Abstract
The 21 authors in this volume recount those formative moments in higher education when they recognized the potential for a new perspective on interaction. In each chapter, we are treated to descriptions of the places, people and readings that inspired what has come to be known as language and social interaction (LSI).
What for many is an ineffable graduate student experience has been put into words by scholars who focus on how language is shaped by those with whom we interact. We are afforded a glimpse of their memories of the events that led to a truly significant way to perceive how we coordinate our actions and make meaning in and through conversations.
The authors describe what, at the time, were novel forms of inquiry. This left me with a nostalgic longing for that time when LSI was still new and formative. What seems lost in today’s academic world of measured outcomes was the generative opening up of potential spaces for meaningful human interaction research.
Many chapters read like stories, beginning by situating their authors in their respective American universities when they began graduate studies. Each author describes what was often a serendipitous route to discovering the research that became his or her life-long passion. Most often, this passion was sparked by a charismatic teacher and a cohort of like-minded peers. Often it was a graduate student, like Deidre Boden who influenced both her peers and her teacher, Don Zimmerman. At institutions lacking that teacher or those peers, we learn of the inspiration gained from reading a particular text (Garfinkel, Goffman, Hymes and Sacks are most frequently mentioned). Those chapters that are single-authored feel somehow lonelier than the others, lacking that joint-experiential ah-ha moment that one might say has become a hallmark of LSI practice.
The best stories in the volume recount some drama, such as a visiting lecture from a renowned professor or a sabbatical, like Robert Hopper’s 1983 sabbatical at Oxford University, or a sudden departure (whether by death, job-change or tenure-denial) that changed the atmosphere in a department. The best stories also recount informal moments, like driving in a car or having a dinner-table conversation; moments that transcend the formal graduate-student routine and provide a feeling of being part of a community. One chapter includes actual dialogue from teacher–student conversations, allowing the reader to hear the ways the inquiries unfolded at the time.
Many chapters include formal lists of people, publications and events, such as who chaired LSI, who wrote which dissertation, and which IIEM/CA summer conference yielded which special issue of Human Studies. While interesting, they leave out the textured details that I think people who are drawn to LSI have come to expect. What was it like to be there, in situ, with those people, and how did the conversations influence what has come to be known as LSI? Those are key questions that LSI scholars seek to address and I learned some of their answers in these pages. As much as I appreciated the historic trips down memory lane (in some ways the strength of the volume), I think the authors did not fully explicate their awareness that their stories were not representational, but constructions. Having been prolific defenders of a socially constructed world, the authors haven’t necessarily captured that sense in these chapters. Oddly, what was missing was an overt recognition about their reflexivity that Leeds-Hurwitz sought in developing this edited volume.
The place of LSI researchers in their own work is almost taken for granted. Perhaps the potential for reflexivity in these accounts is what they encourage us as readers to imagine and the connections they help us to make. For instance, until reading Gerry Philipsen’s account of his peer, Helen Swartzman, I didn’t recognize why I felt such an affinity for her work.
The social histories as told here, and presented in this chronological fashion, prompted me to think about the arc of LSI. Much like the formation of a community, like-minded people were drawn to a way of seeing, and began developing specific methods to explicate particular features of talk and interaction. The formative years in the 1960s and 1970s were generative and inclusive, drawing on interdisciplinary ideas, authors and frameworks. However, as the years progressed, norms were created and refined into rules protected by gatekeepers. The final chapters seemed to limit who is able to count as an LSI member. I was left longing for the formative period, devoid of such parameters.
In the spirit of reflexive self-disclosure, I am currently the chair of the LSI division at NCA and was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. What has been the most difficult part of reviewing this text was deciding how to frame my reading. On the one hand, I would have liked to talk about how these scholars exhibit membership in the category of LSI researchers. On the other hand, I was tempted to consider LSI as a speech community. Making this choice would situate me in a particular place, holding a specific orientation. However, discovering how these distinct accounts of LSI are all contained within the same volume provides a generative spirit that may still lead to novel ways of blending differing LSI perspectives.
The book will be of immense value to anyone interested in those early connections that led to this burgeoning field. Students will be interested in the who’s who history they have recently come to take for granted from social networking sites – information that doesn’t always exist for past generations. Communication colleagues will be interested in how graduate student experiences, often crossing disciplinary lines, have made our own discipline a nexus for a variety of scholars. Finally, those currently affiliated with LSI research may learn to become more reflexive about the people with whom we share this affinity. Towards that end, we may seek to learn more about who or what readings have inspired our current young scholars and what novel questions they seek to answer.