The Promise of Critical Interactionism

Abstract

In this paper, the author advocates recognizing, developing, and promoting “critical interactionism” as a legitimate and pragmatically useful scholarly project. The author argues that critical interactionism includes different interactionist traditions, critical approaches, methodological styles, and sensitizing concepts – as long as they tell us something about how power and inequality operate. I review two fundamental elements of this project that constitute its past and likely future: (1) theoretical interventions that excavate critical insights, diversify founders, integrate critical theories, and promote interactionism's usefulness for critical inquiry and (2) empirically grounded conceptual interventions that shed light on generic processes of inequality reproduction. Although the larger discipline of sociology continues to marginalize interactionism yet selectively adopt its principles, critical interactionism has the potential to break through what David Maines called the fault line of consciousness. The promise of critical interactionism is that it can simultaneously make interactionism more relevant to our discipline and make our discipline more relevant to the social world.

Citation

Schrock, D.P. (2024), "The Promise of Critical Interactionism", Denzin, N.K. and Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Essential Issues in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 59), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 145-164. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620240000059008