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...

"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...