Studies in Symbolic Interaction: Volume 53

The establishment of Science Cafés has become a popular strategy to enhance informal yet instruction-oriented interaction between medical and scientific experts and members of the relevant local communities. The purpose of this chapter is to report on two significant findings of a mixed-methods evaluation of the SCI (Science and Communities Interact) Café. Method: The Clinical and Translational Science Award in the Institute for Translational Sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston established an SCI Café program in 2013 to enable local residents to engage in dialogs with clinicians and researchers regarding their scientific interests and health concerns. A mixed-methods approach was used to evaluate the program. Results: The essential experience of SCI Café (SC) is updating one's knowledge of a topic. The primary comparative and analytical feature of SC participation is expertise. Expertise varies in terms of the social position of the participants: graduate student, university staff, engaged participant, topical participant, and curious participant.

The purpose of the Ethics Support Office, funded by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) and administered by the Institute for Translational Sciences (ITS) at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), is to provide research ethics support to faculty, fellows, and students. This chapter reports on an ongoing qualitative study to understand scientists' views on ethical issues in team science and their suggestions for advancing ethical policy and activities in order to improve ethics training. We originally conducted face-to-face, semistructured, qualitative interviews with a convenience sample of 20 key ITS researchers, representing the majority of researchers. The scientists' most general approach to ethics – in perceiving them, understanding them, and applying them – is to appreciate ethics in terms of their relevance to particular research situations and problems. They prefer to deal with ethics as a common feature and value incorporated into their work. Respondents suggested that those teaching ethics in multidisciplinary translational research must develop strategies that help scientists see and understand the relevance of ethics education to their work. Strategies include improving communication skills, providing shared opportunities for learning, sensitizing researchers to the demands on others on the team who are expected to contribute data and knowledge to the success of the project, and imbedding ethicists on research teams. In tune with the key finding of the study, ethics instructors and coaches need to become well acquainted with the nuances of their scientists' work. This approach will respond to the scientists' desire to conduct ethical research, but in practical terms of the specialized nature of their work.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine an evolving role in the translational science team: that of the consultant. The role of the consultant has long been a key feature of complex organizations in business and government. The consultant provides flexibility to an organization's employee base while providing specific expert knowledge and skills in a timely manner. The role of the consultant in Translational Science is innovative largely because they are attached or assigned to particular research teams, for varying lengths of tenure, to provide both basic and applied/evaluative skills to the increasingly central and defining team concept.

As a rule during interviews, research and respondent share the same sense of reality. In contrast, how should researchers handle phantasmal narratives during interviews, or descriptions of events that are impossible according to natural law? In this chapter, I report on 38 interviews upon people who encountered ghosts, apply theoretical concepts (James, Schutz, Pollner, Blumer), and, through autoethnographic reflection, suggest three approaches (“debunking,” “distancing,” “detouring”) to handling such phantasmal narratives. I conclude that they are best handled by complete suspension of skeptical thought, concentrating on ghost beliefs and not ghost existence.

Modern societies are imbued with a fundamental tension of expertise, as expert status is both a source of authority and channel of wider public trust. Scholars of expertise have shown, though, that the public often lacks trust in experts, something which often occurs alongside politicized social problems. I argue that there are contexts in which expert–public interactions may facilitate trust-building processes even amidst the politicization of problems in which experts are attempting to manage. I refer to this as “negotiated expertise,” when communities with divergent sensibilities of problems (re)construct the rules and norms of expertise in ways that build trust and facilitate cooperative and collective action. This builds on an interactionist understanding of trust and expertise, focusing on the ways in which communities negotiate the meanings, rules, and norms of expert settings. Through a qualitative analysis of Miami's Sea Level Rise Committee, I identify two key factors that facilitate trust-building in expert–public interactions: an emergent socioenvironmental problem and “advocacy-experts.” I suggest that these contexts and factors enabled Miamians to work toward reciprocal practices and understandings, unexpectantly building trust in a politicized setting.

Using a semi-autoethnographic layered account format, we present the voices of 16 Native American adults as they talk about their lives and Native American Caricature Iconography (NACI). First, we explore their impressions and lived experiences with “racial formation projects” such as tribal identification cards, blood quantum calculations, genocide, child removal, boarding schools, and reservations, to contextualize why some Native Americans interpret NACI as much more than “an honor,” “tradition,” or “just good fun.” Next, we explore the Native Americans' perceptions of sports mascots, cartoons, and sculpture, after exposing them to a series of eight images of NACI. We conclude that NACIs are racial formation projects as well. By unmindfully producing and consuming NACI, we fail to interrupt and reform the racial formation projects that continue to define us all.

This chapter is a critical analysis of the empirical research described in the work of Arlie R. Hochschild “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016). The problem of dignity is one of the common psychosocial elements that is used in the book to explain the phenomenon of strong support for right-wing parties that apply specific identity policies. The research report describes the Bayou region in Louisiana, US. The state and the region are the poorest and most ecologically polluted in the United States, and the Tea Party, a right-wing party, obtained the highest support in the region in the latest election. Arlie Hochschild's research and analytical achievements will be compared in this chapter with Polish studies carried out in a small town in Mazovia region, in which the right-wing party currently ruling Poland, the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc), won in the most recent election. Although, I am aware of significant demographic, economic, and political differences between these two countries, I will show that there are certain political and psychosocial processes common to both of them, and these will be analyzed here. I mainly focus on the issues concerning emotions and the analysis of emotional labor, as well as emotion management as described by Arlie R. Hochschild, and I also refer to the concept of interaction rituals and emotional energy.

Existentialist progenitors emphasized the contextual or situational nature of human action and meaning. This paper reviews some of these ideas and then compares how different approaches in sociology have embodied this view: symbolic interaction, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, the California School of Existential Sociology, grounded theory methodology, and macro existential sociology. These perspectives will be compared to assess their relative emphases on the contextual or situational nature of human action and meaning.

Norman Denzin edited and published the first volume of Studies in Symbolic Interaction in 1978. In more than four decades, Denzin published more than 50 volumes of this book series. This chapter provides a fine-grain view of the contribution of Norman Denzin to the Studies of Symbolic Interaction.

In this chapter I wish to acknowledge the unintentional contributions made by Norman K. Denzin to the new Iowa School, one which championed laboratory research, or what Dr. Denzin referred to as, “Green Carpet Sociology.” The term refers to the pea-soup-colored rug that covered the new Iowa School Research Laboratory. I also wish to extend the notion of Dr. Denzin as one of the unintended fathers of the Green Carpet approach by describing my particular intellectual relationship with him and noting how he inspired me while I completed my undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Illinois. In particular, I review three phases of Dr. Denzin's influence: the awakening, the metamorphoses, and the benediction. All three phases relate to how Dr. Denzin inspired a commitment to the ethos of the “Green Carpet Way.”

Norman Denzin's career as a symbolic interactionist spans many years and has produced an incredible amount of high-quality scholarship. His work as editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction has served as a platform for disseminating a wide range of innovative ideas, research, and reviews in our discipline. In this chapter, I will discuss two features of Studies that point to the great value of its work to symbolic interaction in general and to the areas of music studies in particular. Those two features are planting the seed of interactionist scholarship in an initial paper, and growing collective interactionist projects through special issues. My examples will be drawn from my own experiences with Studies over the years, and my approach to research and writing on music phenomena.