Dr Rod Watson

I participate in research networks in France, Belgium, Switzerland, South America, North America, Japan, the Russian Federation and elsewhere, and have published in many of these countries. I am on the editorial board of several journals.

My specialist interests fall within the conceptual and empirical analysis of social orders as local productions. Substantive areas of analysis include: the local organisation of urban public space; oral and textual features of the production of murder interrogations; the shaping of advice in telephoned communications of personal problems and of suicidal intent; the use and transmission of skills in mountain and forest driving; orally and visually-based activities in human-computer interaction (H-CI) and computer-assisted collaborative work (CSCW) and at workplaces: the social structure of trust as a local phenomenon, a ‘situated scheme of practical reasoning’.

Conceptually, these analyses are founded upon the application to sociology of the philosophies of L. Wittgenstein, G. Ryle, J.L. Austin, P. Winch and A.R. Louch. These furnish an anti-Cartesian, anti-mentalist cast to the research. In terms of sociological approaches, the research expresses the standpoint of an Ethnomethodology, analytically respecified to be responsive to the above philosophies and also expresses, rather more adventitiously, some themes in early and contemporary Conversation Analysis including sequential and categorical analysis and ‘institutional talk’. In these respects, the analysis takes a ‘linguistic turn’, broadly conceived. Some of this research takes an ethnographic approach, but all of it involvers various uses of audio- or video- recorded data and detailed transcriptions thereof. My research has been surveyed and discussed by M.T. Wowk and A.P. Carlin in their article ‘Delineating a Liminal Position in Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis: the work of Rod Watson’, in Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Human Sciences Vol. 27 pp. 69-89 (2004).

I teach the following undergraduate modules:

At level 2:

• SOCY20942: Identities in Social Interaction
• SOCY20951: Interaction & Social Order

At level 3:

• SOCY30412: Conversation Analysis
• SOCY30841: Ethnomethodology

Publications Database

Co-editor: Theory, Culture and Society (2007) issue on ‘The debate over cognitivism’, Vol. 24, September, see also editor’s introduction.

‘The visibility arrangements of urban public space: conceptual resources and methodological issues in analysing pedestrian movements’, in Communication and Cognition Vol.38, issues 3, 4 July 2005.

‘The anthropology of communication: Foundations, futures and the analysis of ‘constructions’ of space’, in T. Lask (ed) Constructions Sociales de l’Espace; Les territories de l’Anthropologie de la Communication Liege Belgium: Presses Universitaire de Liege, pp. 193-204.

‘Tacit knowledge’, an entry in M. Featherstone et al (eds) (2006)n Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 23, issues 2, 3 , March-May, special issue: Problematising Global Knowledge pp.208-210.

‘La Confiance Comme Phenomene Pour la Sociologie’, in A. Ogien and L. Quere (eds) (2006) Les Moments de la Confiance Paris: Economica Publishers, pp. 143-168.

‘Comparative Sociology: The case of conversation analysis’, forthcoming (2007) in Cahiers de Problematique University of Montpellier, France.