Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Critical Interactionism: An Annotated Bibliography of My Writings, 2025–2026

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

This bibliography gathers the essays published on Doing Modernity that together constitute my ongoing development of Critical Interactionism — a synthesis of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, symbolic interactionism, and critical social theory aimed at showing how power, moral order, and institutional harm are accomplished in the fine grain of everyday interaction. The entries run in reverse chronological order, from the most recent essay back to April 2025. Read forward from the top, the list is a map of where this work currently stands; read backward from the bottom, it traces how the project's central concerns — the Santa Barbara School's intellectual lineage, the abandonment and street-outreach research, the theory of interaction orders, and the turn toward human-AI interaction — developed, one essay at a time, into their current form. Each title links to the essay itself, so this page can also serve as a working index into the larger body of writing.

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The Cynical Cycle of Mindless Inaction (Revised)

Sep 5, 2026. Opens with a prayer-like invocation before developing an argument about recognition, critical consciousness, and disruption as the precondition for moral action — why people fail to act on what they already perceive, and what "doing the next right thing" requires once cynicism sets in.

Who Gets to Produce the Record? Indigenous Sovereignty in the Age of AI

Sep 2, 2026. Bilingual (Spanish/English) response to Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo's work on Indigenous communicative sovereignty. Extends Hidalgo's claim — that Indigenous peoples must control the production, not just the representation, of their own meaning — into the machinery of AI data extraction, using EMCA's insight that categories and records don't just describe reality but constitute it.

The Paradox of Rational Accumulation: Local Reason, Systemic Harm, and a Theory of Institutional Life in Late Modernity

Aug 23, 2026. Develops a theory of institutional life in which locally reasonable decisions — each individually defensible — accumulate into systemic harm, extending the "rational accumulation" argument first developed in the earlier "Dying by the Rules" essay on street outreach.

Towards a General Sociology and Philosophy of Containment

Jul 3, 2026. Argues that most of what defines mature human capacity — wisdom, compassion, professional skill, democratic judgment — requires sustained attention that ordinary "restless," survival-adapted consciousness cannot provide on its own, and that human societies solve this through "containers": socially organized environments (vigils, courtrooms, classrooms, therapy sessions, Twelve-Step meetings, Quaker meetings, CA data sessions, play, ritual) that stabilize and prolong attention long enough for cultivation to occur. Synthesizes Bion's containment, Winnicott's transitional space, Turner's liminality, Goffman's frame analysis, and Goodwin's professional vision into a single claim: containers don't just hold people, they hold attention. Explicitly ties this to a Dionysian argument that pleasure, play, and festival are not distractions from ethical cultivation but among its most reliable technologies. Developmental significance: introduces "containers" as the mechanism that operationalizes the Attentional Orders essay (above) — if attention is the stratified resource, containment theory explains how attention gets stabilized (or fails to) long enough to produce recognition, bearing witness, and democratic capacity, directly linking to the Longest Night Vigil and bearing-witness themes elsewhere in Mellinger's work.

Attentional Orders: Toward a Sociology of Attention Allocation

Jun 15, 2026. Develops "the attentional order" — attention as a socially organized, stratified resource, not a matter of individual courtesy — building from Goffman's civil inattention and interaction order, Lankenau's ethnography of panhandling as "attention-claiming labor," Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography of documents, and recognition theory (Honneth, Fraser, Butler). Proposes a transformation chain — Attention → Recognition → Obligation → Allocation → Holding → Survival, with a pathological inverse ending in premature death — and argues the critical failure in contemporary institutions occurs not at visibility but at conversion: people are "counted but not housed, diagnosed but not stabilized, recognized but not held." Extends Mellinger's own earlier work on cell phones and civil inattention (2011, 2013) and connects to his broader documentary-sedimentation and Administrative Death concepts from the abandonment research program. Eight formal propositions are offered toward a sociology of attentional orders, with homelessness treated explicitly as a "revelatory case" rather than the theory's only domain. Developmental significance: generalizes the abandonment/documentary-constitution research program into a standalone theoretical apparatus (the attentional order) applicable beyond homelessness to medicine, education, and criminal justice — a structural companion to the Documentary Constitution and Layered Moral Economy essays elsewhere in this bibliography.

