Call for Papers ASA 2020

Dear Colleagues,

Paper submissions for the 2020 American Sociological Association Annual meeting, to be held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11, are open. We encourage you to submit a short paper for review. Note that the submission system will close at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, on January 29, 2020.

We will hold two types of sessions:

(1) Regular sessions

(a) Conversation Analysis
Organizer:
Alexandra Tate, University of Chicago
alt108@gmail.com

(b) Ethnomethodology
Organizer:
Kevin Whitehead, University of California, Santa Barbara
kwhitehead11@gmail.com

(2) Section sessions 

(a) Current Research in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
We welcome papers that report on current studies in EM and/or CA, further exploring how ordinary everyday practices and conversation are accomplished.
Organizer:
Morana Alač, University of California, San Diego
malac@ucsd.edu

(b) Engaging Environment in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Research (60 minutes, combined with our Business Meeting).
We welcome papers that, from the distinct and shared EM and CA positions, address our relationship with the environment broadly conceived (considering its social and cultural aspects while not excluding biotic, chemical and physical characteristics of the world in which we live).
Organizer:
Morana Alač, University of California, San Diego
malac@ucsd.edu

The more high quality submissions for Regular sessions we receive, the more additional sessions we may be able to request. So please do submit, and encourage your students and colleagues to submit. The absolute deadline is Wednesday, January 29, 2020.
The following URL includes instructions for submission:
https://www.asanet.org/annual-meeting-2020/call-submissionsvolunteers

Call for Nominations for Section Awards at ASA 2020

The call for nominations for the 2020 EMCA section awards is now open!

EMCA Garfinkel-Sacks Award for Distinguished Scholarship



This award recognizes those who have made distinguished lifetime career contributions to the fields of ethnomethodology and/or conversation analysis. To nominate an individual for this award, please submit the following:

1. 
A letter detailing the nominee's contributions to EMCA;
2. Relevant supporting materials, including a list of the nominee's
publications; and
3. At least two additional external letters speaking to the person's contributions and impact on the field(s)

Please send nominations to
Dušan Bjelić (Chair) (bjelic@maine.edu) by March 1.


EMCA Best Paper Award



This award recognizes an outstanding publication contributing to ethnomethodology and/or conversation analysis. The 2020 award will be given to a paper. Eligible papers for the 2020 award must be published between March 1, 2017 and February 29, 2020, inclusively. Authors can submit their own publications, or nominations can be made on their behalf.


Nominations should include:

1. full bibliographic information on the nominated publication and 
2. a PDF copy (preferable) or a hard copy of the article or chapter; or a link to a web site where the article or chapter can be downloaded in full at no charge.

Please send nominations to
David Gibson (Chair) (dgibson1@nd.edu) by March 1.


EMCA Graduate Student Paper Award



This award recognizes an outstanding publication contributing to ethnomethodology and/or conversation analysis. The 2020 award will be given to a paper. Eligible papers for the 2020 award must be published between March 1, 2018 and February 29, 2020, inclusively. Authors can submit their own publications, or nominations can be made on their behalf. 



Please send nominations to
Sarah Hitzler (Chair) (sarah.hitzler@uni-bielefeld.de) by March 1.

Melvin Pollner (1940-2007) Prize in Ethnomethodology



The Melvin Pollner Prize in Ethnomethodology honors the intellectual spirit and memory of Melvin Pollner. The $1000 award recognizes an article, chapter, or book published between 2014-2019, that develops original work drawing upon, or resonant with, Melvin Pollner's ethnomethodological interests in topics such as mundane reason, reality disjunctures, radical reflexivity, and the connections and contributions of ethnomethodology to other types of sociology.



Nominations should include

1. full bibliographic information on the nominated publication
2. a PDF copy (preferable) or a hard copy of the article, chapter orbook; or a link to a web site where the article, chapter or book can be downloaded in full at no charge, and
3. a brief description of the publication's special contribution and how it reflects the spirit of the award.

Please submit nominations to
Goetz Hoeppe (Chair) (ghoeppe@uwaterloo.ca) by March 1.

2019 EMCA Distinguished Book Award

The committee for the 2019 EMCA Distinguished Book Award, consisting of Jason Turowetz, Donald Everhart, and Waverly Duck, has unanimously selected Charles Goodwin as this year’s recipient for his book, Cooperative Action (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The committee chose Dr. Goodwin’s book for its outstanding contributions to the field of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The book represents the culmination of the late Dr. Goodwin’s decades-long scholarship in EMCA, applied linguistics, and anthropology, and ties together all of his work, from his earliest research on collaborative sentence construction and argumentation to his pathbreaking studies of interaction and disability, professional vision, embodied and multimodal action, and archaeological practice. 

At the center of the book is Goodwin’s argument that cooperative action is the cornerstone of human culture and social order, providing “in the midst of action itself, a systematic mechanism for progressive accumulation with modification from all scales, from chains of local utterances, through tools, to the unfolding differentiation through time of human social groups” (2017:1). Drawing on materials from a range of fields, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, linguistics, and psychology, Goodwin addresses big questions that cut across disciplinary boundaries as he makes the case for an interaction-centered theory of human society. In particular, he shows how actors build courses of action by using and modifying resources created in previous interactions, and how local actions are implicated in the continual making and remaking of culture. His book puts EMCA in dialogue with scholars in the social and natural sciences, articulating a “general mechanism…for both accumulation and incremental change, one lodged within the interstices of mundane action itself” (2017:7) and challenging popular alternatives that reduce social behavior to psychological and/or biological processes. 

Goodwin’s impressive book will no doubt serve as a resource and inspiration for current and future generations of EMCA scholars.

2019 EMCA Graduate Student Paper Award

Congratulations to Alexandra Tate on the award for best student paper for her “Treatment Recommendations in Oncology Visits: Implications for Patient Agency and Physician Authority,” published in Health Communication, 2018.

This study provides an exemplar of medical CA at its best; it provides new insights into how doctor-patient interaction varies across stages of the oncology encounter. The crucial question asked by Tate is how physician-oncologist and patient negotiate decision making for treatment and, in particular, how physicians assert their authority — and balance it with an orientation to the patient’s agency — in oncology regarding treatment. Making use of Stivers’ typologies for primary care treatment recommendations, Tate found that while oncologists’ proposals were most common in the initial stage of oncologist/patient interaction, when the oncologist needed the patient to buy into a certain treatment, during other stages (mid-course treatment and ancillary treatments) pronouncements were made. Differentiated forms of verbal action are accounted for with respect to the trajectory of the voyage of cancer treatment. A deviant case provides insight into the importance of the relationship of doctor and patient regarding how negotiation proceeds; when a relationship is new midcourse of treatment, then the oncologist must work to gain the acceptance of the client, and will not make pronouncements. The careful design of the study permitted such nuanced understandings of changes in doctor/patient medical encounters across time within a context in medical conversation analysis (oncology) which has received less attention than primary care.

There are important policy implications for medical care which result from this study. In the US physicians initially seek patients’ acceptance of treatment, and therefore want the patient’s input. However, having obtained their signing onto cancer treatments, physicians in the mid course context view patient agency as having been somewhat transferred to them. Participants then have little opportunity to consider alternative therapies, stop treatment or shift to palliative or supportive care. The paper makes important points in showing how this happens and, implicitly, in providing for opportunities to medical staff to become aware of opportunities to enhance the patient’s participation.

Marjorie Goodwin, Lorenza Mondada and Anssi Peräkylä