treatment. Appropriate service may involve recognizing a customer’s preference to remain engaged with a companion or to leave. These are interpretive implications of the study, rather than a claim that every service setting gives customers equivalent freedom.
“Encounters Convening Publics” (2024), with Daniel Muñoz and Dan Swanton, examines a passenger-recorded London tram confrontation involving racist and anti-immigrant talk. The analysis follows responses, claims to a right to respond, avoidance of the confrontation’s terms, and video-witnessing. Passengers can be drawn into becoming members of a public through an unwanted encounter. Speaking involves uncertain support and possible escalation. The paper makes political opposition and public accountability available as interactional accomplishments.
Video and the craft of inquiry
Laurier’s methodological contributions concern recording, transcription, and the craft of empirical inquiry. Their importance lies in making claims inspectable while acknowledging the selections through which recorded events become research materials.
Laurier has contributed to the integration of video into geographical research through chapters on naturalistic data, mobile recording, camera arrangements, and noticing conduct. These writings address how an environment can be recorded without losing the relations among movement, speech, bodies, and objects that make its activities intelligible. Video supplements ethnographic familiarity by enabling repeated inspection of fleeting events.
A recurring lesson in this work is that recording is not a neutral preliminary step. A camera inside a car may preserve the passengers' talk while losing the road; a camera on a service counter may capture the exchange at the till while missing the rest of the room. Where the camera goes decides what evidence the analysis can later use. In a 2019 interview with Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Laurier sharpened the point by distinguishing video as the researcher's tool from video-making as a practice of the people being studied. Recordings make repeated inspection possible, but they do not by themselves reveal social order: the analyst still has to show how participants treat a gesture, pause, or object as consequential.
He also widened what counts as data. "YouTube: fragments of an atlas of the video-tropics" (Area, 2016) and the autopilot study treat publicly posted video as material that can be analyzed on its own terms. With Mathias Broth and Lorenza Mondada he co-edited Studies of Video Practices: Video at Work (Routledge, 2014), which studies video-making itself as a practical activity.
“The Graphic Transcript” (2014) combines transcription’s evidentiary purposes with conventions from comics, including panels, gutters, speech bubbles, and captions. It offers a way to represent visual, spatial, and temporal relations on the page while permitting reinspection. This is an addition to established transcription practice. Jeffersonian conventions remain valuable for talk, and multimodal systems coordinate speech with embodied conduct. Graphic presentation can clarify a scene, but it still selects; visual attractiveness cannot substitute for preserving analytically consequential details.
Laurier’s teaching emphasizes the craft of collecting, analysing, and writing about empirical materials. Participant observation and fieldwork help researchers develop sufficient familiarity to recognize relevant practices, while recordings allow that recognition to be examined and revised. Competence in a setting assists inquiry without guaranteeing an adequate analysis. A researcher must still explain what the evidence establishes and make the reasoning available to readers.
Importance across research fields
Laurier’s research connects several communities through a common empirical orientation. Its relevance can be assessed by the questions and evidence it provides, without ranking him against other scholars or treating every collaboration as proof of disciplinary influence.
In human geography, Laurier makes the organization of place available for close empirical investigation. His work appears in journals including Transactions, Area, and Environment and Planning D, and engages debates about representation, practical reasoning, and public space. It provides a way to investigate how material environments become intelligible through use while preserving the specificity of particular activities.
For mobilities studies, his analyses connect movement with practical coordination. Families continue their relationships in cars; road users interpret trajectories; companions adjust to someone consulting a phone. These findings complement research on transport systems and infrastructural inequalities by establishing what people do within particular journeys. They do not, on their own, explain access to mobility or its environmental consequences.
In human–computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work, Laurier’s collaborations with Barry Brown examine technologies within the activities they support. Studies of navigation, smartphones, and skilled gaming connect interface use with timing, practical interpretation, and collaboration. “Experts at Play” (2009), with Stuart Reeves and Brown, investigates skilled expertise among Counter-Strike players. These studies offer design research evidence about competence and coordination that a task description or account of individual preferences can miss.
