Doing Modernity: A Declaration

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DOING MODERNITY: A DECLARATION

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.



26 December 2025

There are journals. There are conferences. There are academic careers that move quietly along the expected tracks.

Doing Modernity is not that.

This site is my laboratory, archive, classroom, field notebook, theory workshop, and public commons. It is where Critical Interactionism is being built in real time—with rigor, memory, passion, and ethical commitment.

Doing Modernity began years ago as a place to think aloud. It has become something else: a place where EMCA history is remembered rather than forgotten; where theory stays tethered to suffering, injustice, and lived moral life; where the Santa Barbara lineage keeps growing rather than becoming a museum piece; and where public scholarship is not “outreach” but the discipline itself.

Doing Modernity is also a work of memory: preserving, extending, and honoring the Santa Barbara School tradition before its history becomes scattered and diluted. Don Zimmerman trained me. I carry that lineage. And I refuse to let it become a footnote.

This site rejects the idea that serious work lives only inside formal journals. Sacks didn’t wait for journals. Garfinkel didn’t wait for journals. Much of the Santa Barbara School never grew through journals—it grew through relationships, recorded data, taped lectures, stubborn enthusiasm, and a refusal to ask permission. Doing Modernity lives in that spirit.

The world does not need more academic writing stripped of urgency, soul, and responsibility. Doing Modernity refuses that poverty of imagination. Here, I am writing ambitious, sustained, fully argued, citation-heavy, field-grounded scholarship—without gatekeeping, without delay, without apology. This is a place to honor mentors, deepen theory, examine inequality, rethink the interaction order, and build a living sociology that remembers its soul.

What Critical Interactionism Does

Critical Interactionism begins where classical EMCA often stops. It takes seriously the ethnomethodological insight that social order is accomplished in and through interaction—that the interaction order is sui generis, foundational rather than derivative. But it refuses to stop at description.

Critical Interactionism asks: For whom is order accomplished? At whose expense? Through what historically sedimented practices do some bodies move freely while others are surveilled, interrupted, and expelled?

The framework draws together Goffman’s interaction order as clarified by Anne Warfield Rawls, Garfinkel’s accountability structures, Sacks’ membership categorization analysis, and West and Zimmerman’s “doing difference” approach. It engages contemporary work on race-in-interaction by scholars such as Kevin Whitehead, Jason Turowetz, and Elizabeth Stokoe, and Robin James Smith’s attention to how plural interaction orders are practically accomplished in marginal spaces. From these resources, Critical Interactionism develops a way of analyzing oppression as an interactional achievement—without abandoning the empirical rigor that makes EMCA worth doing.

What You’ll Find Here

Doing Modernity houses several interconnected projects. The Santa Barbara School Project offers profiles and reflections on the scholars who built EMCA, documenting their contributions before they are forgotten or flattened into textbook summaries.

Critical Interactionism essays develop the framework through sustained engagement with specific scholars, problems, and literatures.

Praxis essays bring interactionist insight into contact with social justice work—street outreach, harm reduction, homelessness advocacy, and the annual Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil, now in its fourteenth year.

Reading notes provide detailed engagement with EMCA scholarship old and new: close readings, syntheses, and oriented summaries designed to help readers navigate a complex and often inaccessible literature.

An Invitation

If you come here, come seriously. Read deeply. Argue with me. Share the work. Build with me. Critique with care. This is not disposable content; it is a contribution to a living tradition.

Students of EMCA looking for entry points are welcome here. Scholars whose work deserves more attention than it has received may find themselves written about. Practitioners—outreach workers, organizers, anyone trying to make interactionist insight serve justice—will find that this work is also for them.

Doing Modernity is not a blog anymore. It is a home for thinking. And the door is open.

The interaction order is where we live our lives. It is where harm happens and healing happens. It is where institutions meet human beings—in waiting rooms and courtrooms, on sidewalks and in encampments, across counters and through cage bars. Doing Modernity is committed to studying that terrain with care, rigor, moral clarity, and hope.

Critical Interactionism is not a conclusion. It is an ongoing accomplishment.

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Independent Scholar and Sociologist

Ph.D. in Sociology, UC Santa Barbara (mentored by Don Zimmerman)

Member, Santa Barbara County's Behavioral Wellness Commission and Continuum
Board Member, The Committee for Social Justice, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and Showers of Blessing

Seventeen years of street outreach with people experiencing homelessness

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