Workshop: Radical Ethnomethodology
23 June 2016
Location: Manchester Metropolitan University, New Business School, Floor 3, room # 3.14 (M16 6BH)
10:00 AM until 6:00 PM
On 23 June 2016, there will be a meeting at MMU on the topic of “Radical Ethnomethodology.” This meeting will include presentations and discussions on the topic of radical ethnomethodology. Just what is (and/or was) radical about ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA) will be open to discussion and debate at the meeting, but our initial aim will be to explicate what was radical about the commitments expressed in the writings and lectures of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks. The purpose of the meeting is to consider the current state of ethnomethodology and CA in light of those commitments.
More than a half-century ago, Garfinkel and Sacks in different ways set out to investigate the production of social actions without privileging the theories, models, and methods of the contemporary social sciences. Along with their contemporaries and successors, Garfinkel, Sacks, and many others produced several interesting lines of work, but recent trends have obscured and diminished their radical initiatives. These trends include treatments of ethnomethodology/CA as: (1) a precursor of more recent programs and “turns” toward culture, discourse, linguistics, and cognitive science; (2) a continuation of one or another line of classical theory; and (3) a method to be integrated with other qualitative and quantitative social science approaches. This meeting will be devoted to critical discussion of these trends, and suggestions of how to sustain ethnomethodology and CA as radical approaches social phenomena.
The meeting will consist of four panel presentations and discussions. Presenters and discussion leaders will include Dusan Bjelic, Graham Button, Jeff Coulter, Michael Lynch, Doug Macbeth, and Wes Sharrock. Among the questions they shall address are:
Just what is radical about ethnomethodology’s programme?
How does ethnomethodology relate to “classic” social theory?
How does ethnomethodology relate to methods of “constructive analysis” in the social sciences?
In light of the way conversation analysis has developed in recent decades, what might a radical ethnomethodological CA look like?
Meeting Organizers: Michael Lynch (Cornell University), Wes Sharrock (University of Manchester), Phil Hutchinson & Marie Chollier (MMU)
Free of charge - Mandatory registration before 15th June
Information & registration: marie.chollier@stu.mmu.ac.uk
