Carl J. Couch was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and a driving force of the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction. The essays in this collection are written to honour his life and his life's work.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction (SSI) is an ISI listed serial that locates current symbolic interactionist thought and provides contemporary readings of social situations. The papers are longer than the average journal article allowing more scope for expansion and development. To reflect the wide range of perspectives in symbolic interactionism, SSI draws on many interpretative resources including:

• Post-structuralism
• Reconstructivism
• Performativity
• Critical race theory
• Feminist theory
• Posthumanism
• Materials theory
...

This volume examines the concept of performance in ethnographic studies, with a special focus on the issues surrounding the performances of race, and cultural and environmental identities. A special partial section honours the contributions of David R. Maines to the field of communication studies. The concluding section considers new theoretical developments in interaction theory, including a re-examination of the spectatorial gaze in film and literary approaches to the imagined past.

Part of the Blue Ribbon Paper Series, this book contains papers that cover theory and research presented at the Couch-Stone Spring Symposium, and the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. It includes theoretical developments in the areas of everyday life, race, Native Americans, politics, and performance.

Divided into four parts, this title examines commodity racism: representation, racialization and resistance. It presents the interpretive works in the interactionist tradition. It features the essays which interrogate the intersections between biography, media, history, politics and culture.

This issue focuses on "radical interactionism," which recent emergence as an alternative perspective to conventional symbolic interactionism has sparked fierce debate in both North America and Europe. Lonnie Athens discusses the four fundamental differences between radical and conventional symbolic interactionism. The prominent scholars compare the relative insights offered not only between radical interactionism and symbolic interactionism, but between radical interactionism and feminism, dramaturgy, critical studies, and neo-pragmatism. Without exception, they found the radical...

Part one of this title contains contributions from leading activist scholars on commodity racism, Chief Illiniwek and Native American sports mascotts. Part two provides performance narratives on black womanhood, masculinity, whiteness, gender, sexual violation, old civilization and democratic citizenship.

Volume 36 of "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" is solely devoted to the "Blue-Ribbon Papers." Nine papers are published in which hotly-contested issues are raised that, even if only resolved partially, could permanently change the future direction of interactional thought. Among the questions addressed are: whether there ever existed a genuine sociological school of thought based on "interactionsim" at the University Chicago, whether Herbert Blumer misinterpreted the major thrust of George Herbert Mead's thought, whether conventional or radical interactionism is the most insightful...

Volume 37 in the bi-annual series "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" is divided into three distinct parts: Part One, Theoretical Openings, focuses on new theoretical work in the interactionist tradition by leading interdisciplinary scholars. It examines the mesodomain of welfare reform through re-negotiating the order of economic inequality, provides a grounded fractal analysis into the medicalization of homelessness and the sociology of the self, and looks at the labeling of immigrant men as criminals. In Part Two, Studies in Social Construction, focus shifts to issues of gender, ethnicity,...

"Volume 38 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction" is devoted exclusively to the "Blue Ribbon Papers Series," which is under the intellectual leadership of Lonnie Athens. In this issue, Athens presents the autobiographies of scholars who have made significant contributions to symbolic interactionist approach over the 20th and 21st centuries, including David Altheide, Paul Atkinson, Kathy Chamaraz, Adele Clarke, Gary Cook, Carolyn Ellis, Martyn Hammersley, John Johnson, Joseph Kotarba, and Laurel Richardson. The contributors were all asked to address the question of how they got into their...