LISO Seminar Series (Winter 2025)

Coordinator: Geoff Raymond (Sociology)

Time: 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm (PT)

Venue: Education Building 1205; Zoom (click here to join)

January 17, 2025 (hybrid)

Jason Turowetz (Sociology, UCSB)

"Disorder or difference? How clinician-patient interaction shapes the meaning of autism diagnosis"

An autism diagnosis frequently marks a major turning point in the lives of children and their families. While there is now a substantial literature on the risk factors for autism and its correlates at the population level, little is known about how the diagnosis is applied in practice, or how its meaning is negotiated by diagnosticians and recipients. In this talk, I build on scholarship in the sociology of diagnosis and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology to explicate the diagnostic process as it unfolds in real time. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of clinicians delivering diagnostic news to children and families at a clinic for developmental disabilities, I show how the meaning and implications of an autism diagnosis are jointly achieved in interaction by clinicians, families, and sometimes children. Furthermore, I show that clinicians alternately describe autism as a deficit in need of remediation or as a neurodiverse identity with unique strengths as well as challenges, and that this varies based on the child’s age: with younger children, autism is uniformly treated as deficit, whereas with older children, it is sometimes treated as a valuable social-cognitive difference. Among other things, this finding complicates neat dichotomies which position clinicians as mouthpieces for a strictly biomedical model of disease and disability. At the same time, it opens up new possibilities for building on practices that clinicians already engage in – at least to a limited degree – to promote an approach to diagnosis that centers difference rather than deficit.

January 31, 2025 (hybird)

Federico Rossano (Cognitive Science, UCSD)

"What can we learn from dogs pushing buttons with humans?"

In the 20th century, several scholars believed that training animals to learn and use human symbols would provide an unprecedented window into their minds and how human linguistic abilities evolved.  In this talk I report on how we have addressed some of the methodological concerns associated with previous Animal Language studies in an ongoing study with thousands of dogs from 47 countries. These animals are trained with an augmented interspecies communication (AIC) device composed of buttons that, when pressed, reproduce prerecorded human words or phrases. I will report on how we have built the largest citizen science study on animal communication ever and our preliminary results from our longitudinal observational and experimental studies. I will discuss how dogs are using these devices in social interaction with humans and the degree to which they combine multiple buttons for more complex meanings. While conducting this study we have also gained unprecedented access to how people interact with their pets at home. I will highlight the potential of this citizen science approach for research on communication, human-pet bonds, and global health. 

February 21, 2025 (hybrid)

Liz Munday (Sociology, UCSB)

Title TBD

February 28, 2025 (hybrid)

Jessica Gilooly (Sociology & Criminal Justice, Suffolk University)

"The 911 Call-Taker’s Challenge: Sending the Right First Responder"

Alternatives to police response to 911 calls have emerged as the leading public safety reform strategy in recent years. The success of alternative response models hinges on the ability of 911 call-takers and dispatchers to identify when sending behavioral health professionals, medics, and peers with lived experience is appropriate. This article brings to light how dispatch organizations have tried to routinize those decisions using rule-based protocols. Drawing on dozens of interviews and hours of observations with 911 workers in San Francisco and Denver, we argue that the implementation of alternative response has suffered because these forms of guidance frequently fail to resolve uncertainty and ambiguity in the proper response to 911 calls. In these moments, we find that call-takers and dispatchers either develop workarounds to justify sending an alternative to police response when their protocols would advise otherwise, or they retreat into old habits and send the police when doing so is unnecessary. Such variation in call processing raises serious equity concerns, and hinders the utility of alternative response. Our findings expand theoretical and practical understandings of rule-bound forms of guidance inside organizations and point to ways to better cultivate the exercise of sound judgments based on experience among front-line workers. 

March 7, 2025 (hybrid)

Cooper Bedin (Linguistics, UCSB)

Title TBD

LISO Data Sessions (Winter 2025)

Coordinator: Marat Zheng (Sociology)

Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm (PT)

Venue: SSMS 3410 (Human Observatory); Zoom (click here to join)

Note: Click here to sign up for a session, and for some FAQs - if you are a first-time presenter/attendee!

January 10, 2025 (hybrid)

Unmotivated observations on [Chinese Dinner].

January 17, 2025 (hybrid)

Unmotivated observations on [Chinese Dinner] (cont.).

January 24, 2025 (hybrid)

Liz Munday (Sociology, UCSB)

This session examines extracts from debriefing interviews with individuals who participated in a research experiment on decision-making. My analysis focuses on how participants account for decisions based on race-, gender-, or other category-based stereotypes, framing their apparent biases as automatic, externally influenced, or involuntary, often invoking implicit bias as a self-presentational resource. These findings highlight the alignment of participants’ practices with those of academic and professional anti-bias contexts. Today, I briefly revisit 3 extracts and extend the analysis to an additional 3 for comparative insights.

January 31, 2025 (hybrid)

Paddy Lehleiter (Linguistics, Free University Berlin)

Interactional construction of a lesbian date as non-normative and negotiation of category-tied activities at the boundary between friendship and romantic partnership.

Presenter’s note: The excerpt is audio only, since I took it from TalkBank. It is a sequence where someone tells someone about an acquaintance she saw - what she will construct as - a lesbian date. There is a lot to say about the construction of gender and sexuality categories in this sequence and I’d love to hear your thoughts! :)

February 7, 2025 (hybrid)

Marat Zheng (Sociology, UCSB)

A telephone call between a foreign resident and a local government official during the Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai in 2022.

February 14, 2025 (Zoom only)

Jeffery Aguinaldo (Sociology, Wiflrid Laurier University)

Telephone calls with people living with HIV; two instances of HIV disclosures.

February 21, 2025 (Zoom only)

J Sterphone (Sociology, Wheaton College (MA))

A collection of nonconforming responses to questions asked of witnesses in court trials.

February 28, 2025

NO SESSION PLANNED!

March 7, 2025

Alejandro Anaya Ramírez (Linguistics, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos)

A spontaneous conversation between members of a ballroom house in Puebla, Mexico.

March 14, 2025

Available for sign-up.