Respecifying social change: the obsolescence of practices and the transience of technology.

This article proposes that social change, a fundamental topic in sociological theory, can be productively revisited by attending to studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA). We argue that the corpus of EM/CA research, from the 1960s until the present day, provides details of the constitutive and identifying aspects of practices and activities that gradually transform into descriptions of obsolescent practices and activities, and that this corpus can be revisited to learn about the ways people used to do things. Taking landline and mobile telephony as a case in point, we show that the subtle details of conversational practices are anchored in the technology used as part of the contemporary lifeworld, and that they stand for the particularities of routine social structures of their time period. We also discuss the temporal aspects of the competences required on the part of members and analysts to make sense of encountered practices in terms of their ordinary recognizability and interactional consequentiality, pointing to the anchoring of social life in its historical time. Finally, we conclude by considering different ways of respecifying social change by attending to various kinds of historicity and obsolescence of social praxis.

Enabling 'AI'? The situated production of commensurabilities.

How can we examine so-called 'artificial intelligence' ('AI') without turning our backs on the STS tradition that questions both notions of artificiality and intelligence? This special issue attempts a step to the side: Instead of considering 'AI' as something that does or does not exist (and then taking a position on its benefits or harms), its ambition is to document, in an empirical and agnostic way, the performances that make, sometimes, 'AI' appear or disappear in situation. And it comes out, from this perspective, that 'AI' could be considered a vast commensuration undertaking.

Civil inattention-On the sources of relational segregation.

The article employs ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) and experimental video analysis to scrutinize the gaze behavior of urban passersby. We operationalize Goffman's concept of civil inattention to make it an empirical research object with defined boundaries. Video analysis enabled measurement of gaze lengths to establish measures for "normal" gazes within civil inattention and to account for their breaches. We also studied the dependence of gazing behavior on the recipient's social appearance by comparing the unmarked condition, the experimenter wearing casual, indistinctive clothes, to marked conditions, the experimenter wearing either a distinct sunhat or an abaya and niqab. The breaches of civil inattention toward marked gaze recipients were 10-fold compared to unmarked recipients. Furthermore, the analysis points out the commonality of hitherto unknown micro gazes and multiple gazes. Together the findings suggest the existence of subconscious monitoring beneath the public social order, which pre-structures interaction order, and indicates that stigmatization is a source for relational segregation.

"For Example" Formulations and the Interactional Work of Exemplification.

Members in society make ubiquitous use of examples as a resource to engage in their everyday and specialized activities. This paper takes the resourcefulness of exemplification as a topic of inquiry by focusing on the formulative phrase "for example," investigating its interactional work within the analytic framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The data used consists of 11 h of video-recordings of English as a Foreign Language classroom lessons over a semester. We conceptualize exemplification as a holistic configuration (gestalt) where its work consists in the production and recognition of a pair, namely the exemplifying component and the exemplified component. We demonstrate how the teacher and students position the formulative phrase as a recognizable practice for the organization of two distinct actions: accounting for one's opinion and confirming an understanding. Our findings also present the different forms of exemplification, including elaborate narrative constructions, single terms or phrases, and specimen performances.

Telehealth Actions to Address COVID-19 in Latin American Countries.

Introduction: This study set out to examine the use of telehealth resources to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Latin America within the scope of national telehealth projects (NTPs). Methods: A qualitative study developed using ethnomethodology for appropriate understanding of how telehealth actions were carried out in practice during the COVID-19 pandemic within the scope of NTPs, in the following countries: Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The study was carried out from October to 2020 to March 2021. The number of participations in the discussion groups, formed by coordinating teams of NTPs, totaled 90. Results were described in the worksheet completed according to the script. Each country reviewed its respective data, three times on average, in an effort to clarify actions developed. Results: Three groups of countries were identified: (1) Countries with a telehealth background that used these resources to tackle COVID-19 and thereby refined telehealth activities. Countries with greater experience in NTP design, such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, were able to use a wide range of telehealth activities to tackle the pandemic, with offers of teleconsultation, teleguidance, telemonitoring to patients, and training of health professionals; (2) Countries with some telehealth activities to address COVID-19. Uruguay, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Costa Rica; and (3) Countries with no evidence of telehealth resource use during the pandemic. Honduras and Guatemala. Discussion: Most NTPs in Latin America have improved their telehealth activities, contributing to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America.

