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Recent scholarship explores the relevance and canonical status of W. E. B. Du Bois in sociological theory; yet less is said about his contributions to symbolic interactionism. This paper interrogates the emerging meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois for sociology, and the nature of his canonical incorporation. We explore the less "official" dimensions of Du Boisian theory, and in particular two of his contributions to symbolic interactionism: double consciousness and autoethnography. In the last part of the paper, we suggest that Du Bois's incorporation into the sociological canon can be viewed as a process of "centering," and argue that this form of sponsoring of Du Bois's work can elevate some interpretations of Du Bois to the detriment of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis fifty years after its publication. The paper first situates this book within the context of its intellectual precursors, namely Georg Simmel's 1917 essay “Sociability,” Alfred Schutz's 1945 article “On Multiple Realities,” and Gregory Bateson's 1955 paper “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” It then examines the book's three main themes, namely framing, keying, and disattention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces "concept‐driven sociology," a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can "distill" generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a "generic sociology" that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal "parallels" across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a sociological approach to autism spectrum disorder that critiques the terms neurodiverse and it obverse, neurotypical, because they promote a cognitive approach that mystifies what is actual and real about human activity in everyday life. It is in dynamic interactional practices rather than putative cognitive states that human diversity is manifest or observable. The empirical part of the paper, following Bleuler, defines and examines “autistic talk” as a turning away from the ordinary social world or commonsense “reality,” and engaging self‐oriented practices and orientations. However, the range of participants who produce such talk is not confined to those on the putative autism spectrum. Rather, that range encompasses the entire human span. If so, then a question is raised about what autism is as a “condition,” which term individualizes social difficulties rather than appreciating that they are always about diverse social actions‐in‐interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the writings and influence of Anna Julia Cooper. The honest, historical narrative of scholarship is in question when theorists of color are repeatedly forgotten or removed from the academic record. Anna Julia Cooper is just one example of someone who has been overlooked. I detail how Cooper's analysis of group identity, located in shared experience, provided the groundwork for intersectional frameworks and feminist standpoint theory. I further contend that Cooper's lived‐experience narrative not only informed her own work but the work of others of her time, including the more esteemed W.E.B. Du Bois. She addressed how race‐gendered politics and the legacies of slavery and colonialism shape scholarship. Cooper's critique of academia determined that the relationship between colonialism and academia is intrinsically tied. My analysis examines how the work of theorists of color is often omitted, erased, or contextualized within the writings of white theorists due, in part, to a lack of generational intellectual wealth. A concept that recognizes the historical discrepancy in scholarship between white scholars and scholars of color and how that exclusion has shaped and defined established knowledge. This paper analyzes Cooper's placement within the lineage of the academic canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through participant observation of the redemption‐focused identity work of formerly incarcerated citizens affiliated with an urban faith‐based nonprofit organization run by ex‐offenders, this paper examines religiously motivated desistance among eighteen male respondents who attribute lasting desistance to intense religiosity. Recent research portrays the "identity work" of criminal justice‐involved citizens as "narrative labor" fraught with capricious experiences of social rejection and "uncanny" patterns of discrimination and exclusion. Drawing from eight years of participant observation and adopting methodologies of "lived religion" and "appreciative inquiry," life‐history interviews reveal three "frames" of "performative speech" through which religious narrative labor helps signal a "disavowal and recasting" of criminal identities: "coming out of the desert" {learning not to hide}, "bringing it to the altar" {help‐seeking through religiosity}, and "making your test your testimony" {using testimonial storytelling for status elevation}. Prolific integration of Christian scripture into personal narratives mirrors the Identity Theory of Desistance. The paper deepens understanding of how religious narrative labor is performed by ex‐offenders enduring carceral citizenship, arguing for more direct exploration of religiosity by criminologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online interactions constitute an ever‐larger part of our everyday lives. However, due to its roots in the study of face‐to‐face encounters, micro‐sociology tends to consider online interaction as a weak substitute for its physical counterpart. The aim of this paper is to critically assess and further develop one of the most influential micro‐sociological theories: Randall