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.

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...

To mark 40 volumes of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, this volume includes a special introduction from Series Editor, Norman K. Denzin. This 40th volume advances critical discourse on several fronts at the same time, including a report from the First Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines hui, Waikato, New Zealand; New Empirical Studies by D. Coates, J. Johnson, D. Altheide, C. J. Schneider and D. Trotter, R. J. Berger, C. Corroto, J. Flad, and R. Quinney, and B. Jarrett (respectively): new religious movements, the California School of Symbolic Interaction, Terrorism and the...

Contains five papers which examine the future of symbolic interaction. This work features additional essays that offer theoretical developments in the areas of social work, race, media, identity, and politics.

This volume addresses the perceived gap between symbolic interaction and ethnomusicological approaches to the study of music. It seeks to bring the fields closer by highlighting some of the complementary theoretical constructs of phenomenology and symbolic interaction as they relate to music studies. The papers, presented at the 2012 Couch-Stone Symposium, work toward this reconciliation by applying the lens of symbolic interaction to various musical genres, from traditional Inuit music to jazz to hip-hop, reflecting a sensitivity to their various topics as both artistic achievement and...