Couch-Stone Meeting

Call for Papers

Studying Human Knowing and Acting

The 2008 Couch-Stone Symbolic Interactionist Symposium

May 15-17, 2008

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

Held in conjunction with the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI, May 14-17)

This conference features interactionist approaches and the use of ethnographic research to study human group life. We welcome submissions from those whose scholarship builds on the symbolic interactionist tradition and ethnographic research, as well as from those whose work falls within related theoretical traditions, including social constructionism (Schutz, Berger and Luckmann), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss), dramaturgy (Goffman), and pragmatist emphases more generally.  

The Couch-Stone Symposium is an annual conference sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism (SSSI).2 The Couch-Stone Symposium has been named after two scholars, Gregory P. Stone (1921-1981) and Carl J. Couch (1925-1994) who not only contributed consequentially to interactionist scholarship through their research and publications and were centrally involved in fostering symbolic interactionism as a scholarly discipline within sociology and developing SSSI as an association but also supported interactionist scholarship with personal endowments. We are grateful to Gregory Stone and Carl Couch on each of these levels and are pleased to honor them with this symposium.

Along with Herbert Blumer, Anslem Strauss, and others in the interactionist community, Gregory Stone and Carl Couch insisted not only on the importance of studying human group life in the instances in which it takes place but also on developing process-oriented concepts that attend pragmatically to human activity (and interchange) as phenomena in the making.

Sharing this vision of symbolic interaction, this conference seeks to extend our understanding of human knowing and acting by encouraging ethnographic research and using comparative analysis to examine, assess, and extend the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual dimensions of the sociological venture.

We invite submissions from those who may be new to this tradition as well as more established scholars in the field. Likewise, envisioning scholarship as an ongoing process, we are receptive to statements on projects in varying stages (including more tentative formulations) of development.

Further, one of the objectives we would especially like to pursue at this conference is a stronger set of linkages, not only between people working on a broad array of interactionist projects, but also between junior and more established scholars as well as between scholars and scholars in the making. To this end, we will be striving for an exceptionally high level of interchange between the participants so that people may be able to benefit more directly from longer-term relations and the resources that we have to offer as a scholarly community with a coherent theoretical and methodological focus.  

The 2008 Couch-Stone Symposium is organized around three basic sets of sessions

* Sessions focusing on theoretical and methodological matters pertaining to the interactionist study of human group life.

*Sessions addressing ethnographic research and the processual features of human lived experience

*Sessions that revisit our Ethnographic Heritage  

Theoretical and Methodological Sessions

These sessions consider the conceptual, methodological, and analytic features of the interactionist study of human knowing and acting

*Examining the Theoretical Foundations of Human Group Life

*Methodological Directions and Ethnographic Implications

*George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer and the Pragmatist Tradition

*Gregory Stone, Carl Couch, and Social Process

*Transhistorical / Ethnohistorical Pragmatist Analysis

*Developing Comparative Analysis and Generic Social Processes  

*Questing for Intersubjectivity in Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

*Dealing with Proponents of Positivist, Structuralist, and Postmodernist Approaches

*Sustaining Scholarly Emphases in Moralist Climates

*Limitations, Obstacles, and Potentialities of Interactionist Research

*Processes and Problematics of Sustaining Ethnographic Inquiry in the Field

*Pursuing Funding for Ethnographic Inquiry

*Applying Interactionist Research and Analysis to Practical Problems of Living

Ethnographic Ventures, Social Process, and Comparative Analysis

The papers in these sessions would centrally address one of the following processes through interactionist informed ethnographic research and/or comparative analysis. In addition to providing detailed examinations of particular life worlds, a major objective of this conference is to indicate what we have learned about the more generic or fundamental aspects of human group life and to suggest ways that we might be better able to more adequately conceptualize and study these matters from an interactionist standpoint. 

Relatedly, people organizing these sessions would encourage comparative analysis of human life-worlds on the part of presenters in their sessions. In the words of Glaser and Strauss, this means to strive for conceptual, process-oriented comparisons within and across studies (rather than pile up little isolated islands of research).       

