[Xmca-l] Chuck Goodwin - RIP

[mike cole]

A valued colleague and friend from whom many of us learned a lot and are
still
learning.

mike
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Charles Goodwin
May 7, 2018

*Charles (Chuck) Goodwin* died on March 31, 2018, in Los Angeles, the city
where he was born on October 9, 1943, and where he returned in 1996 when he
was hired at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department
of Applied Linguistics.  In 2017 he retired as Distinguished Professor of
Communication.

>From an early age Goodwin showed an aptitude and passion for photography, a
medium that he later combined with video and computer technology to capture
and represent the unfolding semiotics of talk, gestures, and tool-use.
After graduating from Holy Cross, where he studied English literature, and
a year spent at the New York University School of Law, Goodwin went to the
Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. There,
he was exposed to cybernetics by his advisor, Klaus Krippendorff, and to
the study of face-to-face communication through his job as a research
associate and filmmaker in the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic where
Gregory Bateson’s “systems theory” was being applied to family therapy.
During this time Goodwin also met his future wife Marjorie (Candy) Harness,
whose advisor was Erving Goffman, and he began to attend the latter’s
courses, which were also attended by Gail Jefferson and William Labov.

In 1976, Chuck and Candy Goodwin joined the department of anthropology at
the University of South Carolina. Candy was completing her dissertation on
Black children’s verbal virtuosity and argumentation, which debunked
popular stereotypes of the difference between boys and girls’ speaking
styles.  The turn-by-turn analysis made possible by her data played a
crucial role in the Goodwins embracing conversation analysis, which Chuck
revolutionized by demonstrating the importance of visual access to the
interactive construction of speakers’ turns and utterances in his 1977
dissertation.

Chuck Goodwin was an extraordinarily prolific scholar, whose many
publications include his 1994 article “Professional Vision,” the most cited
article published to date in the *American Anthropologist*. Goodwin’s
international fame as an original scholar and gifted lecturer was evidenced
by countless invitations to be a plenary speaker at conferences around the
world and by two degrees of doctor of philosophy honoris causa from
Linköping University and Aalbord University.

His remarkable 2018 book *Co-operative Action*
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cooperative-action/409E1455713D43131F04C3F6B6815FF7>
 brings together a lifetime body of research and provides an empirically
informed theory on human interaction as the systematic, creative reuse of
what was just performed by other co-participants.

One of the universally recognized qualities of Goodwin’s character as a
scholar was his openness to other people’s ideas and research interests.
His world-renowned weekly “lab” welcomed graduate students, colleagues from
a variety of departments, and a steady flow of international visitors who
were eager to submit their audio-visual data to Goodwin’s “professional
vision.”

On March 20, Chuck Goodwin received the news that he was the winner of the
2018 Garfinkel-Sacks Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American
Sociological Association, a well-deserved recognition of his exceptional
contributions to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, two of the
many fields impacted by his creative genius. (*Alessandro Duranti*)

Cite as: Duranti, Alessandro. 2018. “Charles Goodwin.” *Anthropology
News*website,
May 7, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.849




-- 
A man's mind-what there is of it- has always the advantage of being
masculine, - as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most
soaring palm, - and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.
---George Eliot