Collins' interaction ritual (IR) theory. To this end, we conducted a qualitative, two‐month, longitudinal study of six World of Warcraft players. The players were both interviewed and video‐observed while playing, in order to grasp the emotional and behavioral dimensions of their online IRs. Contrary to the prediction of IR theory, results showed that successful IRs with a high level of collective effervescence do take place in World of Warcraft. As such, the online IRs produced the ritual outcomes of group solidarity, emotional energy, symbols of membership, and standards of morality, which persisted for weeks. Our results add to the emerging evidence that IR dynamics may involve similar social processes in online and offline encounters. This suggests that IR theory, and micro‐sociology more broadly, should place less emphasis on bodily co‐presence when theorizing the realm of online interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of how domesticity is enacted and adapted at homeless shelters for determining which clients are “service worthy .” The study draws on nineteen placement meetings with homeless men and focuses on institutional mechanisms for encouraging homemaking skills or domesticity among clients. Adapting Robert K. Merton's typology of adaptations to social norms, as well as Jaber Gubrium's “task‐designated identity,” we showcase male clients' self‐presentation strategies for adapting to the institutional mandates of domesticity. Specifically, our qualitative analysis reveals four modes of task adaption: (1) task conformity by professing the desired norms in their service encounters, (2) task evasion to avoid conversations and related tasks, (3) task transformation by linking the task at hand with something other than originally intended, particularly by reframing biographies to meet the local goals of domesticity, and (4) task protestation, which involves questioning the rationale and necessity of assigned tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper further develops the interactionist notion of passing from a disability studies perspective. Drawing on central disability studies journals' archives in the course of a theoretical PhD project that explores disability studies' theorizing of emotions, passing emerged as one of several issues of emotional relevance in the context of disability—more specifically, as one among several strategic negotiations of feelings in a dis/ableist society. When rethinking passing through the lens of disability, a more nuanced typology emerges; three different ways to negotiate the visibility of one's disability status in order to manage the public impression. I discuss my terminological choices to acknowledge how disabled people strategically negotiate visibility to avoid being made to feel unpleasant in a dis/ableist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's concept of framing is one of his most enduring contributions to social science. Despite the canonical status of Frame Analysis (1974) in multiple fields, few acknowledge its intellectual engagement with animal studies. It was Gregory Bateson, in an analysis of animal play, who first posited the idea of frames as metacommunicative propositions that signal the meaning of behavior. In this paper, we show that Goffman did not just opportunistically borrow the idea of framing from Bateson, but also advanced Bateson's thesis that nonhuman animals are capable of (re)framing the meaning of behavior. He emphasized that animals and humans could meta‐communicate with each other as well. Goffman polemicized against human exceptionalist theories of cognition and communication—not only in Frame Analysis, but also in unpublished remarks he delivered at a controversial conference on animal communication, and he suggested that the ability to meta‐communicate is a more appropriate index of mind than language. Although new research indicates that many species use “significant symbols” and have a “theory of mind,” most interactionists have not reckoned with the sociological implications of animals as “minded” social actors capable of metacommunication with each other—and with people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the study of passing to a privileged identity. From qualitative interviews, we examine Norwegian professors' everyday self‐presentation. When in new encounters, like meeting other parents through their children's leisure activities, our respondents' leave their occupation and especially title undisclosed before cautiously negotiating possible disclosure. The existing literature mostly highlights passing that happens for self‐protection. While (soft) self‐protection is one concern for professors, they also pass for additional reasons: protecting interactants from insecurity or discomfort and preventing imbalance and "fuss." Theoretically, we combine Goffman's treatise of passing with interaction ritual and facework. We discuss whether this analytical model may also help clarify instances of stigma passing and consider the consequences of privilege passing for social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tasting as a social practice can be enacted on behalf of others through precisely positioned nonlexical vocalizations as gustatory mmms. This paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to detail the coordination of parents and infants while starting to feed solid foods; data are from families in Scotland. The analysis focuses on the organization of parental mmms in relation to eye gaze, sequentiality, and the temporal coordination of hands, food, and mouths to demonstrate their use in beginning, continuing, and refocusing on taste. The paper proposes that in order to fully understand the sociality of tasting, infant