Garfinkel, Harold (1917—2011) American sociologist. His work is interested in the problem of how ‘we’ accomplish mutual intelligibility through cooperative processes in our day-to-day social interactions. Garfinkel’s thesis was that the capacity to speak does not by itself explain how communication takes place. One can see what he means by this by travelling in a country where one does not speak the local language---what is striking is the degree to which one can still communicate by means of cooperative processes, whereby people teach each other how to understand what they are saying, often by resorting to hand gestures and pictures. Garfinkel called his approach to the study of human interaction ethnomethodology. It is a somewhat confusing term because it does not name a specific method that analysts should use, but rather refers to the fact that Garfinkel’s analytic interest is in the methods people use in particular situations to communicate, and more importantly to ‘fit in’ with society. Garfinkel famously conducted what he called ‘breach experiments’ as a means of better understanding what it is people do---the aim of these experiments is to do something socially unexpected in a given setting and see if that can reveal the usually unspoken rules about what one ought to do. For example, he asked his students to take a watermelon to the dry-cleaner’s and see what happened when they tried to arrange for it to be dry-cleaned. His most well-known work, and for a long time his only book, is Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). It contains several groundbreaking essays, of which two have become particularly important. The first deals with the way juries decide verdicts; the second has to do with the processes transgender people go through in order to become a different gender.