When Erving Goffman was a Boy

Like creating a mosaic, the bits and pieces of Erving Goffman’s life yield a picture of a complex man who lived in troubled times and through his writings changed the way whole generations saw the world. Looking at that life I chose to focus on his boyhood, from childhood through adolescence. My purpose is here descriptive, an ethnography of a childhood recounting events of Goffman’s early life and placing them in their social, historical and cultural context. That done, I will have a few words to say about the themes that I see in this narrative as well as some apparent connections between events of his boyhood and subsequent events in his adult life

Having Been Goffman\u27s Student I Am Drawn to Voltaire’s Dictum, To the Living We Owe Respect, to the Dead We Owe Only the Truth

This interview with Sherri Cavan, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the San Francisco State University, was recorded over the phone on November 30, 2008. Dmitri Shalin transcribed the interview, after which Dr. Cavan edited the transcripts and gave her approval for posting the present version in the Erving Goffman Archives. Breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information and additional materials inserted during the editing process appear in square brackets. Undecipherable words and unclear passages are identified in the text as “[?]”. The interviewer’s questions are shortened in several places

Dmitri Shalin Interview with Sherri Cavan about Erving Goffman entitled Goffman’s “The Insanity of Place” as an Exercise in Self-Ethnography

Interview between Sherri Cavan and Dmitri Shali

Dmitri Shalin Interview with Sherri Cavan about Erving Goffman entitled Remembering Goffman

Letter from Dmitri Shali

‘Fourth places’: the Contemporary Public Settings for Informal Social Interaction among Strangers.

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’ (Oldenburg 1989). Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity, and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces. Keywords: ‘Fourth places’, Informal Public Social Settings, Social Interaction, Strangers, Public Space Design