ASA 2015 thematic and special sessions RFP

Dear EMCA Members,

The 2015(!) conference seems far away but the Call for Proposals for the meeting in Chicago is already out. Aside from the Regular Section Sessions ASA always invites proposals from members that are interested in setting up sessions that address the conference theme and sessions that are not regular (including author meets critics, Special Sessions (join sessions with other sections), workshops, etc.

The theme for the 2015 conference is "Sexualities in the Social World". The deadline to submit a proposal for a Thematic Session is November 13th, 2013

The deadline to submit proposals for Special Sessions, Courses, Workshops, and other kinds of session is February 5th, 2014.

Information including the submission procedure is described on this website:

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

We would be grateful if you would send us your proposal information as well so that we know what has gone in and can help plan the 2015 program.

Very shortly we will be in touch about the Call for the 2014 meeting in San Francisco.

Best wishes,

Dirk and Erik

Call for Newsletter contributions

A brief note to members of the ASA EMCA Section

I. Call for Contributions: EMCA Newsletter

We are currently putting gathering material for our Fall Newsletter. For that purpose we are looking for members contributions. Please mail us any of the following for inclusion in the newsletter
* Recent publications by section members
* Calls for papers, proposals, participants, or nominations
* Upcoming conferences and events announcements
* Photos form the ASA 2013 conference
* Reports from conferences related to the section (max 500words)
* Jobs of interest to section members
* Funding opportunities and award competitions of interest to section members
* New jobs, promotions, and awards news about our section members
* We also again look for reports from graduate students who are interested in writing a short piece about their school and their experiences with EMCA

Please send all newsletter submissions to the newsletter editors, Laura Loeb (laura.a.loeb@gmail.com), by September 30th.

 II. Request for Comments: 
(this from the ASA Committee on the Status of LGBT Persons in Sociology)

The ASA Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology is a committee made up of LGBT and allied ASA members and has existed for several years. As we move forward with new membership, we are interested in learning about experiences of LGBT persons in the field of sociology, and about ideas for the future mission of our committee. We would appreciate any comments, anonymous or otherwise, that you might be willing to send us regarding this subject to

LGBTSociology@gmail.com.

While we encourage responses from any and all LGBT sociologists, we recognize that the field of sociology, both within academia and without, presents unique challenges to LGBT people of color and transgender individuals; therefore, we especially encourage anyone with insight into these challenges to respond in order to help guide future action. We will be holding a workshop at the ASA meeting in San Francisco next year, where we will review these responses and hold a discussion regarding the status of LGBT persons in sociology and what might be done to improve it. As a committee, we will take these comments under advisement as we move forward with our mission, and as we consider our institutional role and relationship with other groups like the LGBT Caucus.

Sincerely,

Members of the ASA Committee on the Status of LGBT Persons in Sociology
Nella Van Dyke (chair)
Toni Calasanti
Tey Meadow
CJ Pascoe
Roberta Spalter-Roth (ASA Council liaison)
Tom Waidzunas

III. Minutes of Business Meeting (ASA 2013)

The business meeting was held on Monday, August 12th.
 The co-chairs Dirk vom Lehn and Erik Vinkhuyzen opened the meeting and Ruth Parry, the treasurer presented the section's budget and these were unanimously approved by the membership.  Ruth Parry will look into the Pollner account as it is not accruing much interest.
The co-chairs emphasized the continued need for the section to grow its membership and for all current members to reach out and urge their colleagues to join our section.
Next the awards were presented.
First was the Life-Time Achievement Award, which went to Don Zimmerman, who was present at the meeting through a Skype connection. Doug Maynard presented the award and afterwards a pre-recording of Don Zimmerman's thank you speech was played.
Second, the Pollner Award was presented by John Heritage to David R. Gibson, of the University of Notre Dame, for his book Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (2012).
Third, the Book Award was presented by Patrick Watson to Morana Alac of the University of California San Diego, for her book Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
 Fourth, the Graduate Student Paper Award was presented by Tim Halkowski to Chase Wesley Raymond & Ann Elizabeth Clark White for their paper (which Chase presented earlier in the conference): "A Taxonomy of Time Reference in Interaction"
The meeting was closed.

Latest ASA 2013 EMCA Program with Venue Information

Dear EMCA Community,

Laura was so kind to revise the program for the EMCA Sessions once more. Previously ASA had not made available the information for the rooms of the EMCA Sessions. Please download the LATEST Program with room information.

We are looking forward to meeting you at the conference from tomorrow.

Dirk vom Lehn & Erik Vinkhuyzen

Updated ASA schedule

Dear EMCA community,

Thanks to John Heritage and Tanya Stivers's lobbying efforts, we have been able to change the Conversation Analysis session from 8:30 on Sunday morning to 2:30pm later that day.  Now there is no more overlap in our sessions, which is wonderful news.
Please check out our updated Summer 2013 newsletter and print out page 10, which now has the correct schedule (thanks, as always to Laura for the quick turn around!). We look forward to seeing you all soon.

Erik Vinkhuyzen Dirk vom Lehn

Summer 2013 Newsletter!

Dear EMCA community,

Welcome to the Summer 2013 newsletter of the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section.  With the ASA meeting next month, this newsletter naturally focuses on that event where we hope to see many of you in person.  Specifically, note the ASA EMCA schedule, which you should print and bring to the ASA as a handy one page guide of where you should be at what time!  There are 8 sessions. Unfortunately, there are two sessions at the same time.  We urged the ASA to change that but, sadly, we were unsuccessful.