The Temporal Lag of Competence: Paco, Fentanyl, and the Obsolescence of Street Knowledge

May 31, 2026. A memorial essay for Paco, a 28-year-old unhoused man from Goleta who died after an overdose, built around his recurring line, "I got this." Mellinger traces how Paco's carefully maintained style, his periodic visits to his mother, and his refusal of services were not denial but the active protection of a self-understanding as competent rather than as "homeless" or "in need." The essay's central concept — the "temporal lag of competence" — names the way practical survival knowledge acquired under one drug regime (heroin, where experience and caution genuinely reduced risk) persists into a new one (fentanyl, where dose is unpredictable and experience no longer predicts safety) after the environment has already changed underneath it. Draws on Howard Becker's Outsiders, Bourgois and Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend, Craig Reinarman's sociology of drug policy, and Waverly Duck's dissertation on masculinity and health. Developmental significance: reframes overdose from a purely pharmacological or individual-failure event into a social one — obsolete competence, not ignorance, as the mechanism of death — extending Mellinger's abandonment/street-outreach program into the specific terrain of the fentanyl era.

Homeless Mortality, Fractured Interaction Orders, and the Erosion of Civic Recognition

May 18, 2026. A research note for Abandonment in Real Time arguing that California's homeless mortality reviews reveal a problem epidemiology and policy analysis alone can't explain — the erosion of the interactional conditions for civic recognition itself, not merely resource scarcity.

Many Interaction Orders: Recognition, Inequality, and the Stratified Field of Interaction

Apr 25, 2026. This is the revised/expanded "v.9" successor to the earlier draft "The Many Interaction Orders: Goffman, Rawls, Smith..." (see below) — the post itself contains an editor's note confirming the relationship. Argues against Goffman's "interaction order" as a single shared substrate of social life, proposing instead that interaction orders are plural and stratified, and that treating them as unitary is itself a theoretical fiction that obscures whose interactions count.

Habermas, Anthropocentrism and the Real Speech Situation

Mar 15, 2026. A first-person intellectual history beginning with Mellinger's graduate encounter with Habermas at UCSB under Richard Appelbaum, tracing his initial admiration for the theory of communicative action, then developing a critique that the "ideal speech situation" presupposes an anthropocentric frame — read against Critical Interactionism and Dionysian Naturalism.

The Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality: A Research Program

Mar 14, 2026. A theoretical synthesis arguing that ethnomethodology, institutional ethnography, and critical sociology have independently converged on the same claim — that organizational documents actively constitute, not merely record, the realities they describe. Traces the lineage from Garfinkel through Zimmerman, Cicourel, Whalen, and Dorothy Smith, and introduces six original concepts (Burden of Legibility, Documentary Sorting, Documentary Sedimentation, Administrative Death, Conditional Recognition, Temporal Mismatch) applied to the documentary processing of homeless persons.

The South African School of EMCA

Mar 1, 2026. Part of a comparative series mapping EMCA's regional "schools." Situates South African EMCA as shaped by post-apartheid accountability, extreme multilingualism (11 official languages), and institutional asymmetry, and previews the IIEMCA27 conference at Wits University, Johannesburg.

The Machinery of Ordinary Cruelty

Jan 28, 2026. Introduces the central argument of Abandonment in Real Time: that homelessness and premature death are produced through the ordinary interactional practices of care systems, not merely policy failure. Identifies four mechanisms — positional displacement, repeated interactional negation, documentary production, interactional testing — and proposes "care without innocence" as a stance that refuses the conversational repairs that normalize institutional harm.

The Homeless System as Death Regime: An Ethnomethodological Re-Specification

Jan 28, 2026. A distinct companion piece to "The Machinery of Ordinary Cruelty," published the same day. Re-specifies homeless service systems as "death regimes" through three practices — sorting, pacing, exposure — that convert systemic incapacity into locally reasonable decisions, without requiring any individual malicious intent.

January 6 as Media Event: Seeing, Accountability and Ideology

Jan 15, 2026. Applies Garfinkel's documentary method, Sacks's Membership Categorization Devices, and Schegloff's sequential organization to news coverage of the January 6 Capitol attack, using autoethnographic think-aloud protocols comparing his own reading of The New York Times vs. The Washington Times anniversary coverage.

From Minds to Moments: How Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Reconceived Sociological Social Psychology

Jan 15, 2026. Argues EM/CA shifted social psychology's unit of analysis from internal mental states to the sequential, embodied, publicly available organization of action — identity, morality, agency, and inequality as accomplished in moments rather than located in minds — and proposes Critical Interactionism as the synthesis of this empirical rigor with critical theory's normative commitments.

Abandonment in Real Time

Jan 14, 2026. NOTE ON DUPLICATE TITLES: the export contains at least four distinct posts using this title or a close variant — "V. Abandonment in Real Time" (a book chapter, Jan 13), "Abandonment in Real Time (MiniBook)" (Jan 14), "Abandonment in Real Time: What This Book Is About" (Feb 8), and "Abandonment in Real Time: Book Announcement" (Mar 26). I'm annotating the chapter version here: it examines abandonment not as institutional structure or policy failure but as something accomplished in real time, sequentially, within relationships structured by care — arguing abandonment is interactional before it is institutional.

Abandonment as a Site of Revelation

Jan 14, 2026. Opens with an invocation from the Longest Night Vigil. Argues that witnessing (naming the dead without offering repair or solutions) is theologically distinct from — and more honest than — the comforting closure of "moral repair," and that abandonment reveals something about a society that repair too quickly applied would conceal.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ABANDONMENT

Jan 11, 2026. A theoretical statement distinguishing "abandoned knowledge" (content), "abandonment consciousness" (orientation), and "witness formation" (subject-position). Argues abandonment strips away the interactional protections that normally buffer perception from structural contradiction, producing accurate but institutionally disallowed knowledge that gets internalized as distress rather than validated as insight.

THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Jan 10, 2026. An intellectual genealogy written from inside the tradition, tracing UCSB's EM/CA lineage under Zimmerman, Wilson, and Molotch through six themes (structure-in-action, respecification of social psychology, workplace/institutional talk, organizational reasoning, moral economy, power as interactional accomplishment) and situating Mellinger's own work as an internal continuation of that lineage into a "Second Santa Barbara School."

Maladjustment as Insight: The Epistemology of the Abandoned

Jan 9, 2026. A distinct essay from "The Epistemology of Abandonment" above, published two days later. Argues that "adjustment" is a moral demand disguised as psychological health — that what gets clinically labeled maladjustment in the chronically abandoned is often the psychic cost of being unable to participate in the denial that sustains everyone else's coherence.

Reading the News: Toward a Methodology of Critical Textual Analysis

Jan 7, 2026. Develops a nine-dimension methodology for critical textual analysis of news (treating news as account rather than world, frame analysis, textual architecture, authority/voice, close reading, silences, institutional context, comparative reading, reflexivity), combining EMCA with critical discourse analysis and institutional sociology of journalism.

EMCA in East and Southeast Asia: An Emerging Tradition

Jan 4, 2026. Written for and about a specific readership — notes that over 6,000 visitors from China, Singapore, and Hong Kong had reached the blog in the prior six months. Documents EMCA's development across Japan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia as a genuine intellectual formation rather than "Western methods" diffusing outward. A Chinese-language companion post exists on the same date.

The Nordic Formation: EM/CA in Scandinavia and Finland

Jan 2, 2026. Traces EMCA's diffusion into Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland as a networked "ecosystem" rather than a single school, entering primarily through linguistics (Auli Hakulinen at Helsinki) rather than sociology, and identifies Deirdre Boden and Jack Whalen as bridge figures connecting Santa Barbara EMCA to Nordic institutional/organizational research.

LA INSURRECCIÓN DEL SIGUIENTE TURNO: Organización Secuencial y la Praxis de la Liberación

Jan 1, 2026. Spanish-language version of "The Insurrection of the Next Turn" (below) — confirmed as the same essay by the author's own note in the text: "[NOTE: While I am sharing this text in 2025, the core argument was developed in 2010.]" Both versions integrate Pollner's Mundane Reason and Weinberg's Of Others Inside with full sequential analysis.

When the Doctor is a "Lady": Candace West, the Santa Barbara School, and the Micro-Politics of Gender

Dec 31, 2025. Argues West's 1984 paper on physician-patient encounters is a "pivot point" between her earlier interruption research and the 1987 "Doing Gender" breakthrough — that the data itself (women physicians still treated as women first, doctors second) forced the theoretical recognition that gender is an ongoing interactional accomplishment rather than a stable trait.

"The Insurrection of the Next Turn"

Dec 30, 2025. Argues the transition-relevance place (TRP) in conversation — the technical moment where one turn ends and another begins — is also an "ontological opening" where institutional and experiential accounts of reality are adjudicated. Drawing on Pollner and Weinberg, and detailed analysis of a traffic-court transcript, identifies five forms of sequential resistance and insists that the cost of exercising them is unevenly distributed by race, class, gender, and housing status. Core argument dated by the author to 2010, shared publicly in 2025.

Critical Interactionism: The Micro-Sociology of Power, Morality, and Everyday Life

Dec 29, 2025. A formal book prospectus (not an essay). Argues domination happens in the small units of interaction — form fields, algorithmic prompts, a nurse's question — not only in macro-structures, and that the Santa Barbara School developed the tools to show this but stopped short of naming what it found (patriarchy, domination); this book aims to "complete that unfinished revolution."

Charles Goodwin's Professional Vision

Dec 28, 2025. An introduction to Goodwin's 1994 essay "Professional Vision" (reproduced/discussed at length), which showed — using the first Rodney King trial as its central case — that what professionals "see" is not given by the world but actively constructed through coding practices, highlighting techniques, and specialized vocabularies that make some things visible and others not.

Seeing Like an Outreach Worker: Professional Vision and the Politics of Homelessness

Dec 28, 2025. Applies Goodwin's professional-vision framework (above) directly to street outreach work: police, public health officials, and outreach workers each constitute a different reality from the same person sleeping in a doorway. Argues outreach vision is often more humane than policing's but remains selective, professional vision — with real political consequences for what gets acted on.

Timothy Halkowski and the Mirandum of Ordinary Medical Life

Dec 24, 2025. A profile-and-review essay on Timothy Halkowski (Ph.D. UCSB 1990, under Zimmerman and Maynard), framed through Josef Pieper's concept of the mirandum — the wonder-worthy quality that turns routine medical talk into a site of analytic attention. Surveys Halkowski's career from his dissertation on the Iran-Contra hearings through his medical-communication work, highlighting three contributions in particular: "role as an interactional device" (role as something accomplished in talk, not a pre-given category); "the patients' problem" (the social epistemics of deciding whether a sensation counts as a symptom, and narrating that discovery in a way that establishes one's moral standing as a patient); and "approximation elicitors" (how doctors re-ask amount questions — "about how much?" — to manage the interactional accountability, or "response-ability," of both parties). Closes with a close reading of a two-line exchange between a patient and a nurse ("How'd ya do?" / "I think ok") as a demonstration of competence-as-performance. Developmental significance: extends the Santa Barbara School profile series into medical sociology specifically, and explicitly ties Halkowski's concepts (social epistemics of sensation, the patients' problem, response-ability) to Critical Interactionism's concern with how institutional power operates through the moral framing of ordinary talk.

Jason Turowetz and the Second Santa Barbara School

Dec 23, 2025. Distinguishes a "First Santa Barbara School" (Zimmerman-led, 1970s–90s, insisting EM/CA is sociology proper and not just a technique) from a "Second" generation including Turowetz, positioned as renewing sociological EMCA's engagement with moral order and accountability.

