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 Interactional Accomplishment of Contemporary Social Order Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. ·  Revised Oct 6, 2026  1. Who Gets to Be a Stranger? The steps of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse are a good place to watch a city keep its composure. People pass in every direction: shoppers carrying bags from the boutiques on State Street, lawyers and clerks moving between offices, tourists photographing the tilework, and people without housing who carry what they own in packs, bags, or carts. Most of these passages are uneventful, and that is what makes them interesting. A sidestep here, a glance that lands and then moves on, a slight adjustment of pace as two trajectories approach each other. Nobody announces any of it. Yet the scene is orderly, and its order is being produced, continuously, by the people in it. I have spent a good deal of time on and around those steps, first as a street outreach worker and later as someone who could not stop looking at ...