CrimSL Assistant Professor Patrick Watson was an invited panelist at the Pacific Sociological Association's 95th Annual Conference (PSA 2024) in San Diego, CA, on March 21, 2024.
Patrick says, "The panel was titled "Some Old Questions for Some New Troubles: The Continuing Influence of the 1960s Beyond Disciplinary Silos." I presented on the influence of UCLA scholar Melvin Pollner, who used to study traffic courts, and the applicability of his notions of "Mundane Reasoning," "Reality Disjunctures," and "The Politics of Persuasion" to adjudications of police violent conduct recorded on video."
The panel was moderated by Robin James Smith of Cardiff University. Fellow panelists were Morana Alac, University of California San Diego; Black Hawk Hancock, DePaul University; and Andrew Deener, University of Connecticut.
Abstract
This session returns to some key insights and developments from West Coast sociology and traces their significance for contemporary debates and developments in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. The papers aim to recover the detail of well-known projects including Pollner’s study of traffic courts, the Natural History of an Interview project, as well as the treatments of setting and scene by Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks. Ostensibly, the papers could be seen as addressed to criminology, science and technology studies, and human geography. What the papers demonstrate, however, is that despite the tendency to partition and divide the work of the sociology in to disciplinary and even thematic silos, there is much to be gained by continuing to think with and across rather than within the guard-rails that some commentators and interpreters and translators have put in place. In this sense, these papers are an encouragement to others to recover the spirit of inquiry and openness that marked the “scenius” of 1960s West Coast Sociology. We cannot, of course, return to times before the Big Bang, but we can, at least, continue to be open to the possibilities opened up by that spirit for addressing pressing questions for contemporary sociology and society.