feeding research should include real‐time vocal and embodied behavior, which is also key to the functional analysis of sensoriality‐related vocalizations at the margins of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue celebrate and build on the insights Blumer provides in his pivotal book Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. In setting the context for these papers, we discuss the significance of Blumer's variant of interactionism, his contributions to the discipline of sociology, the misinterpretations and misrepresentations of his approach, and the way in which the papers in this issue carry forward his legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper joins earlier interactionist projects in advocating for an analytical attentiveness to generic social process (GSP). This dynamic form of theorizing is indebted to the thought of Herbert Blumer and the extended phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. Rather centrally, the study of GSPs draws upon the foundational concepts of duration, intersubjectivity, and the self. Such concepts have contributed to some of symbolic interactionism's most enduring, empirically grounded and theoretically robust work. Drawing on a series of ethnographic research projects, this paper offers a research agenda for engaging GSPs transcontextually. Specifically, I argue for extending the study of GSPs through the examination of management in everyday life, the creation of subcultural value, and the social construction of doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship demonstrates that whites' racist action requires creativity as much as habit. Racial cognition is implicated in this behavior, as white people use ignorance and apathy to overcome epistemic challenges that threaten white power, privilege, and wealth. Using Mueller's Theory of Racial Ignorance, we show how these cognitive processes abide by an ends‐based orientation—one whereby white people coordinate "anticipated futures" to maintain the literal and psychic spoils of racism. Analyzing papers produced by white undergraduates following a project investigating systemic racism and family wealth transmission, we reveal how students' practical takeaways betray this ends‐based orientation, which remains resilient amidst critical learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral aspects are closely related to psychiatric assessment. Personality disorders, especially, form a morally loaded category, as the diagnostic process involves questioning behaviors that go against social norms. Consequently, being interviewed about these matters may be face‐threatening for the patients. However, the study of the role of morality in psychiatric face‐to‐face interactions has been scarce. This paper explores how the patients and nurses orient themselves to moral matters during personality disorder interviews in two Finnish psychiatric outpatient clinics. This article uses Erving Goffman's frame theory to differentiate how different orientations come into play during the interviews. Conversation analysis forms the methodological basis for the work. In personality disorder interviews, it is possible to observe information‐gathering, moral, and everyday interaction frames. The nurses have different approaches in receiving the patients' moral considerations. They may maintain a rather neutral approach, but there are also cases of both challenging tones and more supportive and affiliating responses. Making visible how moral themes are discussed in real life enables a nuanced evaluation of psychiatric practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining former athletes' health‐related beliefs and behaviors on the long‐term effects of concussions and potentially developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) offers a domain to understand how men renegotiate their masculinities. In this paper, we explore how the cultural production of the concussion crisis shapes the ways in which men athletes make sense of self and their masculinity in the face of declining health. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 27 male, former athletes, this article examines the multiple ways in which gender shapes their experience and treatment of traumatic brain injuries or suspected CTE. We show how men are re‐negotiating their aging masculinities through illness narratives and how the cultural production of the concussion crisis in sports shapes these narratives. We break down our analysis into three sections: (1) reflections of chaos narratives and stories of never‐aging masculinities, (2) the ways the concussion crisis shapes their restitution narratives, and (3) quest narratives combining never‐aging and aging masculinities. Whether or not these athletes have or are treated for CTE, we argue that they reformulate their masculinity to regain control over their manhood and to feel a sense of relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between the racial hierarchy and the racialized interaction order, questioning how controlling images of blackness are mediated in interactions. I explore this through interviews with thirty‐two black British middle‐class individuals, examining their interactions in the professional workplace. I argue that white people often draw on a practical knowledge of "white ignorance" to activate controlling images in their interactions with black professionals. This white ignorance allows for white people to find creative ways to irrationally deploy controlling images, and to adapt controlling images to specific interactional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's interest in spies and espionage is widely recognized in commentary on his work. Where did this interest come