1971

Abstract

In the second semester 1970–71 I was a visiting professor at York University, Toronto, teaching as one of my courses the second half of a graduate seminar in sociological theory. The first half had been taught by Professor John O’Neill who, among other things, acquainted the students with a phenomenological approach to social science. They had read Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau—Ponty, Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, Natanson’s The Journeying Seif, McHugh’s Defining the Situation,O’Neill’s own Perception, Expression, and History, and Agee’s Let Us Now Fraise Famous Men.I knew nothing eise about the students and at the first meeting tried to begin remedying this. We tape—recorded all sessions and had the tapes transcribed. I explained the presence of that machine on the table — we all have

a hunch what it is for, I suppose, but maybe not why, why I’d like not only to record but also to transcribe the seminar and have it, so everybody gets a copy. The reason is that I am very curious about what is going to happen in this group. And this is a record of it. So if each of us has a copy we can all look back to see what questions came up, how, by whom, and so on.