Dear Professors and Students,

We are most pleased to invite all to attend the following Seminar by UM Distinguished Visiting Scholar Professor Robin James Smith, Professor of Sociology, Cardiff University and The University of the Witwatersrand, on “Context, Contexture, and Congregational Gestalts”, on Friday, 2:00pm, in room E21a-3118.

BIO

Robin James Smith is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, and Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has studied mobile interaction in public space, urban outreach work with rough sleepers, the work of mountain rescue, and policing practice. These projects connect through an interest in mobility, space, and perception, with a particular focus upon members’ categorisational practices. He has published extensively from these studies in a range of leading international journals and had edited several books including On Sacks (Routledge), The Lost Ethnographies (Emerald Publishing) and Leaving the Field (Manchester University Press).

ABSTRACT

Context, Contexture, and Congregational Gestalts

In this paper, I explore and extend the recent resurgence of an ethnomethodological attention to praxeological Gestalts. Specifically, I attend to the production and maintenance of the cohered contexture of a work site – namely, a mountain rescue training scenario. By analysing video data recorded during a “live exercise” of a casualty extraction, I attend to the ways in which sequential-categorial-relevancies are accomplished and oriented to in the organisation of the work of caring for the casualty. The case provides a nice demonstration of the work of maintaining a simulated Gestalt in which the medical care is getting done, its disruption when the simulated ‘frame’ is disrupted, and, most significantly, a sustained and continued production of the worksite as a worksite for the doing of mountain rescue. Through the analysis, I aim to remedy Watson’s (2015) complaint that worksite studies have, strangely, seldom attended to categorisation practices and their situated significances. Methodologically, the paper is an argument against fragmentary, individualistic, treatments of social order and for a unitary analysis of complex scenes and settings.

IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE