IIEMCA 2017

Plenary Address: Monday, July 10 – 11:00am

This and That: Garfinkel, Wittgenstein and the World in 2017

In “Suicide, for all practical purposes” Garfinkel asserts that the coroner and SPCers engaged in death inquiries must make their determinations “with respect to
the “‘this’s’: they have to start with this much; this sight; this note; this collection of whatever is at hand. And whatever is there is good enough in the sense that whatever is there not only will do, but does … What the inquiry can come to is what the death came to” (Garfinkel 1967: 18; emphasis in original). In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (Wittgenstein 2007 [1922]: 6.44, p. 107; emphasis in original).  The paper explores the relationship of these two thoughts and their relevance to confronting the contemporary threat to human civilization posed by anthropogenic climate disruption brought on by unfettered corporate capitalism.

About Peter Eglin

Peter Eglintaught sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University from 1976 until he retired in 2016. He was Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universität Konstanz 1980-1981, and Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford in 1981, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic and the University of Wales at Bangor. He is author of Talk and Taxonomy: A Methodological Comparison of Ethnosemantics and Ethnomethodology (1980). With Stephen Hester he is co-author of A Sociology of Crime (1992) and The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis (2003), and co-editor of Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis (1997).  As a student of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis he investigates the use of categories for describing persons in practical reasoning in talk and texts in various settings. He has contributed chapters to the Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights (2013) and the Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture (2014).

Plenary Address: Tuesday, July 11 – 11:00am

Working with the Garfinkel Archive: Laying the Foundations for Understanding a Cumulative Body of Collaborative Work

Harold Garfinkel left a massive archive of materials dating to 1940. I will discuss various ways in which our work on the Archive may reveal and repair misconceptions about Garfinkel and those he worked with. Early papers and research make clear that Garfinkel’s approach was paradigmatic in ways that parallel Wittgenstein. His relationships with Parsons, Goffman and Sacks are of particular importance, remaining close over many years. In 2015, a team at the University of Siegen Germany (Erhard Schüttpelz, Anne Rawls, Tristan Thielmann) was awarded multi-year funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to sustain this work.  (See http://www.cscw.uni-siegen.de/projekte/medien-der-kooperation/)

About Anne Rawls

Anne Warfield Rawls is Professor of Sociology, Bentley University, Professor of Socio-Informatics, University of Siegen, Germany, Associates Researcher, Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux (CMS) EHESS, Paris, Senior Research Fellow, Yale University Center for Urban Ethnography, and Director of the Harold Garfinkel Archive. Professor Rawls is a Principal Investigator on the DFG funded Research Project “Scientific Media of Practice Theory: Harold Garfinkel and Ludwig Wittgenstein” supporting a multi-year research collaboration between the University of Siegen and the Garfinkel Archive. Professor Rawls is the recipient of the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Michigan Sociological Association, and a Senior Research Laureate from the City of Paris. She is the author of books and articles on Durkheim, including Epistemology and Practice(Cambridge University Press, 2009), articles on “race” as an interactional phenomenon, and has edited and introduced several volumes of Garfinkel’s work, including Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (Paradigm Publishers 2008). Her work has focused on the importance of equality in everyday “constitutive” practices for grounding modern democratic public life – an insight she traces to Durkheim and Garfinkel.

Plenary Address: Tuesday, July 11 – 6:30pm

The “natural facts of life:” looking into moral accountability

I start from Garfinkel’s remarks (which deeply informed his early work) that the everyday scenes of familiar activities are treated by members as “the natural facts of life” and that these are, for them, “through and through moral facts of life”. According to him these furnish the “points of departure and return for every modification of the world of daily life.” (1967:35). I explore this in relation to specific kinds of setting that constitute lived courses of serious trouble or conflict for members, such as a shooting, or crossing a military checkpoint. How are “modifications” of the familiar and the everyday in such contexts made accountable by members, and what features of practico-moral reasoning does this make visible?

About Lena Jayyusi

Lena Jayyusi is Professor of Communications and Media Sciences at Zayed University, U.A.E.  She has taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, the University of Connecticut at Storrs and Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania.  An Annenberg Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and an SSRC Fellow, she has been a visiting researcher and Visiting Professor at the Ecole Haute D’Etudes de Science Sociale in Paris. She served as Senior TOKTEN consultant on media and culture for the United Nations Development Program in Jerusalem, as Director of Academic Programs at al-Quds University in Jerusalem, and as Director of the Oral History Program at The Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center, in Ramallah, Palestine. She has also been, for the last 15 years, a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at Muwatin: The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, in Ramallah. Her publications address topics in media, film, and cultural studies, narrative, practical reasoning and everyday communication, national identity, and international law. Her Categorization and the Moral Order (1984), widely cited in our field, was re-issued as a Routledge Revival in 2014. Her edited book Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation 1917– the Present (2015) received a MEMO Palestine Book Award.   She is currently working on a book entitled ‘Praxiologies: Categorization, Mediation, and the Logic of Social Practices’.

Plenary Address: Wednesday, July 12 – 11:00am

Gestures and Second Language Conversational Repair

This presentation discusses ways that iconic gestures can be used in in second language conversational repair, either as components of the repair sequence or as trouble sources on which repair is initiated. It highlights the close relationship between talk and gesture in re-establishing intersubjectivity in second language conversation.

