Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

 DOING MODERNITY: THE BLOG With every action, we make the world.  With every action, we potentially make the world better or worse.  Our ordinary activities count.  For it is through these everyday behaviors that the social world is ongoing constituted as an orderly event. In 2008 I created a blog entitled “Doing Modernity”.  That blog covered a wide range of interests, but was centrally concerned with how we “do modernity”–that is, I hoped to examine a few of the concrete practices social actors employ in everyday life to produce and reproduce our society. I began this blog to supplement a class in Social Psychology I regularly at Antioch University Santa Barbara, and to illustrate an auto-ethnographic approach to examining everyday life, particularly concrete instances of social activity. This class forged a "Critical Interactionist" approach to studying social psychology in everyday social life.  Theoretically, I drew upon critical social theories t...

 PUBLICATIONS  Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. (1992) "Postcards from the Edge of the Colorline: Images of African Americans in Popular Culture, 1893-1917." Symbolic interaction  (1992) "Talk-as-Work: The Case of Paramedic Calls for Emergency Field Orders" in Current Research in Occupations and Professions Vol. 7 )  (1992) "Accomplishing Fact in Police "Dispatch Packages": An Analysis of the Situated Construction of an Organizational Record." Perspectives on Social Problems Vol. 4 )  (1992) "Representing Blackness in the White Imagination: Images of "Happy Darkies" in Popular Culture, 1893-1917. Visual sociology  (1994) "Toward a Critical Analysis of Tourism Representations" Annals of Tourism Research  (1994) "Negotiated Orders: The Negotiation of Directives in Paramedic-Nurse Interactions." Symbolic interaction  (1995) "The Anatomy of an Obituary: 'Rock Hudson Dies at 59 After Fighting AIDS'" Pe...