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Constellations of ferry (im)mobility: islandness as the performance and politics of insulation and isolation
(Cultural Geographies, 2011-04)Drawing from three years of fieldwork — including over 250 journeys and about 400 interviews — conducted in ferry-dependent coastal and insular communities of British Columbia, this paper extends the concept of constellation ... -
The techne of making a ferry: a non-representational approach to passengers’ gathering taskscapes
(Journal of Transport Geography, 2011)Drawing upon ethnographic data collected in British Columbia’s ferry-dependent island and coastal communities, non-representational theory, and mobility studies literature this article examines the process of making, or ... -
Constellations of (in-)convenience: disentangling the assemblages of Canada's west coast island mobilities
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011)Drawing from fieldwork conducted to examine the roles played by ferry mobilities in the lives of residents of ferry-dependent islands and coastal communities of British Columbia, Canada, this paper focuses on three elements ... -
Performing elusive mobilities: ritualization, play, and the drama of scheduled departures
(Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011)Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in ferry-dependent islands and remote coastal communities of British Columbia, this paper examines the process of catching a ferry in time for a scheduled sailing. ... -
A Queen's Drowning: Material Culture, Drama, and the Performance of a Technological Accident
(University of California Press, 2009-08)Drawing on ethnographic data collected among residents of northwest British Columbia's coastal and island residents, I examine a technological accident: the sinking of the M/V Queen of the North. This accident is examined ... -
Toward a Technography of Everyday Life: The Methodological Legacy of James W. Carey's Ecology of Technoculture as Communication
(SAGE Publications, 2009)This article identifies Carey's contributions to the concept of technoculture and attempts to systematize his writings on communication, culture, and technology in order to craft a methodological strategy for the study of ... -
Symbolic spaces in dirty work: academic service as authentic resistance
(Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008)Drawing from in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted at an American public research university with 46 professors I analyze the meanings that faculty in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities assign to ... -
The geography of disciplinary amnesia: Eleven scholars reflect on the international state of symbolic interactionism
(Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008)Both the history and the historiography of SI show that multiple “different definitions and boundaries” have been applied to the subject of study (Atkinson & Housley, 2003, p. vii). Yet, despite the commonly agreed-upon ... -
Of Walking Shoes, Boats, Golf Carts, Bicycles, and a Slow Technoculture: A Technography of Movement and Embodied Media on Protection Island, BC
(SAGE Publications, 2008)Drawing on participant observation conducted on Protection Island, British Columbia, this article examines the significance of technologies of movement and, in particular, embodied media. It advances the argument that ... -
Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work: Sense-Making and Sensory Management
(American Sociological Association, 2008)Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call "somatic work." We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, ... -
Women and Their Clitoris: Personal Discovery, Signification, and Use
(University of California Press, 2007-05)Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women ... -
Technologies of the sky: a socio-semiotic and critical analysis of televised weather discourse
(Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2007-04)We offer a critical reading of televised weather reporting and forecasting discourse. We analyze text obtained from a US affiliate station of The Weather Channel over three days when a winter front advanced through the ... -
Social Semiotics and Fieldwork: Method and Analytics
(SAGE Publications, 2007-01)Drawing from recent analytical developments in semiotics and postmodern ethnography, this article exposes and assesses the combination of social semiotics and fieldwork as a form of qualitative inquiry. Approaches to ... -
Island Time: The Media Logic and Ritual of Ferry Commuting on Gabriola Island, BC
(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2007)Gabriola Island, British Columbia, this article analyzes the meanings associated with the movement of the MV Quinsam—the primary means of transportation onto and off the island—and with the ritual of ferry commuting. By ... -
Dead Poets' Society: Teaching, Publish-or-Perish, and Professors' Experiences of Authenticity
(University of California Press, 2006-05)Within social psychology, the concept of authenticity of the self has traditionally suffered from lack of definitional clarity. In this article, after conceptualizing authenticity as the phenomenological emotional experience ... -
Symbolic Interaction as Music: The Esthetic Constitution of Meaning, Self, and Society
(University of California Press, 2006-02)Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another ... -
Body-Ekstasis: Socio-Semiotic Reflections on Surpassing the Dualism of Body-Image
(Ashgate, 2006)The body and experiences of embodiment have generated a rich and diverse sociological literature. This volume articulates and illustrates one major approach to the sociology of the body: symbolic interactionism, an ... -
Home/Self/Ecology/Politics
(SAGE Publications, 2006)Building on Deleuzian philosophy, deep ecology, Carol Ronai's model of the layered text, andWendell Berry's post-9/11 writings, the author recollects his story of ourWest and reflects on the meanings of home for the self ... -
The Changing Meanings of Authenticity: An Interpretive Biography of Professors’ Work Experiences
(Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2006)This paper contributes to the symbolic interactionist literature on authenticity and the self by drawing from ethnographic research conducted with 46 faculty members at an American public research university. I offer an ... -
Nonrepresentational Theory and Symbolic Interactionism: Shared Perspectives and Missed Articulations
(University of California Press, 2004-08)Nigel Thrift’s Non-RepresentationalTheory is the latest—and more coherently and thoroughly formed—of his recent attempts to develop the ontological foundations and the practical agenda of an interdisciplinary theoretical ...