About Irene Koshik

Irene Koshik is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in conversation analysis, language and social interaction, and second language teaching methodology. Her research uses Conversation Analysis methodology to analyze talk in everyday conversation and in institutional contexts.  She has studied second language conversational and pedagogical practices, questions used as challenges, chat reference interactions, and links between epistemics and membership categorization.  Her most recent work focuses on gestures and repair in second language conversation. Her work has been published in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, Text & Talk, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. She has also contributed to volumes published by Blackwell, Cambridge, John Benjamins, and Oxford University Press and is the author of Beyond Rhetorical Questions: Assertive Questions in Everyday Interaction (John Benjamins, 2005).

Plenary Address: Wednesday, July 12 – 8:30pm*

Garfinkel, Sacks and Formal Structures: Collaborative Origins, Divergences and the Vexed Unity of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

This talk focuses on the collaboration between Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks on their paper “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions.” Their collaboration had lasting importance for both ethnomethodology and CA, by subordinating the privileges of academic analysis to the production of “members’ methods of sociological inquiry.”

*Keynote address occurs at the Conference Banquet (beginning at 7:00pm).  Pre-paid banquet ticket is required to attend.

About Michael Lynch

Michael Lynch is a Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He studies discourse, visual representation, and practical action in research laboratories, clinical settings, and legal tribunals. He received the 1995 Robert K. Merton Professional award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association for his book Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. His most recent book, Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (with Simon Cole, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan) examines the interplay between law and science in criminal cases involving DNA evidence.  The book received the 2011 Distinguished Publication Award from the Ethnomethodology/ Conversation Analysis section of the American Sociological Association. He received the 2016 John Desmond Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science for distinguished contributions to the field.

Plenary Address: Thursday, July 13 – 11:00am

Professor W. Wesley (Wes) Sharrock of The University of Manchester has supervised 54 Ph.D. students, authored 16 books (at last count), and co-produced by force of his scholarship and presence a major site of ethnomethodological and natural language studies at The University of Manchester over the last 50 years. He received a lifetime achievement award from the American Sociological Association in 2011, and has written critically on moral philosophy, cognitive science, computational science, workplace studies, research methodology, interactionism, pragmatics, and social psychology. His latest book (2016), with Richard Harper and Dave Randall, is Choice: The sciences of reason in the 21st Century.

Monday, July 10 – 2:00pm

Working in the Garfinkel Archive

Harold Garfinkel assembled and left to us an Archive of some 600 boxes of materials, mainly texts, drafts and edited drafts, but also tapes, artifacts, and records of conversations and collaborations.  It is tempting to say this will show us the development of his thinking, but the work of working an archive is its own task.   The panel will discuss its labors.

Facilitator: Anne Rawls – Bentley University, University of Siegen

Jason Turowetz – University of Siegen

The problem of Jewish identity in the early development of Garfinkel’s “Trust” argument

Tristan Thielmann – University of Siegen

Towards a digital archive: Garfinkel’s concept of communicative net-work

Albert Meehan – Oakland University

Exploring Garfinkel and Bittner Connections in the Garfinkel Archive

Michael Lynch – Cornell University

Garfinkel, Sacks, and their collaboration on “Formal structures of practical action”

Tuesday, July 11 – 4:00pm

Ethnomethods of Mobile Machines in Road Traffic

Facilitators: Barry Brown & Eric Laurier 

The panel will look at how drivers make sense of and drive with systems that assist, augment and/or substitute for drivers. It will build upon existing EMCA studies of the local organisation of traffic, technology and mobility.

Barry Brown – University of Stockholm

Eric Laurier – University of Edinburgh

The normal natural troubles of autonomous cars

Self-driving cars raise interesting problems around establishing quite what the automated driver is up to, for both the driver of the car and other members of traffic cohorts. In this study we draw upon video recordings of self-driving cars in traffic to examine how their actions are made sense of.

Erik Vinkhuyzen – Nissan Research Center

Supervising autonomous driving technology: Some initial observations

Autonomous vehicles require supervision by their drivers and in this paper will present data of supervisory practices from two settings. The first is with a self-driving vehicle and the second with a driving instructor, the comparison will under-line their significant differences.

Tristan Thielmann – University of Siegen

Driving with the ETAK Navigator: An ethnomethodology of digital wayfinding

Drawing from a historical ethnography of ETAK Navigator users, this paper will describe the praxeologies of an early form of digitally assisted navigation. The analysis will detail the accountability of 4 schema: diagrammed origins, diagrammed passage events, diagrammed destinations, “on-screen-specific” displayed orientates of origins, events & destinations

Wednesday, July 12 – 9:00am

Six Years After the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Approaches

Facilitator: Aug Nishizaka

Tomone Komiya – Tohoku Gakuin University

Aug Nishizaka – Chiba University

Invisible and visible dangers: Locally achieved conceptual connections

This study analyzes video recordings of interviews with residents who returned to their hometown after being evacuated following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It explores conceptual connections that the residents use when addressing the “paradox” of safety and when the recurring claim, “Young people have not returned,” is locally organized.

Masato Komuro –  Chiba University

The concept of “involvement” used by a reconstruction support group without further justification

This presentation discusses the concept of “involvement” at the meetings of a reconstruction support group; the meetings are organized by a city affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It shows that members of the group understand the concept of “involvement” as “good” without any further justification.

Natsuho Iwata – National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies

Satomi Kuroshima – Tamagawa University

Masafumi Sunaga – St. Paul University

Practices for informing and receiving internal exposure test results: Normalization of inferable results

This paper elucidates the practices doctors and examinees employ during medical consultation for the discussion of internal exposure test results following the nuclear power plant accident. It demonstrates how doctors prepare to inform examinees of their results and offer interpretations, as well as how examinees respond using their individual judgment