Suggestion to rename "EMCA Lifetime Achievement Award" to "Harold Garfinkel Lifetime Achievement Award"

Dear EMCA Section Members,

I hope you've had a splendid start into 2015.

Today, I contact you with a short query or suggestion that has come from various members and people interested in EMCA.

Our Section currently has four awards, one of which is the "EMCA Lifetime Achievement Award". We wondered what members would think of a renaming of this award to "Harold Garfinkel Lifetime Achievement Award"?

Please do contact the Section Co-Chairs Robert Dingwall and/or Mardi Kidwell or me with your thoughts on this suggestion.


Kind regards
Dirk

dirk.vom_lehn@kcl.ac.uk

ASA Submission Open

Dear EMCA section members,

The online submission portal for the ASA annual meeting in Chicago in 2015 is now open for business at http://www.asanet.org/meetings/callforpapers.cfm. The deadline for submissions is January 7 at 3 pm EST.

Remember to choose the Conversation Analysis or Ethnomethodology sections when you submit. 

Obituary Edward Charles Cuff

Edward Charles Cuff:

Ted Cuff died, aged 76,  on 24^th, October 2014 shortly after suffering a stroke. Ted was the author of  Problems of Versions in Everyday Situations and co-editor of and contributor to the widely used textbook Perspectives in Sociology (a sixth edition is in preparation). He also co-edited Crisis in the Curriculum and Doing Teaching. After graduating from the LSE, Ted joined the Sociology Department at Didsbury College of Education, Manchester  in 1968, developing a small but high quality sociology teaching department. The department was dissolved owing to changes in education policy and administrative structures, with the College being absorbed into Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University.  As Head of the Educational Studies department Ted’s main focus became an administrative one, leading to increasing disillusionment with both the direction of educational policy and the priority of process over substance in the  administrative setting. After only the briefest reflection he took   the opportunity for  early retirement in the 1980’s. In retirement he took a fine arts degree at Manchester University and pursued his interests in opera, painting, theatre and, above all, literature, though he continued close contact with his circle of sociological colleagues.

Ted was a founding member of the  ‘Manchester School’ of Ethnomethodology, making Didsbury an organising centre for the Group’s activity , creating there a  comprehensive archive of ethnomethodological writings, many of which were then unpublished. He was much admired for the fineness of his intelligence, the acuity of his judgement and the precision of his prose as well as  his nuanced mastery of administrative skills. He set himself the highest   standards of integrity,  and will be affectionately remembered for his warm,  engaging and witty presence.

He is survived by Janet, his wife of fifty four years, and by daughters Jacqueline and Susan.

Call for Papers (01/15/15) Mobilizing Vulnerability: New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights

Call for Papers (01/15/15)

Mobilizing Vulnerability:

New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights

A Special Issue of Feminist Formations

Co-edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Rachel Lewis

During the past decade, there has been a substantial growth in academic scholarship devoted to exploring the intersections among vulnerability, precarity, and human rights. While feminist and queer theorists have turned toward concepts of vulnerability and precarity as a way of accounting for contemporary forms of political violence, critical theorists have turned to vulnerability and affiliated terms (precarity and precarization, for example) as the basis for understanding human interdependencies, obligations, and ethical responsibilities (Berlant, Butler, Cvejić, Fineman, Lorey, Puar, and Vujanović). However, what has not been considered to date and what this special issue aims to elucidate are the contributions that transnational feminist scholarship and methods can make toward our understanding of embodied and structural vulnerabilities, especially as these vulnerabilities shape human rights theory and practices.

This special issue will discuss both the value and the risks of theories of vulnerability and precarity for transnational feminist research on human rights. Specifically, we seek to address how transnational feminist analytics might increase our understanding of the mobilization of vulnerability and how concepts of vulnerability and precarity travel transnationally to produce new rationalities. We seek contributions that focus particular attention upon the intersection of notions of vulnerability and precarity with human rights discourses, with an emphasis on how these concepts might advance or counter transnational feminist projects. A key issue will be the ways in which such discourses typically map vulnerability onto certain bodies (marked in terms of gender, race, class, or age) and not others, and how these bodies take on the burden of representation in domestic and international politics and law. As such, we invite article submissions on any topic pertaining to the subject of global human rights, sexuality, disability, and emergent work in vulnerability studies. Key questions framing the special issue include the following:

1.      To what extent has the growing inclusion of women’s rights, LGBT rights, disability rights, and children’s rights on the international human rights agenda opened up a space for alternative conceptualizations of vulnerability and human rights discourses? How do marginalized subjects perform resistance through the mobilization of vulnerability and precarity?