Note that the Business Meeting will be held on Monday, August at 9:30am where we will be presenting the various awards.  You can see who won the awards in this newsletter.  We are grateful for all the committees for their hard work.  Our Social is on Saturday night from 6:30-9:00pm; please come and join us in Rosie O'Grady's. We are continuing the short bios from graduate students
in the field.  In this newsletter, we thought it would be nice to highlight some of the graduate students who are presenting at ASA next month.  If you know graduate students who would like to present themselves in the newsletter, please e-mail us.

Thanks to Laura Loeb for editing the newsletter (she will be presenting at the ASA meeting, so make sure you tell her how much you like the new look).

Yours,

 Erik Vinkhuyzen & Dirk vom Lehn, co-chairs.

Click on the image below to see the newsletter!
 

Melvin Pollner Prize in Ethnomethodology 2013

The Pollner Prize Award Committee has announced the winner of the 2013 Pollner Prize.

Members of the committee are: Paul Drew (Loughborough University), John Heritage (Chair) (UCLA), Douglas Maynard (University of Wisconsin, Madison).

The recipient of the 2013 American Sociological Association’s EM/CA Section Pollner Prize is 

David R. Gibson, of the University of Notre Dame, for his book Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (2012).

Here is the committee's letter:

"The committee received 3 nominations for this year’s award of the prize. In addition to David Gibson, Tim Berard was nominated for his article entitled Unpacking ‘Institutional Racism’ (published in the journal Schutzian Research); and Robert Garot was nominated for his book Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets (NY: New York University Press, 2010).

The committee discussed each of these nominations in some detail, and agreed that any of the nominations would have been worthy of being awarded the prize. Berard’s article convincingly developed insights from Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, Schutz, Goffman and Sacks to “illuminate the pragmatic, moral reasoning at work in the institutional racism argument” – amounting to an insightful interrogation of the phenomenon of ‘institutional racism’. In Robert Garot’s monograph exploring the nature of gang identity and self-identity, we encountered a nuanced use of in-depth ethnographic interviews from which he provides a realistic and vibrant account of identity and gang membership, and explores the boundaries and shifting contingencies of membership and identity. In the process he does much to demonstrate the weaknesses of a static and monolithic conception of gangs and their members. What impressed us about Gibson’s book was his truly sociological account of the decision making process during the ExComm group’s deliberations in the White House, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gibson shows that Kennedy did not so much lead a discussion in which all options were rationally appraised, but rather steered a conversation in which certain lines of argumentation and courses of action came to be privileged over others. His account of this process, over several days of the group’s deliberations, was based in Gibson’s innovative use of ‘time-line’ analysis and his careful and detailed analysis of the interaction between Kennedy and members of his advisory group. Gibson's analysis offers a vivid picture of the conversations themselves, of the avenues that were developed or remained unexplored in the formulation of the US response, and of the contingencies that were associated with some avenues being developed and others dropped. This is a notable study."

2013 Book award

The Book Award committee has announced the winner of the 2013 Book Award.
The members of the committee: 

Patrick Watson (University of Waterloo)
Christian Greiffenhagen (University of Nottingham)
Michael Lynch (Cornell University)

Winner:
Morana Alac
Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The section is very grateful to them for their careful work.  We look forward to honoring Morana at the ASA this summer in New York.


Here is the committee's letter:

"We are pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2013 American Sociological


Association’s EM/CA Section Book Award is Morana Alac of the University of California San Diego, for her book Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

The committee evaluated eight volumes; four single authored works and four edited collections.  While all contributed to the fields of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (and furthermore, linguistics), two in particular stood out as contributions that moved the field in definite directions (honourable mention to Baudouin Dupret’s [2011] Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law, Morality and Justice Surrey: Ashgate).

Alac’s book examines the ways assorted scientists (cognitive scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists) use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and the resultant digital image outputs to draw conclusions about brains, minds, vision, task accomplishment and so forth.  The book analyzes the use of gestures towards the brain images on computer screens (what Alac describes as “multimodal semiotic interaction”) and how these gestures, images and the resultant discussion are used to build consensus amongst the co-present scientists on what the data on the screen are telling them about human minds. 

Several chapters of the book (3-6) focus on experienced doctoral/post-doctoral researchers (“Old-Timers”) instructing neophyte researchers (“Newcomers”) on the practices of seeing and making see-able the different forms of data displayed on the screen.  Effectively, a combination of speech, gesture and image analysis (and image preparation) play a role in showing the “Newcomer” what is present before their eyes in and as fMRI data.

The book is of interest to a number of audiences: perhaps, first and foremost, researchers interested in the relations among instructions, gestures and learning in scientific settings.  The wider Science and Technologies Studies community will take interest in the combination of approaches, and the relatively novel combination of semiotics with EM/CA.  The book also was the most successful of
those submitted at integrating Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic concerns and discussions, providing a fine exemplar of how the two approaches can effectively be used together.  The committee noted that this was one of the deciding factors, as the book will be of interest to both of the constituent communities of the awarding body.

The committee would like to thank those who nominated books for consideration, and again commend members of the field for their efforts.  We took great pleasure reviewing these works, and wish to recognize all authors and editors for their exceptional work."