“How I learned What I Learned" by Studying Interaction Orders: How “Troubled" Interactions Violate “Trust Conditions” to Produce Deviance with Dr. Waverly Duck

"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." - Dr. Waverly Duck

Join us as we welcome Dr. Waverly Duck for an in person presentation! Dr. Duck is an urban ethnographer and the North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2016 C. Wright Mills Book Award. His second book on unconscious racism, Tacit Racism, co- authored with Anne Rawls (also with the University of Chicago Press), was the 2021 winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the 2022 Book Award winner for the North Central Sociological Association. He also co-authored and curated a new book with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, titled Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction (Taylor and Francis, 2020). Like his earlier work, his current research investigates the challenges faced by socially marginal groups. However, his work is more directly concerned with the interaction order of marginalized communities and how participants identify problems and what they think are viable solutions.

Appetizers and refreshments will be served!

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