2.      How might theories of vulnerability and precarity challenge second wave feminist understandings of women’s human rights grounded in freedom from gender violence and the pursuit of sexual autonomy? What role might transnational feminisms play in further elucidating the potential and limitations of vulnerability as an analytic?

3.      How do advocacy groups navigate the international moral economy of human rights and unsettle moral dichotomies (victim/agent) as they take on shifting identities and positions in narrating their struggle for power within their multifaceted particularities?

4.      How might transnational feminist and queer theories of vulnerability and precarity help scholars, practitioners, policy-makers and human rights advocates to better account for the pleasures and vicissitudes of desire and relationality, emotion and affect, corporeality and interdependency, care and protection in human rights narratives?

5.      In what ways might theories of vulnerability and precarity establish new critical frameworks for rethinking the contested relationship between women of color feminisms and transnational feminist practices?

We especially invite contributions that explore the intersections among vulnerability, precarity and human rights in relation to the following thematics:

·         the role of vulnerability and precarity within transnational feminist theory and activism

·         differential distributions of vulnerability and precarity along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship

·         the potential and limitations of theories of vulnerability and precarity for thinking through race, gender, sexuality and the formation of international human rights discourses

·         racism and state violence

·         trauma and the ethics of witnessing

·         dispossession, ecstasy and the limits of sexual autonomy

·         disability and displacement

·         interracial vulnerability and economic precarity

·         love and gender violence

·         sexual rights and erotic vulnerability

·         precarity and gender norms

We seek contributions from across the humanities and social sciences that interrogate representations of gender, sexuality, disability, human rights, and vulnerability in relation to law and public policy, social media, literature, narrative, popular culture, and social justice activism. We welcome contributions with U.S., global, international, and transnational foci.

Essays should be 8k -11k words, including endnotes and references. Submit your complete manuscript via email to FF editorial assistant, Brooke Lober (feministformations@email.arizona.edu) and copy the co-editors to your email: Wendy Hesford (hesford.1@osu.edu) and Rachel Lewis (rlewis13@gmu.edu).

For information on Feminist Formations, visit our website. And for further manuscript specifications, see Author Guidelines. For all other questions, please contact the special issue guest editors.

2015 Annual Meeting Call for Papers

The online submission system will open on December 5. The deadline for submissions to the 2015 Call for Papers is January 7, 2015, 3:00pm EST.
A record-breaking 4,664 submissions were received in 2014 (compared to 4,464 in 2013). Authors who submit their work to the 2015 Call for Papers will receive notices of the final disposition of their submissions by March 5, 2015.


http://www.asanet.org/meetings/callforpapers.cfm

Dear EMCA members,

Below is the fall 2014 newsletter!  Thanks to all for contributing, and especially for Laura Loeb for doing such an outstanding job editing.  This is our last newsletter, before the new team takes over.

We have thoroughly enjoyed our time as co-chairs.

Best wishes,

Dirk vom Lehn & Erik Vinkhuyzen

Awards information and deadlines 2015

2015 ASA Ethno/CA Award Announcements and Deadlines

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 2010-2014, 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 link to a web site where articles and/or chapters can be downloaded; a PDF copy of the manuscript; or a hard copy of the manuscript (copies of books need not be submitted with the initial nomination), and 3) a brief description of the publication’s special contribution and how it reflects the spirit of the award. 

Please submit nominations to Bob Emerson, remerson@soc.ucla.edu  by March 1.

EMCA Distinguished Book Award

This award recognizes an outstanding publication contributing to ethnomethodology and/or conversation analysis. The 2014 award will be given to a book. Eligible books for the 2015 award must be published between September 1, 2012 and February 28, 2015, inclusively. Authors can submit their own publications, or nominations can be made on their behalf. Committee members may also make their own nominations.

Please send nominations along with a full publication to Timothy Halkowski (chair) tim.halkowski@uwsp.edu  by March 1.

EMCA Lifetime Achievement Award

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 Don Zimmerman (chair), dzimmerman@soc.ucsb.edu by March 1.

EMCA Graduate Student Paper Award

This award recognizes an outstanding paper written by a graduate student. Submitted papers should address ethnomethodological and/or conversation analytic topics and literature and should read well as stand-alone papers. Maximum length is 10,000 words. We seek to support graduate students’ original and best work, so we will consider unpublished papers or articles published in any journal or book. Co-authored papers are only acceptable if all authors are students.  Work must have been completed or published between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014. All identifying references to the author(s) should be removed from submissions. The award will be presented at the ASA 2015 EMCA section’s business meeting in Chicago. A total of $300 is available to offset travel expenses in attendance for winning student(s). 

Please send nominations to Philippe Sormani (chair), philippe.sormani@univie.ac.at  by March 1.