Symbolic Interaction has just published a new article St. Clair Drake, the Chicago School, and the Emergence of a New Urban Black Perspective” in which Roger Salerno discusses the particular ethnographic approach and studies of St. Clair Drake who was educated, amongst others by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the Chicago School of Sociology while his work was indebted also to W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Fanklin Frazier.
On Early View of Symbolic Interaction, we have just published Gary Alan Fine’s review of Raúl Pérez’s book “The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy”. Fine argues that “Pérez has written the most consequential sociological analysis of humor in the past 20 years”. He ends his review stating that “[W]ith the current debates over who or what is racist, Pérez has provided a guide that will provoke debates that are essential in a world of comic possibilities and comic cringes”.
Members of SSSI and journal subscribers can download the review HERE
Greetings and I hope you are all enjoying the summer break. As a matter of introductions, I am Tony Puddephatt, the new president of the Society for this year. I look forward to doing what I can for the Society, and I really look forward to seeing you at the many conferences awaiting us next spring and summer.
I am emailing now to ask for volunteers interested in helping out on a new committee that is tasked with making use of new resources to develop and advance our society.
To be more specific, we have recently benefited from a very generous donation from the family of Carl Couch, so it is up to this committee to determine how this funding is to be managed and distributed, and to what ends (perhaps an annual research scholarship, etc). There are other potential funds that may come in from other sources that would also be part of this conversation, beyond this recent Couch family donation. Dr. Joe Kotarba, a long time member of SSSI, has been in touch with the family to discuss this donation and what might be done with the funds. As such, he has kindly agreed to chair the committee (thank you Joe!).
As suggested by Joe, the immediate tasks of the committee would likely entail the following:
· assemble a proposed policy statement for the acquisition and management of resources for growth and innovation;
· propose a more formal and lasting name for the committee (as we get a better handle on what the committee is charged to do);
· propose criteria for the selection of new members;
· propose assurances that the committee will be representative of the SSSI membership.
We were hoping to get 3-5 SSSI members on board the committee, to serve along with Joe Kotarba as chair, and Jillian Crocker, our treasurer, as an ex officio member. The more this committee is diverse so as to be representative of the full membership of SSSI, the better, so please do consider volunteering!
If you are willing to help on this new and exciting committee please let Joe Kotarba know via email (joseph.kotarba@txstate.edu).
My very best to you all,
Tony
Professor Anthony Puddephatt
Lakehead University
President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
We have just published Femke Vandenberg’s article “Put Your “Hand Emotes in the Air:” Twitch Concerts as Unsuccessful Large-Scale Interaction Rituals”. In her paper, Vandenberg explores “mediated concerts” disseminated via Twitch as a growing form of music consumption and investigates if interaction rituals can be accommodated appropriately in the virtual sphere. Vandenberg finds that the online sphere is better suited to small-scale interaction.
In his review of Scott R, Harris’s book “How to Critique Journal Articles in the Social Sciences” Lukas Szrot argues that Harris “invites real participation in this collaborative framework, sketching the contours of a sort of “folk epistemology” for experiencing, describing, and interacting with(in) the social world, and then building on this framework, not only by comparing it to (and contrasting it with) social science research, but also offering numerous opportunities to experience, to take part in, social science discovery and discourse.”
There is currently plenty of debate about “fake news”, “propaganda”, “misinformation” and the likes. Martin Innes and Andrew Dawson put into dialogue a large corpus of social media data with Goffman’s concepts of “misinformation”.
We have just published Ken Kolb’s review of the Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith’s edited volume Earl “Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change“. Kolb argues that as “Hattery and Smith demonstrate in painstaking detail, the concept of policing offers a powerful theoretical device to unpack the ways all our institutions maintain systems of inequality. From this updated edition, we learn how policing Black and trans bodies can take both material and ideological forms, how it can include incarceration as well as social ostracism, and how it applies to both perfect victims (innocent and blameless) and those whose cases are not so cut and dry.”
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Further articles and book reviews by Kenneth H. Kolb in Symbolic Interaction can be found HERE.
There is plenty of discussion about media in our journal. Save for David Altheide’s well-known research on news media and more recently Christopher Schneider’s discussion of social media and policing, a few years ago we published Valérie Bélair-Gagnon‘s article “Revisiting Impartiality: Social Media and Journalism at The BBC”. We now have published on Early View the article “Politics of Crisis: Threatening and Defending Journalistic Expertise—A Processual Account” in which Alexander Antony, Sike Steets and Michaela Pfadenhauer contribute to this debate by analysing the practical use of crisis claims in metajournalistic discourse.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Shirly Bar-Lev and Michal Morag have just published an excellent research paper on Early View of Symbolic Interaction that explores “how cult members create both physical and mental backspace to allow the birth of a secret creative self within the cult”.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Ken Kolb is well known to readers of this journal and members of the SSSI for his research on inequality. In her review of Kolb’s latest book “Retail Inequality. Reframing the Food Desert Debate“, Jennifer L. Nelson highlights the rigorous and transparent approach Kolb has taken to his research that reveals the entangling of food poverty, racism, “the legacy of divestment from poor, urban, majority-Black communities by letting these causes go unsaid”, and the lack of grocery stores and develops ideas to facility equal access to good quality retail.
