Convenors
Sebastiano Citroni, University of Insubria
sebastiano.citroni@uninsubria.it (corresponding scholar)
Giovanni Pagano, University of Milano-Bicocca
g.pagano17@campus.unimib.it
How do citizens coordinate collective action, practically define shared problems and experience civic life in their everyday settings? Traditional social science accounts often approach civil society either from a macro-structural perspective, focusing on formal organizational sectors, political opportunities, and resource mobilization, or from a strategic perspective, highlighting entrepreneurial actors whose skills and decisions explain how plans are developed, goals pursued, and participants mobilized. Conversely, ethnographic research has long championed a different view, looking at civil society as a fluid, practical accomplishment shaped through situated social interaction.
This panel aims to explore the rich, evolving landscape of interactionist studies of civil society. Approaches put forward within the new cultural sociology or the pragmatic approach to civic and public life, among others, all draw on foundational insights from Erving Goffman’s analysis of social interaction. Despite their different conceptual nuances, these contemporary ethnographic approaches have developed diverse, intersecting frameworks for analyzing how actors interactionally construct, justify, and dispute collective arrangements in public life – investigating, in other words, how civic life takes shape from the ground up.
We welcome ethnographic contributions from sociology, anthropology, political studies, planning studies, and other disciplines. We encourage papers examining a wide range of settings, including social movements, volunteering, local community organizing, third-sector organizations, and participatory governance, with the goal of mapping the current vitality, internal frictions, and future trajectories of interactionist ethnographies of civil society.
Open questions
The track welcomes abstracts on addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:
- How do different interaction styles variably interpret the same political conditions? What collective action implications derive from the practices of different scene styles in different settings?
- What scene styles are practiced by civil society actors? How do they change in different cultural contexts? How do such styles relate to the other institutional conditions in which they are practiced?
- How does the practice of interaction styles matter in the shaping of social relations and alliances within and across different collective action domains and social work sectors?
- How do different contemporary cultural and pragmatic frameworks complement, overlap, or challenge each other when exploring civil society?
- How do contemporary grassroots movements practically construct and justify their claims in everyday settings? How are these constructions shaped by their everyday association-making?
- How do associations, volunteers and activists coordinate, and defend their actions, resolve disputes, and legitimize social arrangements when contesting top-down technological and industrial infrastructures (e.g., data centers, green transition projects)?
- How do contemporary feminist, queer, and transgender collectives weave everyday life, mutual care, and ordinary support routines into the fabric of their civic practices?
- How do the practices of interaction styles vary over time and space within the same cultural context? How can such variation be detailed and accounted for?
Keywords
Civil society, collective action, everyday life, cultural sociology, pragmatism, ethnography
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Urban sociology, urban anthropology, political science, social movement studies, sociology of associations, planning studies, social psychology
References
Citroni, S. (2025). The everyday life of civil society. Springer.
Boltanski, L. (2011). On critique: A sociology of emancipation (G. Elliott, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work published 2009)
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of worth (C. Porter, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1991)
Dewey, J. (2012). The public and its problems. Penn State University Press. (Original work published 1927)
Eliasoph, N., & Lichterman, P. (2003). Culture in interaction. American Journal of Sociology, 108(4), 735–794.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.
Goffman, E. (1979). Footing. Semiotica, 25 (pp. 1-29)
Lichterman, P., & Eliasoph, N. (2014). Civic action. American Journal of Sociology, 120(3), 798–863. https://doi.org/10.1086/679189
Luhtakallio, E. (2012). Practicing Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230363519
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521
Convenors’ bio
Sebastiano Citroni is an associate professor in the Department of Law, Economics and Cultures at University of Insubria, Italy. His research interests include civil society, ethnography, environmental and urban studies, social theory and politics. His last books are The Everyday Life of Civil Society (Palgrave, 2025) and L’invenzione nel terzo settore (Il Mulino, 2026).
Giovanni Pagano is an urban planner and a PhD candidate in Urban Studies in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. His work sits at the intersection of urban planning and grassroots mobilization, and he employs a qualitative ethnographic approach. Through consistently situated observations, he investigates how citizens’ committees construct claims about urban planning conditions in their everyday settings.