Within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, his studies contribute to research on mobile, embodied, and material activity alongside work by Mondada, Haddington, Broth, and others. Their importance is empirical and methodological: movement, changing visibility, and technological mediation become resources that participants use in organizing action. The graphic transcript supplies one means of presenting these relations.
For urban sociology, his café studies and public-transport analysis connect questions about conviviality and publicness with observable conduct. Goffman’s account of reserve and Habermas’s account of debate become interlocutors whose concepts can be examined against practical activity. Public life includes accommodation, withdrawal, disagreement, and the organization of a right to respond.
His work also reaches family feeding, animal relations, social work, and health communication. Across these subjects, interactional analysis can establish how experiences and obligations are expressed, interpreted, and given consequences. Its practical value depends on retaining that specificity when findings are brought into professional or policy discussions.
Critical assessment
A balanced assessment distinguishes limitations of individual studies from categorical claims about the programme. Close interactional evidence is powerful for establishing how a practice works. It does not automatically explain all the conditions that make the encounter possible.
Power cannot be treated as absent merely because an analysis concentrates on local conduct. “Racism and Misrecognition” (2021), with Yarong Xie, Steve Kirkwood, and Sue Widdicombe, examines reports of racial encounters and how categorization can deny national membership that a person claims. The study also analyses the delicacy of describing and evaluating incidents as racist. Alongside the tram paper, it demonstrates that Laurier’s collaborations address injustice directly. The remaining question concerns how a particular investigation relates interactional findings to organizational and historical conditions.
The distribution of conviviality nevertheless requires careful attention. A welcoming encounter among admitted customers cannot establish how a venue treats those who never enter or are asked to leave. For research involving unhoused or otherwise stigmatized people, relevant evidence may include entry conditions, refusals, staff instructions, and participants’ responses. Civil inattention should be distinguished from conduct that denies a person’s presence or claim to participation. These distinctions require demonstration; social categories alone cannot settle the meaning of each encounter.
The geographical and social range of a corpus also matters. Many of the studies discussed here concern British and northern European cafés, journeys, and workplaces, while the Chennai research shows a wider reach. Their findings should be compared with other arrangements before being generalized. An unfamiliar practice may look disorderly to outsiders yet have differentiated uses for participants. Equally, a procedure identified in one setting may fail or acquire different consequences elsewhere.
Collaboration across journals and disciplines makes the programme difficult to apprehend as a whole. A reader encountering only a navigation article might miss the connections with café hospitality or media work. This dispersal is a challenge for synthesis rather than an empirical defect: the common questions become clearer when studies are read together while their distinct findings remain intact.
Camera placement creates evidentiary limits. Recordings may preserve counter talk while missing a refusal at the entrance, or occupants’ conversation while obscuring the road. Institutional histories and activities distributed across sites may require documents and additional ethnography. Researchers should distinguish what a recording establishes from what these other materials establish, then demonstrate the connections between them.
The reach of a finding also differs from its prevalence. A closely analysed sequence can identify an intelligible procedure; a collection can show recurrence and variation. Neither automatically establishes how often that procedure occurs across a population. The rapport study’s 18 small-talk encounters provide a specific empirical basis. Comparative work would be needed to establish how its patterns operate across service settings, customer populations, and working conditions.
Implications for critical interactionism
Laurier offers critical interactionism a discipline of empirical demonstration. Analysis can show how recognition, exclusion, and responsibility become consequential through conduct without treating every detail as a predetermined instance of domination. Institutional ethnography provides a complementary route for investigating how local activities are coordinated through texts, policies, and organizational relations. Combining the approaches requires preserving their distinct questions and establishing the links with evidence.
His larger contribution is to make ordinary competence available for sustained inquiry. Familiar activities contain relationships among perception, language, bodies, objects, and obligations that people rely on without continually explaining them. Laurier’s studies recover some of those relationships and show how they organize places and encounters. Their significance lies in what this evidence enables us to understand, including the conditions under which coordination succeeds, welcome is withheld, and public order becomes contested.
