Book Talk with E. Summerson Carr - “Working The Difference” And Scott MacLochlainn - “The Copy Generic”
Join E. Summerson Carr and Scott MacLochlainn for a Book Talk where they will discuss their books Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing and The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds.
Presented in partnership with the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology.
A Q&A and signing will follow their discussion.
About Working the Difference: Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference, E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms–and particularly forms of expertise–emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.
About E. Summerson Carr: E. Summerson Carr is Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is author of Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (Princeton, 2011) and co-editor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (California, 2016). She works between cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology to study how ideas, logics, norms and values are authorized, enacted, institutionalized, and scaled as expertise. Her most recent research tracks the contributions and conundrums of full-time canine workers in U.S. human service organizations.
About The Copy Generic: From off-brand products to elevator music, the "generic" is discarded as the copy, the knockoff, and the old. In The Copy Generic, anthropologist Scott MacLochlainn insists that more than the waste from the culture machine, the generic is a universal social tool, allowing us to move through the world with necessary blueprints, templates, and frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that orders and values different types of specificity yet remains inherently nonspecific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both overproduced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals how the concept of the generic is crucial to understanding how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world.
About Scott MacLochlainn: Scott MacLochlainn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2022) was a winner of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s New Voices Book Prize. His research focuses on the ethical contestations emergent from the circulation of new language, media, and legal formations in the Philippines, as well as in the United States and Ireland.
If you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.