School of Social and Political Science

Description

Each year, Sociology invites a scholar of high international reputation to give the Erving Goffman Memorial Lecture. The aim of this lecture is to honour and continue the intellectual legacy of Erving Goffman by deepening our understanding of human behaviour and interactions. Erving Goffman Memorial Lectures

Professor Susie Scott (University of Sussex, UK):

Many of us are familiar with Goffman’s approach to studying performative interaction: the things that people do, say, display or present to make convincing identity claims. However, he also has plenty to teach us about negational forms of action, which involve hiding, misleading, masking or disguising more troublesome aspects of self. From his theoretical models of dramaturgical dynamics to his empirical studies of stigma and total institutions, Goffman shows us how actors strategically manage and present their non-selves through encounters in everyday life. 

Drawing on my own research on the sociology of nothing, I illustrate this with an analysis of personal life-stories, in which participants recount experiences of absence, loss and yearning towards non-existent things. These include missing people, surrendered roles, lost opportunities and impossible futures. In both the negotiation of these situated acts and the narrated accounts of their meaning, actors navigate cultural scripts and normative rules of behaviour. Doing nothing is therefore an agentic and meaningful process of performing reverse biographical identity work.