About Me
I am a social scientist interested in how individuals and groups navigate conflict between divergent agendas. I received my PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2026 and am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ripon College, a liberal arts school in Wisconsin. My research agenda follows three broad tracks. The first examines prolonged conflict within organizations; the second investigates negotiation practices; and the third probes how people overcome miscommunications and establish positive relationships.
Exemplifying the first strand of my research agenda, my dissertation asked how elite incumbents within
organizations that are targeted by social movements negotiate with activists, focusing on how this plays
out in the domain of a large and highly influential religious denomination. Drawing on material from six
archives and 78 qualitative interviews, I closely examine the International Mission Board (IMB), which is
the Southern Baptist Convention’s main agency for international evangelism. I trace how IMB leaders
adapted to pressure from conservative activists in the 1980s and outline the long-term impact of this
pressure on the organization’s structure. Although Southern Baptists are often used to exemplify
American evangelicals’ rightward political trajectory, my study reveals the surprisingly limited impact of
the movement’s pressure tactics. The first chapter, published at Social Currents, asks why conservative activists had difficulty implementing policy objectives despite broad access to organizational decision-making
processes. By closely examining the performance of the movement’s representatives, I demonstrate that information asymmetries and closed deliberative structures curtailed the conservatives’ impact. Additional papers drawing on my dissertation research have been published in Church History and Review of Religious Research and I am currently developing my dissertation into a book examining how pressures to work undercover impact the everyday experiences of evangelical missionaries around the world.
The second track of my research employs conversation analysis—a method that uses recordings of naturally occurring interaction to ground the interpretation of actions in their sequential contexts—to identify interactional practices involved in facilitating negotiation or managing conflict in dyadic and small group contexts. This work has been published in various outlets, including Social Psychology Quarterly, The Sociological Quarterly and Discourse Studies. Combining my interest in religion with a micro-analysis of situated social influence, my article, “Biblical Authority in Interaction” (published in Journal of Pragmatics), received best student paper awards from the ASA Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
The final track of my research looks deeper into the mechanics of everyday communication to investigate
the principles that underlie mutual understanding. A first paper, published in Social Forces, examined
how ambiguous actions emerge and are managed in everyday encounters. Focusing on situations in which
intersubjectivity breaks down, the paper isolates common elements to develop a theory of how mutual
understanding is achieved at the micro-level. A newly published paper in Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour extends this line of inquiry by examining tacit moral expectations that inflect how we
understand one another. Finally, I am currently collaborating with a team of researchers using video
recorded data of conversations between strangers to study how individuals forge connections across
differences in race, class, education level, and political background.
My next major project unites my expertise in social interaction with my interest in organizational dynamics and persuasion to examine how lawyers’ discursive strategies shape outcomes in cases before state supreme courts. As last resort for state appeals, these forums exert a significant impact on jurisprudence. Video recordings of oral arguments facilitate conversation analysis of how litigants construct their positions on a moment-by-moment basis in a high-stakes environment. Answering recent calls for more attention to state and local governance, this study extends my research on persuasive talk to an institutional environment while providing new insights into the health of an understudied component of the democratic system.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Giovanni Rossi, Tanya Stivers, and Andrew Chalfoun. 2026. “When Requests Are Unarticulated: Accountability and Social Action Ascription.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 59(1):65-84. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2026.2624345
Andrew Chalfoun. 2026. “Differentiating Regulative and Constitutive Normativity: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel, and the Sticky Problem of Meaning.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 56(1): e70033. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.70033
Andrew Chalfoun, Giovanni Rossi, and Tanya Stivers. 2025. “Incurable Optimism about Getting What We Want: Anticipating Success in Everyday Requests.” The Sociological Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2025.2568214
Andrew Chalfoun. 2025. "Picking Winners? Candidate Selection and Representatives’ Performance in the Southern Baptist Conservative Movement." Social Currents 12(3):251-268.
https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965251322870
Andrew Chalfoun, Giovanni Rossi, and Tanya Stivers. 2025. “The Magic Word? Face-Work and the Functions of ‘Please’ in Everyday Requests.” Social Psychology Quarterly (88)1:66-84.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725241245141
Andrew Chalfoun. 2025. “Shifting Responsibility onto Coparticipants: Disaffiliative Accounts in Request Sequences.” Discourse Studies 27(1):64-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241252950
Tanya Stivers, Andrew Chalfoun, and Giovanni Rossi. 2024. “To Err is Human but to Persist is Diabolical: Toward a Theory of Interactional Policing.” Frontiers in Sociology 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1369776
Andrew Chalfoun. 2023. “When God Calls: Temporality in Southern Baptist Calls to Missions.” Review of Religious Research 65(2):213-235. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034673X231186329
Andrew Chalfoun. 2023. “Biblical Authority in Interaction: How Do Evangelicals Use the Bible?” Journal of Pragmatics 208:19-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.02.010
Tanya Stivers, Giovanni Rossi, and Andrew Chalfoun. 2023. “Ambiguities in Action Ascription.” Social Forces 101(3):1552-1579, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac021
Other Writing
Andrew Chalfoun. 2026. Review of Christianity and Politics in Tribal India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism by G. Kanato Chophy. Reading Religion.
https://readingreligion.org/9781438485812/christianity-and-politics-in-tribal-india/
Chang, Gordon, J.R. Osborn, Chalfoun, Andrew, Tad Skotnicki, and Aminda M. Smith. 2025. “Review Symposium: Interactionism Meets Historical Analysis: An Author-Critic Dialogue on ‘Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times.’” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 26(3). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-26.3.4480
Andrew Chalfoun and SLNC Government and Heritage Library. 2025. Revision of “Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary” (original by Glenn Jonas, 2006). NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/southeastern-baptist-theological-se
Andrew Chalfoun. 2024. Review of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum. Reading Religion. https://readingreligion.org/9780674976771/heathen/
Andrew Chalfoun. 2024. Review of Baptizing Burma by Alexandra Kaloyanides. Reading Religion. https://readingreligion.org/9780231199858/baptizing-burma/
Andrew Chalfoun. 2024. “Jerry Rankin.” The Mississippi Encyclopedia Online. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/rankin-jerry/