Gestalt contexture and contested motives: Understanding video evidence in the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager.

This article is situated in ongoing discussions about the influx of images of police violence. To date, much scholarship has centred on Foucauldian notions of knowledge-power and sousveillance. Alternatively, I attend to how video evidence produces understanding of police violence in court through a case study of the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager who shot and killed Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. While audio and video direct evidence of the moments leading up to Slager's decision to shoot was presented, cross-examination focused more explicitly on post-shooting conduct as circumstantial evidence. This approach highlights an issue for video evidence, that what is to be settled at trial may not be directly re-presented in video. Gurwitsch's notion of Gestalt and Garfinkel's adaptation thereof are proposed as an alternative means of interrogating video evidence.

Harold Garfinkel and Edward Rose in the early years of ethnomethodology.

This article documents the beginning of the intellectual companionship between the founder of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel, and Edward Rose, who is most often associated with his program of "ethno-inquiries." I present results from archival research focusing on the contacts and collaborations between Rose and Garfinkel in the years 1955-1965. First, I describe the review process for Rose and Felton's paper, submitted to the American Sociological Review in 1955, which Garfinkel reviewed and after Rose's rebuttal recommended for publication. The paper induced Garfinkel to write an extensive commentary that has remained unpublished. Second, I discuss the 1958 New Mexico conference sponsored by the Air Force, which was an opportunity for Rose and Garfinkel to work together on topics related to common-sense knowledge and scientific knowledge. Third, I give an overview of the ethnomethodological conferences in 1962 and 1963, supported by an Air Force grant written collaboratively by Rose and Garfinkel. Here I focus primarily on Rose's research on "small languages," which stimulated many discussions among the early ethnomethodologists. Rose's work and exchanges with Garfinkel demonstrate the former's affinity for miniaturization as a research approach and search for ways to empiricize topics of sociological theory in locally observable settings.

On body-environment continuities from a laboratory commensalism.

The article attends to everyday practices in a laboratory of neural genetics that studies olfaction, with the fruit fly as its model organism. Practices in neural genetics exhibit one of the 'post' aspects in post-genomic science - a turn to the environment. To get at how laboratory members engage body-environment continuities, I pay attention to an occasion of designing experimental chambers for an optogenetics study. As practitioners deal with the body's continuities with the world by engaging the spatial character of olfaction, their accounts exhibit qualities of feelings of immediate experience, relatable to C.S. Peirce's phenomenological category of Firstness. While these traces of Firstness inevitably manifest themselves in mixtures with the other two of Peirce's categories - namely, Secondness and Thirdness - noticing them allows for an engagement of the environment that goes beyond action and meaning. I reflect on that environment by considering the involvement of scientists' bodies in life with flies, while not forgetting my inhabitation of the laboratory space. Rather than relying on a cross-mapping of attributes known from the human sphere (intentional states or features of the human body) while managing a measurable space observed from the outside, this is an environment lived from within and with others. I conclude the article by proposing its noticing as an orientation toward ecological preoccupations.

Jogos olímpicos da juventude de buenos aires: sentidos construídos por atletas sul-americanos / Juegos olímpicos de la juventud de buenos aires: significados construidos por los atletas sudamericanos / Buenos aires youth olympic games: meanings constructed by south american athletes

Resumo O objetivo do presente estudo é compreender os sentidos construídos por atletas sul-americanos sobre sua experiência nos Jogos Olímpicos da Juventude de Buenos Aires em 2018. Para tanto, esta investigação centrou-se em uma abordagem de natureza qualitativa, baseada nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da etnometodologia, com o uso da entrevista guiada. Os resultados apontaram que os referidos Jogos reificam o saber comum e socialmente compartilhado entre os sujeitos como membros de um grupo de elite esportiva, veiculado, sobretudo, pela identificação com a dimensão relativamente proporcional à versão adulta dos JO. Conclui-se que, embora sejam oriundos de lugares diversos e, em alguns casos, falem línguas diferentes, esses sujeitos compartilham simultaneamente um conjunto de sonhos, objetivos e valores específicos no contexto dos Jogos realizados na capital da Argentina.