SSSI Members can download the review HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
We have just published Marci Cottingham’s review of Judging and Emotion: A Socio-Legal Analysis” by Sharyn Roach Anleu and Kathy Mack. This review adds to recent reviews of books in the area of socio-legal studies.
Flower, Lisa. ‘Demeanor, Time Management, and the Everyday Performances of Judicial Officers’. Symbolic Interaction 41, no. 2 (2018): 282–84. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.327.
Steverson, Leonard A. ‘Emotional Order in the Court! Defense Attorneys and Emotional Labor’. Symbolic Interaction 44, no. 4 (2021): 858–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.554.
———. ‘Navigating Institutional Spaces: Minority Girls and the Juvenile Justice System’. Symbolic Interaction 42, no. 4 (2019): 723–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.425.
———. ‘Warning! Signals of Crime and Disorder: Community Reactions and Police Response’. Symbolic Interaction 39, no. 3 (2016): 516–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.230.
SSSI Members can download the review HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Save for the strong interest in ‘multimodality’ in ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research (#EMCA), scholars in linguistics and semiotics have developed a notably different concept of ‘multimodality’. Yao Wang and Pei Huang have reviewed Sigrid Norris’s introductory text on this topic.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
In her review of Ken Plummer’s book “Critical Humanism: A Manifesto for the 21st Century” Giovanna Fallo writes that “[T]he Manifesto identifies the areas of critical examination and thought that could create global humanity that is not based on a dominant Western conceptualization of the world. [It] tenets point to critical thought areas that can bring a global society to global humanity.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
There is renewed interest in the Frankfurt School as well as a growing interest in public sociology and the impact of sociological research on policy and practice. Save for a Routledge companion to the Frankfurt School there are historic accounts of the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and other proponents of critical theory like Stuart Jeffries recent “Grand Hotel Abyss” that draw attention to not only the past of the Frankfurt School but also its current influence and relevance.
In his book “Erich From and Global Public Sociology” Neil McLaughlin has brought together a discussion of the work of one of the key scholars of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm, with the current debate about public sociology and the impact that sociological can or should have on policy and practice. David Nock has reviewed McLaughlin’s book for Symbolic Interaction.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
There is currently plenty of discussion about animals in society. With a short series of book reviews discussing recently published book concerned with the treatment of animals in the human-world, Symbolic Interaction makes a small contribution to this debate.
We have just published a review essay in which Krzysztof T. Konecki’s discusses
Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household By Andrea Laurent-Simpson (NYU Press, 2021)
and
The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals By Katja M. Guenther
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Recent reviews in the area of animals in society:
Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. ‘“We Never Imagined:” Animals and Vulnerability in Contexts of Disaster’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.591.
Austin, Jessica. 2022. ‘A Call to Protect Both Humans and Non-Humans in Disasters’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. Accessed 9 March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.582.
vom Lehn, Dirk. 2022. ‘The Robots Are Coming’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. Accessed 9 March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.576.
In sociology and a range of other social sciences as well as in robotics, there has been a growing interest in people’s behavior toward and treatment of animals. Leslie Irvine is one of the pioneers in sociology and interactionism concerned with human-animal relationships. In 2009 Professor Irvine published her book “Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters” in which she critically reflects on the treatment of “non-human animals”. Due to the growth in sociological interest in human-animal relationships “Filling the Ark” has been republished. As the original edition of the book was not reviewed in Symbolic Interaction we now are delighted that Andrea Laurent-Simpson has reviewed the 2021 edition of the book that includes a new preface by Professor Irvine
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
We have recently published two other reviews related to human-animal relationships:
Austin, Jessica. 2022. ‘A Call to Protect Both Humans and Non-Humans in Disasters’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. Accessed 9 March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.582.
vom Lehn, Dirk. 2022. ‘The Robots Are Coming’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. Accessed 9 March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.576.
We have just published Brigid E.K. Burke’s article “‘Being Mean’ and ‘Spazzing Out:’ Social Calibration and Gender in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Training” on Early View of Symbolic Interaction. The author’s excellent Video Abstract discusses the content of the article.
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
Based on interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city, Eramian and Mallory investigate how and when the world of inequality comes to matter in friendship. They study failed and difficult friendships through attention to the relationship between (in)equality, recognition, and “rules of irrelevance.”
This study interestingly indicates “how friendship is never just a refuge of openness and mutual disclosure apart from the wider world but is equally dependent on selective forms of omission to sustain equality and mutual recognition between friends.”
SSSI Members can download the article HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction please click HERE
We have just published Bernadette Barton’s review of Tina H. Deshotels and Craig J. Forsyth’s “Gendered Power Dynamics and Exotic Dance: A Multilevel Analysis” on Early View of Symbolic Interaction.
SSSI Members can download the review by clicking HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.
Symbolic Interaction (Journal) Blog 