Interaction Order at the Margins: Robin James Smith's Sociology of Homeless Outreach

Dec 22, 2025. A review essay on Robin James Smith's (often with Tom Hall) research program on UK street outreach, which uses Goffman's interaction order (via Anne Rawls's rereading) as a "stress test" — arguing that where the ordinary supports of offices and paperwork are absent, the constitutive work of interaction becomes most visible.

What Do We Owe One Another Once We See Asymmetries Being Done

Dec 20, 2025. A short, moral-philosophical piece: once asymmetry is recognized as something accomplished (through talk, categorization, unequal accountability) rather than as neutral background, "innocence" becomes unavailable. Argues Critical Interactionism accepts EM/CA's refusal to reify inequality but refuses the conclusion that description exhausts moral responsibility.

Beyond Asymmetries-in-Action: Critical Interactionism, Moral Economy, and the Unequal Distribution of Consequences

Dec 20, 2025. A formal response to a Symbolic Interaction special issue (Vol. 48, Issue 4, 2025) edited by Catherine L. Tam and Robin James Smith. Published the same day as "What Do We Owe One Another" (above) and explicitly poses that essay's question as the special issue's unaddressed remainder — extending the issue's analysis of asymmetry-as-accomplishment toward moral economy, standpoint, and material consequence.

Don H. Zimmerman and Deirdre Boden, "Structure-in-Action"

Dec 2, 2025. A discussion of Zimmerman and Boden's 1991 introduction to Talk and Social Structure, which argues talk-in-interaction is not epiphenomenal to social structure but is the framework through which structure and institutions are actually constituted.

Embodied Ecstasies: The Sacred Choreography of Party and Play

Nov 23, 2025. A "flash auto-ethnography" of a single chemsex encounter, read through interactionist sociology, queer phenomenology, and critical drug studies. Reframes substance use not as deviance but as a form of interactionally accomplished consent, care, and harm reduction — drawing on Kane Race's concept of "seroconviviality."

On Maynard and Wilson's "On the Reification of Social Structure"

Nov 21, 2025. Part of a systematic re-reading of Santa Barbara School foundational texts. Discusses Maynard & Wilson's 1980 essay, which argued sociology's "structuralist orientation" treats social structure as having metaphysical independence from the events it supposedly governs — a reification the Santa Barbara School's praxeological alternative was built to dismantle.

THE LAYERED MORAL ECONOMY OF OPPRESSION: COM                                     PLETING THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Nov 20, 2025. Note: the URL slug reads "laminated," though the published title says "Layered" — likely a retitling after the slug was set. Argues the first Santa Barbara School's "Doing Gender" framework broke down when extended to race and class in "Doing Difference," and that this productive failure set up the work (Whitehead's occasioned relevance, Rawls & Duck's clashing interaction orders, Critical Conversation Analysis) needed to complete it — synthesized here into a six-layer "Layered Moral Economy of Oppression" framework.

Democracy Under Threat: Steven Clayman's Interactional Analysis and the Crisis We Can No Longer Ignore

Nov 17, 2025. Argues Clayman's four decades of research on news interviews and press conferences show democratic accountability is an interactional accomplishment, not an institutional given — and that Clayman describes this infrastructure with precision but stops short of naming what happens when it is deliberately dismantled, which this essay does.

Don H. Zimmerman: The Quiet Maverick of Ethnomethodology

Nov 16, 2025. A biographical profile of Mellinger's own doctoral-era teacher, tracing his training under Garfinkel at UCLA, his arrival at UCSB, his early studies of welfare-office record-keeping and emergency dispatch, and his marriage to artist Siu Zimmerman as an expression of the same egalitarian sensibility that shaped his mentoring style.

Workplace Studies and Critical Interactionism

Nov 16, 2025. Argues that ethnomethodological workplace studies (Xerox PARC-era and after) brilliantly documented how cooperative work is actually organized but rarely confronted the politics of that organization — and that Critical Interactionism mobilizes the same interactional tools (turn-taking, repair, categorization) to expose racial microaggression, gendered silencing, and algorithmic deskilling under neoliberal capitalism.