Resumen El objetivo del presente estudio es comprender los significados construidos por los atletas sudamericanos sobre su experiencia en los Juegos Olímpicos de la Juventud de Buenos Aires 2018. Para ello, esta investigación se centró en un enfoque cualitativo, basado en los supuestos teórico-metodológicos de la etnometodología, utilizando la entrevista guiada. Los resultados mostraron que los mencionados Juegos cosifican el conocimiento común y compartido socialmente entre estos sujetos, considerados como miembros de un grupo deportivo de élite, transmitido principalmente por la identificación de una dimensión relativamente proporcional a la versión adulta de los Juegos. Se concluye que, si bien provienen de diferentes lugares y, en algunos casos, hablan diferentes idiomas, estos sujetos comparten simultáneamente un conjunto de sueños, metas y valores específicos en el contexto de los Juegos realizados en la capital argentina.

Abstract This research aims to understand the meanings constructed by South American athletes about their most remarkable and meaningful experiences in the YOG-2018. For such a purpose, we focused on a qualitative approach based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of ethnomethodology using guided interviews. The results indicate that the mentioned games reify the common and socially shared knowledge among a select group of elite athletes, especially linked to the identification of the dimension similar to the adult version of the OG. We conclude that despite their different origins, in some cases, different languages, such individuals share a set of dreams, goals, and certain values in the context of the games performed in the capital of Argentina.

A conversation analytic approach to schizophrenic interaction: methodological reflections on disruptions of the common-sense world.

Certain schools of phenomenological psychiatry conceive of schizophrenia as a pathology of common-sense. Ethnomethodological enquiry, with its roots in Schutzian social phenomenology, takes as its domain, topic, and substance of study the ongoing achievement of a common-sense world between social members. Yet, dialogue between psychiatry and ethnomethodological approaches is thin. In this article, we discuss a conversation analytic approach to schizophrenic interaction which has generated and utilized a model of a five-world manifold to frame analyses of talk-in-interaction. 'Worlds' are conceived, after Schutz, as finite domains of meaning, and the model operates as a breach of natural attitude assumptions to examine mechanisms of the constitution of the one-world-in-common of common-sense. It is suggested that certain aspects of schizophrenic talk might receive account in terms of a loss of integration between these five domains of meaning. Conversation Analytic methods were applied to transcripts of audio recordings of psychiatric interviews but encountered hurdles that motivated the broadening of methodological scope. Such hurdles included a weakening of the next turn proof procedure, implicit reification of the schizophrenia construct, and problems of translation presented by the analyst's normative membership encountering non-normative life-worlds of schizophrenic experience. Strategic responses to these hurdles included exploring linkages between phenomenological psychiatry and ethnomethodological approaches, as well as an engagement of ethnomethodological self-reflection and conceptual clarification of the schizophrenia construct in line with Garfinkel's unique adequacy requirement. The manifold model is glossed, and interaction between two of its worlds - a world of concrete, situational immediacies and another of abstract organizations - is explored in more detail via analysis of conversational data. It is suggested that the five-world model, along with further micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction, might have implications in psychiatry for topics such as autism, double bookkeeping, concretism, theories of disturbed indexicality, and insight attribution. We conclude that the consideration of atypical interaction obliges the interaction analyst to take account of their own implicit normative world-frames and that the use of domain-specific top-down models in conjunction with the inductive approach of Conversation Analysis may extend the reach of CA to facilitate productive dialogue with other disciplines.

How to Start a Fight: A Qualitative Video Analysis of the Trajectories Toward Violence Based on Phone-Camera Recorded Fights.

We aim to contribute to recent situational approaches to the study of interpersonal violence by elaborating the concept of trajectories. Trajectories are communicative processes in which antagonists act upon each other's bodily and verbal actions to project a direction for the interaction to take, which is then (con) tested in the exchanges that follow. We use the notion of trajectories to gain insight in how participants turn an antagonistic situation into a violent encounter, which we contrast to interactionist and micro-sociological understandings. Using ethnomethodological and conversation analytical tools, we detail the trajectories of three violent encounters, captured on phone camera recordings to answer the question how verbal and bodily exchanges project physical violence. Methodologically, our contribution shows how bodily actions can be studied in visual data. Our cases show how antagonists move the interaction toward violence by creating a metaconflict revolving around the conditions under which the interaction will become a physical confrontation; what we call the contested projection of violence. We conclude that the concept of trajectories offers a useful analytical tool to detail the shifts and turns of the interactive process-notably it's bodily dimensions- that characterize antagonism and violence. Substantially, our analysis raises questions about conceptualizations of the emotional dynamics (notably the role of dominance) of violence, as proposed by earlier micro-sociological and interactionist work. We therefore suggest that future studies engage with these issues in more detail and in larger datasets.