from? While the context of Cold War America provided the broad cultural horizon of this work, deeper roots may be found. Goffman's contact with two University of Chicago professors, Edward A. Shils and Douglas Waples, both of whom served in U.S. intelligence organizations during World War II, also shaped Goffman's interest in the subject. This paper explores these relationships and their connection to Goffman's writings on spies, secrecy, and information control in postwar America. Goffman's view of spies and espionage as analogues to American postwar lives is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit, is arguably the most important political, social, and economic phenomenon in British post‐WWII history. This paper analyses parliamentary debates from December 2018 concerning the European Withdrawal Act, focusing on the epistemic modality of Member of Parliaments' (MP) statements, to investigate the ontology of Brexit. Epistemic modality refers to linguistic devices that allow modification with regards to confidence, truthfulness, and probability, and enables investigation of MPs' commitments. Commitments are a part of their status function declaration, which create institutional reality. Analysis of such commitments permits inference about the institutional reality of Brexit. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/90RRWApg0rQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen mediated concerts grow in popularity. As physical events, concerts accommodate both small‐ and large‐scale interaction. However, the extent to which these interactions establish emotional energy online is debated. Combining video observations and video elicitation interviews with participants of live music on the online platform Twitch, this paper explores this growing form of music consumption while also adding to the debate on the appropriateness of the virtual sphere in accommodating successful interaction rituals. It finds that the online sphere is more suited to small‐scale interaction. Large‐scale interaction rituals are unsuccessful, suffering from a context collapse, social convergence, and no rhythmic entrainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the birth of a secret creative self within suppressive or silencing organizations, such as cults, by focusing on concrete instances in which members of such organizations challenge the organization's leadership and norms. Building on Goffman's concept of the backstage, it considers how cult members create both physical and mental backspaces to allow the birth of a secret creative self within the cult. Through the stories of former cult members, it sheds light on how the "occupied self," as Goffman called it, can use these backspaces to preserve and restore a sense of personal autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dutch criminal courts, judges and their assisting clerks spend significant amounts of time doing file-work in preparation for the court hearing: a practice they often call 'visualizing the case.' This practice is distributed over clerks and judges and materially mediated: the legal case file enters into face-to-file interaction as both a text and a material object. This article aims to unpack what techniques clerks and judges draw on in order to come to 'see the case clearly,' while at the same time it elaborates on the renegotiations of these largely paper-based practices when court workers are confronted with the digitization of case files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from interviews with seven people with dementia and twenty six carers in the United Kingdom, to explore impression management in couples living with dementia. Participants with dementia typically preferred to conceal their diagnoses and acted accordingly, but progressive decline precluded perpetual concealment. Participants therefore gradually switched to a second type of management, displaying their impairments in specific ways to encourage favorable impressions. Cognitive inequities, and the prescriptiveness of diagnosis and care, granted carers increasing power over the presentation of selves. Such inequity is potentially problematic because cultural and institutional concerns can promote conflicting preferences within couples. The shifting distribution of self is hence bound up with structural constraints. A video abstract is available at https://tinyurl.com/y3mj4d9f. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes gift relations in criminal organizations. It adopts a symbolic interaction perspective to focus scholarly attention on the way in which actants skillfully maneuver within the social expectations inherent in gift‐giving relations. The study is based on insights from twenty interviews with ex‐convicts and ten interviews with police officers or associates, and an in‐depth analysis of memoirs, police reports, and newspaper articles. Our study expands the scope of symbolic interactionism by considering how the exchange of gifts and favors is emotionally stylized to achieve both social and operative goals. We aim to carefully deconstruct the performance of gift‐giving and favor exchange in Israeli crime organizations, to understand how it is orchestrated to elicit genuine feelings among givers and recipients, as well as to control the use of violence. Finally, we identify gift‐giving as a double‐edged sword designed to lure recruits into a network of binding obligations, only to form a durable system of credit and debt wherein any transgressions are strictly punished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the dress of execution victims. Executions provide both the convict and the state with an opportunity to claim honor and respectability. Drawing on newspaper accounts of