*Acquiring Perspectives

*Defining, Accepting, and Questioning the “whatness” of Reality

*Encountering Ambiguity

*Achieving Identity

*Questing for Popularity

*Doing Activity

*Generating Performances

*Striving for Success, Living with Failure

*Managing Impressions and Dealing with Deception

*Pursuing and Experiencing Influence Work

*Engaging Relationships

*Managing Intimacy and Distancing

*Experiencing Emotionality

*Developing Communicative Fluency

*Participating in Collective Events

*Experiencing Religion and Spirituality

*Teaching and Learning

*Developing. Sustaining, and Adjusting Character

*Generating, Perpetuating, and Challenging Memory

*Engaging Technology

*Doing Science

*Dealing with Entertainment

*Experiencing the Media     

*Producing and Consuming Texts

*Living on the Internet

*Attending to Tourist and Recreational Ventures

*Engaging the Marketplace

*Attending to Teamwork       

*Forming and Coordinating Associations

*Managing and Being Managed in Organizational Contexts

*Experiencing Organizational Routines

*Attending to Governing Practices

*Developing, Assessing, and Transforming Policy

*Managing Morality

*Regulating Deviance

*Experiencing Deviance

*Dealing with Change and Continuity

*Experiencing Migration and Relocation

*Experiencing Social Class

*Living with Racial and Ethnic Identities

*Attending to Matters of Gender

*Dealing with the Embodied and Imaged Self

*Defining and Managing Illness

*Facing Disaster and Loss

*Attending to the Environment

*Shaping and Reshaping Cities

Revisiting our Ethnographic Heritage

The papers for these sessions would review the works of particular scholars engaging in pragmatist / interactionist oriented ethnography. In addition to developing a synoptic overview of the particular ethnography(ies) considered in the paper, authors consider the ways that these studies contribute to the more generic or enduring understanding of human group life as represented (variously) in people's perspectives, identities, activities, relationships, commitments, collective ventures, and the like. This allows us to reengage literature from the past in more comparative analytic (transcontextual and transhistorical) terms and fosters a stronger cumulative conceptual dimension to interactionist scholarship.      

 *Revisiting Our Ethnographic Heritage: Session 1

*Revisiting Our Ethnographic Heritage: Session 2

*Revisiting Our Ethnographic Heritage: Session 3

*Revisiting Our Ethnographic Heritage: Session 4

Note: The particular sessions featured in the final conference program will vary depending on people’s activities and interests. Thus, some categories may be collapsed or extended, with ensuing adjustments, as move toward the final program.

Due Dates

Please submit Paper proposals for the Couch-Stone Symposium by November 30, 2007. Later proposals will be considered but it may not be possible to list these in the Final conference program. Likewise, earlier submissions will be given priority in programming considerations. 

Couch-Stone Conference Fees

Full-time Faculty presenting papers… $85US

Students and others attending the C-S Symposium… $45US

• After March 31, 2008 Registration fees will be increased by $20 and $10, respectively). 

• The Couch-Stone Conference fees are partially subsidized by the SSSI. This includes [CONFIRM with NKD] one/two buffet (evening) dinners hosted by the ICQI. A pizza night also is planned.  Sorry, there are no registration reductions for missed meals or single day registrations. 

• People registering for the Couch-Stone Symposium also would be able to attend all regular ICQI sessions (and vice-versa).  

It is expected as well that all presenters (or at least one of the co-authors of multiple authored papers) will be members of SSSI. Membership includes a year’s subscription to the journal Symbolic Interaction and SSSI Notes (newsletter).

SSSI Membership fees for 2007-2008 

Student memberships $28US

Other individual memberships are proportional to income, as follows

If your income is      

under $30K -     $35US      

$30K - 39,999 - $40      

$40K - 54,999 - $45      

$55K - 69,999 - $50      

over $70K -       $55

You may join SSSI (and obtain the journal Symbolic Interaction) by contacting the University of California Press at

• http://ucpressjournals.com/journalJoin.asp?j=si

Conference Organizers

Robert Prus 

Department of Sociology 

University of Waterloo  Waterloo,

ON Canada N2L 3G1 

prus@uwaterloo.ca 

Tel: (519) 888-4567 ext. 32105

Michael Coyle

Department of Political Science 

California State University,

Chico Chico, CA 95929-0455

  U.S.A. 

mjcoyle@csuchico.edu

Phone: 530-898-4965 Fax: 530-898-6910 Cell: 480-242-6887   

Thank you for joining us in this venture.With your participation and that of like-minded others, it will be a very worthwhile assembly of scholars…