Coalitions of touch: Balancing restraint and haptic soothing in the veterinary clinic.

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or "vets") fashion fleeting "coalitions of touch," that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician-animal-client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast-moving episodes of veterinary care.

Interaction order and the labeling of disorder: How parents mobilize personal knowledge in the clinic to resist medicalization of their children's behavior.

This paper examines how parents of children diagnosed with autism resist the medicalization of their children's behavior. Drawing on video and ethnographic data collected over four years of fieldwork at a clinic for developmental disorders, the paper distinguishes two orders of practice - that of the clinic and that of the family - and argues that behavior which is interpreted as disordered in the clinic may be seen as ordinary in the home. These different interpretations reflect and renew distinct orders of sensemaking in the clinic and home, and parents may mobilize familial knowledge of the child to counter the medicalization of specific behavior patterns, even where they otherwise accept an autism diagnosis. In showing how medicalization and labelling are achieved and resisted in the mundane details of social interaction, the paper contributes to studies of diagnosis, disability, and deviance. Further, the myriad ways parents and clinicians contest which regions of a child's behavior get medicalized - i.e. which behavioral patterns are labeled disordered - present a challenge to binary conceptions of medicalization, recommending instead a more nuanced model of medicalization as a multi-dimensional continuum: more or less, rather than either-or.

Staying with the trouble of networks.

Networks have risen to prominence as intellectual technologies and graphical representations, not only in science, but also in journalism, activism, policy, and online visual cultures. Inspired by approaches taking trouble as occasion to (re)consider and reflect on otherwise implicit knowledge practices, in this article we explore how problems with network practices can be taken as invitations to attend to the diverse settings and situations in which network graphs and maps are created and used in society. In doing so, we draw on cases from our research, engagement and teaching activities involving making networks, making sense of networks, making networks public, and making network tools. As a contribution to "critical data practice," we conclude with some approaches for slowing down and caring for network practices and their associated troubles to elicit a richer picture of what is involved in making networks work as well as reconsidering their role in collective forms of inquiry.

The interactional production and breach of new norms in the time of COVID-19: Achieving physical distancing in public spaces.

A key requirement of COVID-19 pandemic behavioural regulations in many countries was for people to 'physically distance' from one another, which meant departing radically from established norms of everyday human sociality. Previous research on new norms has been retrospective or prospective, focusing on reported levels of adherence to regulations or the intention to do so. In this paper, we take an observational approach to study the embodied and spoken interactional practices through which people produce or breach the new norm. The dataset comprises 20 'self-ethnographic' fieldnotes collected immediately following walks and runs in public spaces between March and September 2020, and these were analysed in the ethnomethodological tradition. We show that and how the new norm emerged through the mutual embodied and spoken conduct of strangers in public spaces. Orientations to the new norm were observed as people torqued their bodies away from each other in situations where there was insufficient space to create physical distance. We also describe how physical distance was produced unilaterally or was aggressively resisted by some people. Finally, we discuss the practical and policy implications of our observations both for deciding what counts as physical distancing and how to support the public to achieve it.

How collective interactions and institutional logics influence permanency planning in child protection in Quebec.

BACKGROUND: In the Canadian province of Quebec, placing children in foster care is an exceptional measure whose ultimate goal is family reunification. When child-protection workers decide that reunification is unlikely, they must design permanency plans that ensure continuity of care and stable relationships for the child. Most studies of this important decision-making process have focused on individual practitioners as if they acted alone. This process is collective, interactive, and influenced by various contextual elements. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this exploratory study was to examine the collective, interactive aspects of the decision-making process involved in permanency planning. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: The participants were key players involved in child-protection decisions at an Integrated University Health and Social Services Centre (CIUSSS). METHODS: The theoretical approach of this study combines Giddens's structuration theory with ethnomethodology. Data were collected through interviews with 16 key players and nine months of observing advisory-committee meetings. RESULTS: In making permanent placement decisions, the participants must engage in extensive interactions with one another. They must also apply various institutional (clinical, legal, and managerial) logics with differing goals and differing operational frameworks, the tensions among which make the process more complex and challenging. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the complexity of making permanent placement decisions and the importance of interaction and collaboration in this process. These findings suggest that management of this process should focus not on holding practitioners accountable and penalizing them for mistakes, but rather on providing adequate conditions for practice to facilitate thoughtful collective deliberation and learning and ethical decision-making.