executions conducted between 1840 and 1940, we demonstrate that convict attire reveals an important tension between the convicts' gendered character claims and the efforts by execution managers to arrange a credible execution. But whereas displays of masculinity reinforce more than challenge the propriety of executions, women's femininity displays challenge not only the propriety of executions, but also the respectability of those tasked with their killing. We conclude that the subversive potential of clothing is found not only in the garments themselves, nor only on the wearers' intentions, but also on the institutional settings in which they are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the identity work of women undergoing high‐cost religious disaffiliation by examining the exit experiences of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saint (LDS, Mormon). Previous research into religious change has not fully engaged with the extensive identity work that exiters do as they leave these groups. I propose a stage model of religious exit identity development to expand upon the process of identity transformation during and after high‐cost religious exit. Additionally, I examine how the gender regimes of high‐cost‐religions result in different pathways out and experiences during disaffiliation for women and men. Though constructed to describe high‐cost religious exits, this model may also be helpful in understanding other "high‐cost" exits. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/hup3KFXvODs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the meanings medical students invest in their white coats and how these meanings shape students' strategic use of the white coat as a status symbol. During a four‐year ethnography of medical education, I found that the white coat signified knowledgeability and was used to assert status. In interactions students policed their own and each other's status displays, a process I identify as an instance of status management in medical training. An analysis of the meanings and conventional uses of the short white coat increases our understanding of how novice trainees negotiate their place in a new social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I critically discuss Helmes‐Hayes and Milne's institutional perspective, as well as Neil McLaughlin's emphasis on scientific intellectual movements and Coserian intellectual sects, in explaining the emergence and potential future of symbolic interactionist theory in Canada. I contest claims that the interactionism is on the verge of disappearing and instead offer an explanation grounded in insights about shared meaning. I conclude that it is ironic that debates over the presumed demise of symbolic interaction may well contribute to its continued existence within the canon of Canadian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orrin E. Klapp was a member of the Second Chicago School. He was a prolific scholar who remained active for decades. He is best known for his early analyses of social types; his later work offers broad social criticism about the search for meaning in contemporary society. Although he was an original thinker, he has had a limited influence on interactionist thought. This paper reviews his key ideas. It then uses the concept of collective selection—which itself central to Klapp's writings—to explain how the social organization of scholarship has kept Klapp on the periphery of interactionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I critically and analytically describe the book Classic Grounded Theory: Applications with Qualitative and Quantitative Data (Holton and Walsh 2017). I also offer reflections on the development of grounded theory methodology, and on the (in)consistencies of its procedures and epistemological assumptions. Finally, I offer some possibilities for developing classic grounded theory based on the proposals included in the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kathy Charmaz is arguably the most important member of the second generation of grounded theorists. In this paper we present our analysis of her research and published works in reference to the historical and biographic contexts that shaped them. Our analysis is framed by the sexpartite scholarly identity Charmaz developed over the course of the 55 years of her academic career, including: medical sociologist, symbolic interactionist, qualitative researcher, grounded theorist, public sociologist, and interpreter of the Chicago School Diaspora. We examine the significant theoretical, methodological, and substantive contributions she has made, such as her work on the implications of silences in qualitative interviewing, the necessity of contextualizing research, the gendered nature of living with chronic illness and disability, and most notably, the features of her own constructivist grounded theory. In doing so, we address tensions in her understanding of obdurate reality and theoretic saturation, as well as the perils of the unintended consequences of championing reflexivity. We conclude by conceptualizing how Charmaz's scholarly activities serve as a means by which Chicago School traditions are passed on to subsequent generations of symbolic interactionists and grounded theory researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how two spiritual communities—a Catholic prayer house and an Integral Yoga studio—shape the emotional lives of their members. I find that both organizations promise to facilitate what I call holistic emotional change: modifications of deep‐seated emotional habits and dispositions. Moreover, both organizations transmit a comprehensive emotion management system—a regimen of different practices, or techniques of emotion