Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

 Unlearning Oppression By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. No child is brought into this world as a racist or sexist or homophobe.  Oppression must be learned through our childhood socialization processes.  While the home environment provided by our parents is crucial to learning both oppressive and anti-oppressive behaviors, cultural institutions such as schools, religious institutions, and mass media also play a central role. For many years I taught classes at local college and universities I called “Unlearning Oppression”.  While the formal titles of these classes was typically “Race, Class and Gender in American Society” I insisted upon dealing with ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of oppression. In these classes my goal is to create a climate in which students can both deal with their own issues as people who are oppressed and deal with their issues as people who are oppressors.  My title derives from the pioneering work of Erica Shereo...

Doing Modernity: The Micro Foundations of Contemporary Society Doing Modernity and the Industrial Ontology: To do modernity is to inhabit a world that is not simply “there” but one that is constantly performed, assembled, stabilized, and occasionally ruptured through our most mundane actions. Drawing on the ethnomethodological tradition, we can say that modernity is not a finished structure or state of being—it is a situated accomplishment, reproduced moment by moment in embodied, taken-for-granted routines. It is the way we walk down a city street without colliding, the way we queue in silence while swiping through curated digital selves, and the way we glance—not too long, not too short—at a stranger on the subway. This is Goffman’s territory—those ritualized gestures of face management and moral order. His notion of civil inattention doesn’t merely describe how we behave in cities—it diagnoses a form of hypermodern interactional intelligence. Eye contact, then gaze aversion. Proximi...

  Encountering Strangers in Public Places: Goffman and Civil Inattention Appeared in Everyday Sociology, W.W. Norton and Company By Wayne Mellinger Instructor, Antioch University 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 appointment, preoccupied with our own thoughts, navigating through the crowded sidewalks. On “auto pilot,” we don't even think about our many brief encounters with unknown others in public spaces. There is a norm of anonymity which governs behavior in public between strangers. Normally strangers quickly glance at each other and then look away. Through this ritual, which sociologist  Erving Goffman  calls “ civil inattention ,” we demonstrate that we recognize the other person's presence, are not seeking a sustained interaction, and have no hostile intention. The  Dictionary of Critical Social Science  defines “civil inatten...