Encoding Collective Knowledge, Instructing Data Reusers: The Collaborative Fixation of a Digital Scientific Data Set.

This article provides a novel perspective on the use and reuse of scientific data by providing a chronological ethnographic account and analysis of how a team of researchers prepared an astronomical catalogue (a table of measured properties of galaxies) for public release. Whereas much existing work on data reuse has focused on information about data (such as metadata), whose form or lack has been described as a hurdle for reusing data successfully, I describe how data makers tried to instruct users through the processed data themselves. The fixation of this catalogue was a negotiation, resulting in what was acceptable to team members and coherent with the diverse data uses pertinent to their completed work. It was through preparing their catalogue as an 'instructing data object' that this team seeked to encode its members' knowledge of how the data were processed and to make it consequential for users by devising methodical ways to structure anticipated uses. These methods included introducing redundancies that would help users to self-correct mistaken uses, selectively deleting data, and deflecting accountability through making notational choices. They dwell on an understanding of knowledge not as exclusively propositional (such as the belief in propositions), but as embedded in witnessable activities and the products of these activities. I discuss the implications of this account for philosophical notions of collective knowledge and for theorizing coordinative artifacts in CSCW. Eventually, I identify a tension between 'using algorithms' and 'doing science' in preparing data sets and show how it was resolved in this case.

Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific instruments speak: From semiotics to postphenomenology.

Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the 'absolute certainties' of ready-made science appear. He approaches science-in-the-making from the perspective of semiotics because it enables him (1) to attribute equal importance to humans and nonhumans, and (2) to let the actors in scientific practices speak for themselves. We argue that Latour's semiotic approach to science-in-the-making and his understanding of scientific instruments as inscription devices do not fulfill these desiderata. This, in turn, prevents him from understanding the crucial role that scientific instruments play in science-in-the-making. As an alternative to Latour's semiotic approach, we present a postphenomenological approach to studying science-in-the-making. Using the notion of technological mediation, we argue that scientific instruments actively mediate how reality becomes present to - and is treated by - scientists. Focusing on how intentional relations between scientists and the world are mediated by scientific instruments makes it possible to turn them into genuine actors that speak for themselves, thereby recognizing their constitutive role in the development of the interpretational frameworks of scientists. We then show how a postphenomenological approach can be understood as an ethnomethodology of human-technology relations that meets both of Latour's requirements when studying science-in-the-making.

Agnes e Garfinkel: pensando gênero através de um clássico da sociologia / Agnes and Garfinkel: thinking about gender through a classic of sociology / Agnes y Garfinkel: Pensando género a través de un clásico de la sociología

Resumo Neste artigo buscamos apontar como a relação entre Agnes e o sociólogo estadunidense Harold Garfinkel produziu uma análise de gênero que se diferenciava das teorias biologizantes do seu tempo. Através do conceito de passing e da noção de rotineirização da Etnometodologia, o autor antecipa, em certa medida, certos pressupostos que viriam a nortear a noção de gênero que se desenvolveria na década de 1990. Na primeira parte do texto, o nosso enfoque será nos impactos da experiência de Agnes para a etnometodologia; em um segundo momento, provocaremos um diálogo entre Garfinkel e a teoria da performatividade de Judith Butler.

Abstract In this article we intend to show how the relationship between Agnes and the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel produced a gender analysis that differed from the biological theories of its time. Through the concept of passing and the ethnomethodology's notion of routine the author anticipates certain assumptions that would guide the notion of gender that would develop in the 1990s. In the first part of the text, our focus will be on impacts of Agnes' experience for ethnomethodology; in a second step, we will provoke a dialogue between Garfinkel and Judith Butler's theory of performativity.

Resumen En este artículo buscamos señalar como la relación entre Agnes y el sociólogo estadounidense Harold Garfinkel ha producido un análisis de género que se distinguía de las teorías biologizantes de su época. A través de la concepción de passing y de la idea de rotinerización de la Etnometodología, el autor adelanta, hasta cierto punto, determinados presupuestos que vendrían a guiar la idea de género que se desarrollaría en la década de 1990. En la primera parte del texto, nuestro énfasis será en los impactos de la experiencia de Agnes para la Etnometodología; en segundo momento, provocaremos un diálogo entre Garfinkel y la teoría de la performatividad de Judith Butler.