Bibliography
Brown, Barry, and Eric Laurier. 2012. “The Normal, Natural Troubles of Driving with GPS.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Read online
Brown, Barry, and Eric Laurier. 2017. “The Trouble with Autopilots: Assisted and Autonomous Driving on the Social Road.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 416–29. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2001. “Why People Say Where They Are during Mobile Phone Calls.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (4): 485–504. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2004. “Doing Office Work on the Motorway.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5): 261–77. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2008. “Drinking Up Endings: Conversational Resources of the Café.” Language & Communication 28 (2): 165–81. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2008. “How Breakfast Happens in the Café.” Time & Society 17 (1): 119–34. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2014. “Dissolving the Dog: The Home Made Video.” Cultural Geographies 21 (4): 627–38. Read online
Laurier, Eric. 2014. “The Graphic Transcript: Poaching Comic Book Grammar for Inscribing the Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Action.” Geography Compass 8 (4): 235–48. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Barry Brown. 2008. “Rotating Maps and Readers: Praxiological Aspects of Alignment and Orientation.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 201–16. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Barry Brown. 2011. “The Reservations of the Editor: The Routine Work of Showing and Knowing the Film in the Edit Suite.” Social Semiotics 21 (2): 239–57. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Barry Brown, and Moira McGregor. 2016. “Mediated Pedestrian Mobility: Walking and the Map App.” Mobilities 11 (1): 117–34. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson Noble, Mark Perry, Daniele Pica, Philippe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel, Laurel Swan, Alex S. Taylor, Laura Watts, and Alexandra Weilenmann. 2008. “Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel.” Mobilities 3 (1): 1–23. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Ramia Mazé, and Johan Lundin. 2006. “Putting the Dog Back in the Park: Animal and Human Mind-in-Action.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 13 (1): 2–24. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Daniel Muñoz, Rebekah Miller, and Barry Brown. 2020. “A Bip, a Beeeep and a Beep Beep: How Horns Are Sounded in Chennai Traffic.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 53 (3): 341–56. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Daniel Muñoz, and Dan Swanton. 2024. “Encounters Convening Publics: Opposing Politics and Confronting Trouble-Making.” Social & Cultural Geography 25 (10): 1670–90. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. 2003. “The Region in the Boot: Mobilising Lone Subjects and Multiple Objects.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (1): 85–106. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. 2006. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2): 193–208. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. 2006. “Possible Geographies: A Passing Encounter in a Café.” Area 38 (4): 353–63. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. 2007. “‘A Parcel of Muddling Muckworms’: Revisiting Habermas and the English Coffee-Houses.” Social & Cultural Geography 8 (2): 259–81. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Ignaz Strebel, and Barry Brown. 2008. “Video Analysis: Lessons from Professional Video Editing Practice.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9 (3), article 37. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Sylvaine Tunçer. 2025. “Acknowledging, Recognising and Responding to One Another: Ordinary Hospitality in the Café.” Geoforum 165: 104372. Read online
Laurier, Eric, Angus Whyte, and Kathy Buckner. 2001. “An Ethnography of a Café.” Journal of Mundane Behavior 2 (2). Read online
Laurier, Eric, Angus Whyte, and Kathy Buckner. 2002. “Neighbouring as an Occasioned Activity: ‘Finding a Lost Cat.’” Space and Culture 5 (4): 346–67. Read online
Laurier, Eric, and Sally Wiggins. 2011. “Finishing the Family Meal: The Interactional Organisation of Satiety.” Appetite 56 (1): 53–64. Read online
Reeves, Stuart, Barry Brown, and Eric Laurier. 2009. “Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise.” Games and Culture 4: 205–27. Read online
Tunçer, Sylvaine, and Eric Laurier. 2026. “Customer Agency in Interactive Service: Small Talk and Rapport at the Cafe Counter.” Sociology 60 (3): 778–97. First published online November 12, 2025. Read online
Xie, Yarong, Steve Kirkwood, Eric Laurier, and Sue Widdicombe. 2021. “Racism and Misrecognition.” British Journal of Social Psychology 60 (4): 1177–95. Read online
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