5 Thursdays (first class meeting will be October 5), 2-3:50pm, Ellison Hall 2609
Enrollment Code: 58073
Much of our social life is conducted within and through conversational interaction with others -- significant others, friends and family, familiar people we encounter routinely, and some whom we may meet only once. In this respect, conversational interaction can be understood as a form of social organization in its own right, one that enables and underwrites the informal social life of a society. This course introduces students to methods for closely observing interaction and developing detailed analyses of the talk, gesture and embodied conduct that are constitutive of it. We will primarily focus on the ways in which interactants patrol, defend and otherwise manage various rights and responsibilities associated with personhood and the dilemmas posed in constructing intimate self-other relations.
Professor Geoffrey Raymond, Sociology, primary research interest is the analysis of recorded interaction. He has published papers on the organization of interaction, the organization of rights and responsibilities in interaction, and qualitative methods in the social sciences.