The Moral Economy of Interaction

Nov 11, 2025. A long chapter-length piece (the longest in this list) developing "moral economy of interaction" as the theoretical bridge between micro-interactional accomplishment and macro-structural inequality, synthesizing the Santa Barbara lineage (Garfinkel, Zimmerman/Wilson, West, Boden, Maynard, Clayman) into the six-layer Layered Moral Economy of Oppression framework also discussed above.

Douglas W. Maynard and the Moral Architecture of Institutional Life

Nov 8, 2025. A comprehensive theoretical review positioning Maynard as fusing Sacks's sequential rigor, Garfinkel's radicalism, and Goffman's dramaturgical ethics into an empirically grounded moral sociology — tracing his work from Inside Plea Bargaining through Bad News, Good News to his studies of autism diagnosis, and arguing this transforms conversation analysis into "a moral science."

Talking City Trouble: Urban Micro-Ethnography and the Moral Order of Public Space

Nov 6, 2025. Revisits Duneier and Molotch's 1999 "Talking City Trouble" and its concept of "interactional vandalism," but argues against their assumption of one dominant interaction order being violated — proposing instead that city sidewalks host multiple, competing interaction orders (gendered, racialized, class-based) whose collisions, not just civility violations, produce urban "trouble."

On Marilyn Whalen and Jack Whalen's "Studying Workscapes"

Nov 5, 2025. Discusses the Whalens' 1994 "Studying Workscapes," which reframed organizations not as static rule systems but as "workscapes" — living ecologies of people, artifacts, and talk — based on their fieldwork at Xerox PARC, and situates this as foundational to what became the Workplace Studies movement.

On Maynard and Zimmerman's "Topical Talk, Ritual and the Social Organization of Relationships"

Nov 5, 2025. A pedagogical commentary on Maynard & Zimmerman's 1984 study of 22 videotaped dyadic conversations, which showed that intimacy, rapport, and self-disclosure are not internal psychological states but interactionally accomplished through the sequential organization of how conversational topics are opened.

Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch, "The Compulsion of Proximity"

Nov 4, 2025. Discusses Boden and Molotch's essay on why physical co-presence persists despite communication technology — that modernity's most consequential decisions (courtrooms, surgical teams) still depend on shared space, and that even digital communication borrows its grammar from face-to-face interaction.

Organizations Are Talking: Deirdre Boden and the Sequential Constitution of Institutional Order

Nov 3, 2025. Discusses Boden's The Business of Talk (1994) and her reversal of standard organizational theory — that hierarchies and policies are not pre-existing structures but locally sustained achievements of talk — while critiquing Boden's own universalizing tendency to treat "the organization" as a single, uniform interaction order rather than one fractured by race, gender, and class.

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis in Social Work

Oct 24, 2025. Argues social work has historically theorized practice in terms of policy, ethics, or psychology rather than examining how help is actually accomplished turn-by-turn, and surveys EM/CA scholars (de Montigny, Messmer, Hitzler, Granosik) who study intake and case management as finely organized interactional achievements rather than mechanical procedures.

Ethnomethodology at Xerox PARC: When the Study of Ordinary Action Entered the Cathedral of High Technology

Oct 14, 2025; substantially revised Sep 2026. Traces how Lucy Suchman's photocopier studies at Xerox PARC — showing that users act sequentially and contingently rather than executing internal plans — challenged the plan-based models of 1980s AI and cognitive science, and how this spread through Xerox's Work Practices tradition (Julian Orr's technician "war stories," Whalen and Szymanski's teleservice studies, Harper's documents research) into the Workplace Studies movement and CSCW/HCI. Draws heavily on Blackwell, Blythe & Kaye's 2017 reconstruction of EuroPARC to complicate the triumphalist version of this history: ethnomethodology acquired real institutional authority at EuroPARC (its own directors, eventually) via a "Low Church" outward orientation combined with "High Church" doctrinal gatekeeping, canonical-text hazing, and — per Blackwell et al.'s interviews — a "macho" argument culture that burned out several young women researchers. Documents (via Szymanski and Whalen's own account) a direct, sourced link between Zimmerman/Garfinkel and the Xerox labs, while explicitly declining to claim Zimmerman personally trained the Xerox ethnographers. Closes by extending Suchman's "situated action" critique to contemporary human-AI interaction. Developmental significance: a substantially reworked and more empirically careful version of an earlier draft under the same title, distinguishing documented claims from unverifiable ones (e.g., the Szymanski/Zimmerman relationship) rather than smoothing over the gap.

The Social Construction of Social Problems: Talking with Rishi about UFOs

Oct 5, 2025. A dialogic essay built around a conversation with "Rishi," a young philosopher defending UAP/UFO reality claims, used as a live case study in Spector and Kitsuse's social-constructionist theory of social problems — the question reframed from "are UFOs real" to "how do claims about UFOs become credible, contested, or dismissed."

An Autoethnography of Human-AI Interaction: Towards an Ethnomethodology of Artificial Accountability

Oct 4, 2025. Co-credited "with Rishi Shukla." Treats dialogue with an LLM as naturally occurring interactional work, analyzing repair, preference organization, and epistemic calibration using adapted Jefferson-style transcription conventions, and argues "artificial accountability" is not a property of machines but a joint accomplishment sustained turn-by-turn between users and systems.

First Encounter at the Stone Wall: A Flash Autoethnography of Street Outreach

Sep 25, 2025. A narrated first-contact outreach encounter at a Santa Barbara grocery, used as a "micro-laboratory" for practice and theory, with 28 analytic endnotes braiding EM/CA (Goffman's civil inattention, Garfinkel's shop-floor problem, Sacks's membership categorization) with harm-reduction and motivational-interviewing frameworks. Reframes "pre-contemplation" as rational street triage rather than client deficiency.

How to Read People: A Critical Interactionist Guide

Sep 20, 2025. Written in dialogue with David Brooks's How to Know a Person (2023). Agrees with Brooks that recognition heals and invisibility wounds, but argues (via Cooley's looking-glass self and the interactionist tradition) that "reading" people is never neutral — it's a learned, patterned social skill shaped by structures of inequality, not simple intuition or empathy.

Harvey Molotch and the Foundations of Critical Interactionism

Jul 3, 2025. Marked DRAFT in the text itself. Argues Molotch (through News as Purposive Behavior, Talking Social Structure, The Compulsion of Proximity, and Talking City Trouble) pushed ethnomethodology past its own "methodological agnosticism" toward engagement with structural power — directly inspiring Critical Interactionism's attempt to keep EM/CA's attention to local interaction while embedding it in material and political conditions of exclusion.

Interactionist Studies of Work (Revised)

Jun 4, 2025. A long, comprehensive survey (156,000+ characters) of interactionist approaches to work — symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, science and technology studies — tracing the field's genealogy from Everett Hughes and the Chicago School forward, treating work not as a variable to measure but as something accomplished, moment to moment, by real people.

The Many Interaction Orders: Goffman, Rawls, Smith and the Plural Moral Terrains of Everyday Life (Revised)

May 22, 2025. This is the earlier draft superseded by "Many Interaction Orders: Recognition, Inequality, and the Stratified Field of Interaction" (above) — the post contains its own editor's note stating this version "remains archived as an earlier draft." Opens with an autobiographical vignette contrasting a courthouse appearance with a street-outreach encounter fifty feet away, as two radically different, simultaneously operating interaction orders.

George Herbert Mead and the Making of Symbolic Interactionism (Revised)

May 22, 2025. Part of the Doing Modernity teaching-essay series. Argues Mead's claim that mind, self, and society are socially constituted (not naturally given) is indispensable to Critical Interactionism, but that his mentalistic account of the self (internal "I"/"me" dialogue, role-taking) is a limitation EM/CA was built to overcome by respecifying these as observable, accountable interactional achievements.

Auto-Ethnography as a Research Methodology in Critical Interactionism

Apr 17, 2025. A methodological statement situating autoethnography within Critical Interactionism's qualitative toolkit alongside participant observation, breaching experiments, and conversation-analytic video recording — framing the "flash autoethnography" pieces elsewhere in this list (Stone Wall, Embodied Ecstasies) as instances of this method rather than as informal personal writing.

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