Our guest is Eric Laurier, Institute of Geography & the Lived Environment, Edinburgh University (whose own blog has the unimprovable title Ordinary Life As It Happens). Here he gives us a capsule account of the EM/CA culture wars in the social sciences as they’ve played out in Human Geography.
Eric Laurier, University of Edinburgh
On joining the company of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, you are told war stories of the early history of incomprehension, misunderstanding and antipathy it met from prominent figures in Sociology. The Purdue Symposium in Ethnomethodology from 1968 provides a transcript of one of the skirmishes that illustrates very nicely all of these qualities. In other disciplines there are other histories that have lead to other sorts of relationships.
Research on Language and Social Interaction - Blog 