management, with distinct goals and temporal horizons. At both sites, these practices—prospective, reflexive, and in situ techniques—are thought to work in tandem to overcome negative emotional habits and cultivate abiding dispositions of joy, peace, and contentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community care is the "hospital without walls" model of mental health services that deinstitutionalized mental patients in the late‐twentieth century. Neoliberal reforms have challenged the implementation of community care by restricting access to permanent housing. Extreme poverty has rendered eviction commonplace for community care recipients. The mark of an eviction limits lease attainment. As a result, community care providers practice proxy deflection—redemption, externalization, and paternalism—to resist eviction stigma during the leasing process. This paper extends stigma research by examining resistance rather than imposition of stigma by social service providers, contextualizing resistance with the perspective of stigmatizers, and identifying resources that proxy resistance offers service recipients leasing up in stratified private rental markets during the neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosis is rarely a straightforward process. This is especially so in psychiatry, where diagnoses are not based on organic biomarkers (e.g., blood tests). Diagnosis can be particularly complicated for children, whose symptoms must be disentangled from typical developmental processes. In this paper, we examine how clinicians use narrative as a method for differentiating a child's autism from a possible co‐morbid seizure disorder. Our approach is conversation analysis, and we show that narrative is a pervasive and endogenous practice for producing warrantable diagnostic knowledge about patients and, as such, forms part of what we term “the practical epistemology of clinical work.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being “offered” by offenders and then “evaluated” by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I performed a qualitative content analysis of 136 college students' food diary reflection papers to examine the accounts used when explaining dietary failures. In addition to common justifications (denials of injury, appeals to higher loyalties, and condemning the condemners) and excuses (denials of responsibility and postponement), diarists referred to their status as a college student and the 'typical college student lifestyle' as the major reason for eating an unhealthy diet. Exploring how students use life stages to neutralize stigma adds a new temporal and context-focused dimension to studies of accounts and provides direction for potential health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines reflections about researcher emotions and the experience of having panic attacks and panic disorder as a result of fieldwork. Anxiety and panic are sparsely discussed in methodological appendices and handbooks about qualitative research, and the embodiment of mental health in the field has received even less attention. I have two aims in the paper: to describe the experience of panic attacks and to open a discussion about panic and anxiety attacks in the field. The failure to address mental health problems as a result of fieldwork can negatively impact expert and fledgling ethnographers, and should be remedied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Often known as cynical, contentious, and exhibiting a complicated approach to objectivity, Erving Goffman could also be generous, civil, insightful, open to feminist ideas, and surprisingly political. A 1977 collective feminist writing project led to my conversation with Goffman in 1980 about his ideas on gender, sexism, and feminism. A summary of that conversation is presented, together with my formal reflections then (1980) and now (2013). While documenting the sociological practice of an earlier era, this paper concludes that feminist sociological theory must move beyond its locations in the past and the present into the liberating knowledge of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on video recordings of coaching sessions in the context of basketball and powerlifting, this paper investigates how the sports coaching process unfolds as situated interactions. The work of sports coaching is pervasively oriented toward teaching athletes the correct forms of motion and play. Correction then is one of the central constitutive practices of sports training sessions. In this paper, we draw on a collection of instances of correction demonstrations from powerlifting and basketball to describe their order. We demonstrate the three phases of these demonstrations: arranging bodies and gaze for visual access, presenting the error visually, and proposing a correction with an embodied demonstration. Findings underscore the management of shared visual access in multi-party correction demonstrations. In demonstrating how multiple bodies may be involved in embodied reenactments of a correctable problem, and demonstrating that it is seeing an error, more than reenactment per se, that is necessary for correction activities, the study extends existing understandings both of sports coaching processes and of instructional correction in embodied activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraordinary social and economic impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic has generated many claims about the middle‐range future—the period beginning in the late summer or early fall of 2020 and projected to last for some months or years. This paper surveys those assertions and seeks to explain the factors that led to them. Exploring questions about future claims can expand the scope of social problems theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the power of a mediatized President to use reflexive propaganda—the rules and assumptions of digital media—to define a public health crisis. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, President Trump engaged in attention‐based politics, or the use of media to draw attention of the largest audience to himself, at the expense of an efficient response to a major public health crisis. The repetitive tweets, with a common form—vulgar and combative language, usually against journalists—converted Donald Trump into a digital meme and enabled the President to dwell on his distorted accomplishments and TV ratings, to downplay health risks, and initially define the lethal virus as a benign hoax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anatomy lab has been studied by sociologists interested in professional socialization since the 1950s. This is because the act of dissecting a cadaver is thought to be foundational for both the student's medical knowledge and the development of the student's professional identity. In this paper, I revisit the anatomy lab both historically and ethnographically. Drawing on theoretical insights from the laboratory ethnography tradition within science and technology studies, I show that students use material artifacts in the lab to support their "surgical identity play." This activity is structured by the laboratory's performative architecture even while it is unsupervised by anatomy faculty. While many analyses of professional socialization focus on how students learn to interact with patients during their training, I show that the anatomy lab experience is an important form of professional socialization because here students learn to employ surgical instruments, language, and dress, and begin to relate to each other as colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on in‐depth interviews and drawing exercises with 25 resolution makers, this paper explores the use of time in structuring and enacting improvement projects of the self. Resolutions are intentional, identity‐laden moments when people bring the future into the present. They provide a window into the identity work of the "near future"—an underresearched but fascinating site where individuals transition between what they see as an immediate, controllable future to a more distant one that is less certain. In attempt to mitigate the emotionally and cognitively daunting prospects of the distant future, resolution makers enlist time as a form of capital, constructing the "temporal bridge" of the near future by engaging in three interrelated processes: structuring and remembering, being flexible, and maintaining optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's conflicts, understood as disagreements involving negative emotional energy, constitute a particularly intense type of social interaction. In this paper, we show that children's conflictual interactions in school differ with regard to interactional dynamics and levels of confrontational tension, which together potentially lead to violence. We discuss how these differences relate to issues of inclusion and exclusion, to levels of interactional resources, and to neighborhood differences. Our conclusions are based on analysis of fieldwork data on children aged five to eight in two Danish schools. The analysis applies Goffman's and Collins's perspectives on interaction rituals and violence and the concept of emotional capital based on Bourdieu's theory of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how images of unfortunate childhoods are invoked to make sense of psychological problems in adulthood. I use conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to study a Swedish radio program in which a psychotherapist talks to people about their personal troubles. The findings suggest that, on one hand, the image of an unfortunate childhood was used as an explanatory framework for individuals' problematic experiences. On the other hand, the childhood‐grounded reasoning, applied to individual cases, illustrated the explanatory framework and reaffirmed it as a commonsense way of reasoning about personal troubles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how people talk about the things that have not happened in their lives. I argue that we can perform reverse biographical identity work upon our unmade selves by exploring the meanings of unlived, non‐experience. Challenging one's own rehearsed life story is an act of narrative self‐transgression, involving negative responsibility assumption. Drawing on my symbolic interactionist theory of "nothing," I consider how negative social phenomena (no‐things, no‐bodies, and non‐events) are interactively accomplished and retrospectively made sense of in personal accounts. Themes of lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, and emptiness emerge from an analysis of twenty‐seven stories. These tales reveal a mixture of emotions: not only sadness, stigma, shame, and regret, but also relief, pride, acceptance, and gratitude. Narratives of nothing are often ambivalent in tone, reflecting the complexity of storied life behind the scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am pleased to introduce an issue of eight articles and six book reviews on the theme of "Interaction and Organizations", with special attention to inequality, boundary work, and meaning making. Johannessen and Geiss's articles examine institutional interactions at particular moments in time. As with the articles by Johannessen and to a lesser extent Geiss, here too institutional mandates shape conduct. [Extracted from the article]

A call for papers on space and time is presented.