Description
This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.
Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations
Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley
2. Discovering Sacks
Rod Watson
3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks
Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock
4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders
Andrew P. Carlin
5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks
Jack Bilmes
6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender
Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards
7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths
Jessica Robles
8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction
Richard Fitzgerald
9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies
Lorenza Mondada
10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings
Christian Licoppe
11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection
Eliot M. Hoey
12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order
Susan Danby
13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions
Sara Keel
14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons
Ricardo Moutinho
15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’
Robin James Smith
16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action
Kevin A. Whitehead
17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media
William Housley