Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

Dear EMCA community,

Welcome to the spring 2013 newsletter of the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section.  Click here to view the whole Newsletter.

We are looking forward to the American Sociological Association conference this summer in New York. The ASA has granted us four sessions, but thanks to a great response to the call for papers for both the ethnomethodology and conversation analysis sessions John Heritage and Tanya Stivers have applied for more sessions. The ASA is yet to grant us these, but the enthusiastic response is a sign that the section serves an ever vibrant international community and ought to have a place at the ASA; sociology is after all the discipline from which the field derives its intellectual roots.

That is not to say that we are not struggling with membership. While we have signed up some new members and were able to entice some former members to rejoin the section, our membership is in the low 100s, far below the 300 members that the ASA has set as the
minimum for a section. We have received official notice from the ASA that increasing membership must be priority and real progress must be shown this year. So please help us out by becoming a member and by askingyour colleagues to become members. Recall that once you have paid for the ASA membership, the section membership is relatively cheap, so convincing folks who are already ASA members to join our section as a second section should be easier. Remember also that students can join the ASA at a highly reduced rate.

We also need your help with several of the awards for this year. Jon Hindmarsh heads up the graduate student paper award. Please send your graduate students’ submissions to Dirk vom Lehn (dirk.vom_lehn@kcl.ac.uk). Only scholarly, journal-ready articles and papers produced in 2012 will be considered. If you know of a book that should be considered by the book awards committee, please send the title to Patrick Watson (pwatson@uwaterloo.ca) - eligible works must be published in 2011-2012.

In this newsletter and in upcoming newsletters, we will publish a series of brief pieces by EMCA graduate students from around the world about their departments and themselves, highlighting where EMCA is being taught in the world and the different types of work graduate students are doing. In this issue, we are featuring essays from graduate students from Russia, Italy, and Australia.  If you would like to write a piece, or know
graduate students who would like to, please e-mail Laura Loeb (laura.a.loeb@gmail.com).

We hope to see you all in New York! Remember, registering early is cheaper!
Thanks to Laura Loeb for editing and designing the new look for the newsletter.

Yours,

Dirk vom Lehn & Erik Vinkhuyzen