This book brings together critical social theories and microsociological approaches to reveal the critical and cultural potentials in interactionism - the chapters arguing that far from being oriented towards the status quo, interactionism in fact contains a critical and cultural edge.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the co-author of The Social Thought of Erving Goffman, the editor of Postmortal Society; Deconstructing Death; The Poetics of Crime; and Beyond Bauman: Creative Excursions and Critical Engagements, and the co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman; Encountering the Everyday; The Transformation of Modernity; Utopia: Social Theory and the Future; Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences; and Liquid Criminology.

Introduction: The Coming of Critical and Cultural Interactionisms 1. Misgivings About Goffman: Social Structure, Power and Politics in the Work of Erving Goffman 2. Upscaling Goffman: Four Principles of Neostructural Interactionism 3. A Call to a Critical Interpretive Interactionism 4. Dramaturgical Interactionism: Ideas of Self-Presentation, Impression Management and the Staging of Social Life as a Catapult For Critique 5. Critical Interactionism: A Theoretical Bridge for Understanding Complex Human Conditions 6. Pacifism, Gender and Symbolic Interactionism 7. Towards a Feminist Symbolic Interactionism 8. An Invitation to 'Radical Interactionism': Towards a Reorientation of Interactionist Sociology? 9. Symbolic Interactionism and The Frankfurt School: A Critical Appraisal 10. Situational Analysis as a Critical Interactionist Method 11. Cultural Criminology and its Incitement for Symbolic Interactionism: Transgression, Marginalisation, Resistance and Media in the Wider Context of Power and Culture of Late Modernity