7th April 2025
This event is organised by the University of Edinburgh, Sociology subject area.
About the talk:
Troubled interactions are situations in which talk, self-presentation, and interaction itself break down – often in subtle ways not noticed by all participants. This talk illustrates the use of an interaction order approach, grounded in the work of Goffman and Garfinkel, to study such troubled interactions. Doing this reveals counter-intuitive and unexpected aspects of how meaning and self are ordinarily achieved.
Drawing on video and audio recordings, I offer illustrations from my ethnographic and ethnomethodological research in which communication and mutuality break down, leading participants to ascribe motives to each other as they attempt to explain what went wrong and why. These motives do not drive the action, rather they emerge from and serve as accounts for the trouble -in the process producing deviance.
The illustrations that I use capture the operations of local interaction orders in relation to (1) neighborhood poverty and drug dealing, (2) food apartheid and neighborhood solidarity, and (3) interaction in a clinic where children are assessed for autism (focusing in particular on a test in which autistic children are asked to respond to questions about emotions). By way of these examples, I demonstrate how studying interactional trouble can make visible constitutive and regulatory practices/expectations that are ordinarily tacit, while also establishing a context in which to discuss why I became a qualitative researcher.
About the speaker:
Waverly Duck is an urban ethnographer and the North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology.