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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 performance autoethnography may or may not be interpreted as a continuation of a conversation regarding the experiences of those with devalued statuses in academic settings. The authors rely on “strange accounting” to consider their experiences in the academy from various standpoints: before and after promotion, before and after leaving academia. While reflecting on our past experiences, we introduce the concept of “everyday precariousness” as a way of explaining the normalization of instability, insecurity, and negative affect that is part of everyday life for those with devalued statuses in academic settings and beyond. Everyday precariousness is an embodied experience for those in vulnerable positions. Normalized exposure to risks, such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, or structural instability, produces an undercurrent of threat that permeates academic culture. Our stories of everyday precariousness span race, ethnicity, class, academic roles, and gender boundaries (among many others). Analyzing these experiences furthers previous work on the uses of strange accounting as well as the dynamics of status silencing. In the final analysis, unresisted and unabated, everyday precariousness and status silencing can lead to institutional failure and resonance disasters.

This autoethnography takes up the matter of toxic masculinity in university settings. We introduce the term “status silencing” as a way to make visible the normalization of toxic masculinity in everyday talk and interaction in university settings among and around colleagues. Status silencing is the process in which the status of a dominant individual becomes a context which renders the story of an individual with a subordinated status untellable or untold. Using strange accounting, we explore active and passive types of status silencing to show how talk and interactions involving toxic masculinity are both internalized and externalized expressions of power and dominance. We argue that while most scholars view toxic masculinity as blatant acts of violence (mass shootings, rape and sexual assault, etc.), it is also a normalized occurrence for feminized others and that toxic masculinity in academic settings is part of an ongoing institutional norm of silence.

Symbolic interaction may not have much of a future. Rome is burning; the Titanic is sinking; and still the band plays on. With some notable exceptions, we symbolic interactionists, as a group, appear to be sitting around, paralyzed, watching events unfold from the dizzying heights of our ivory tower, grumbling under our collective breath about how bad things are, but not yet doing enough, much like the rest of the world.You take the blue pill; the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Morpheus from The Matrix)

A luminescent purple glow expands, refracting holographic light in the background. As the perspective shifts, each color of the rainbow appears and disappears along multiple axes of a prismatic spray. Our Diva, Carolyn Ellis, sits alone on a stool in the midst of the purple glow, extending her hand, palm up, with outstretched tapered fingers, beckoning us to join her. “Don’t be afraid,” she smiles, “we are all the same.”

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

Norman Denzin organized the Urbana SSSI Stone Symposium, where I first met Patricia. He and I share the dual identities of sociologist and communication scholar. Given all he has published as well as the publishing opportunities he has provided others, Norman has done more for interpretive social sciences and symbolic interaction than anyone I know. He has been instrumental in my career, especially when I was a young scholar. The first person to identify my work as schizophrenic, Norman said I made a plea for interpretive, imaginative inquiry, and then turned hard science against it. This was a transforming moment, a moment in which I stopped judging my creative work by the standards of traditional science and instead focused on articulating what my work contributed to understanding emotionality and meaning in our lives. As a colleague and friend, Norman's role in my life is personal and political.

This chapter provides the historical and intellectual context of studying inequality and domination using the symbolic interactionist perspective. Lonnie Athens' radical interactionism was identified as a useful framework to research the omnipresent and insidious inequality found in everyday life. Chapters presented in this volume represent a follow up of Volume 41 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, edited by Athens, where he laid the ground work for the research of domination and subordination. Chapters in this volume demonstrate the advancements made in studying inequality in symbolic interactionist research.

This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.