Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how boys use jocular play to perform romantic relationships in their peer culture and construction of masculinities. The analysis combines an ethnomethodological approach to doing gender with poststructuralist-influenced studies on masculinity and boyhood. We demonstrate how the boys - through game-playing, teasing, humorous narration, and ritual insults - do gender while they explore potentially embarrassing romantic experiences. The boys police and produce acceptable heterosexual masculinities while having fun and doing friendship, demonstrating the dynamic and entertaining potentials of performing romantic relationships in jocular peer play.

This study explores how preteen children in everyday interaction mobilize relationship categories to negotiate what counts as appropriate romantic feelings among peers. The analysis draws on ethnomethodological work on membership categorization and conversation analysis, integrated with ethnographic knowledge of children’s social life. Particular attention is on how children make claims of and resist membership in a particular relationship category (that of boyfriend- girlfriend). The sequential analysis shows how category-based claims of ‘liking someone’ and ‘being together,’ indexing a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, are responded to with resistance and denials. Categorical claims are also turned into public performances of relational pairing invoking the normative character of romantic matchmaking. The findings suggest that norms of feelings play a central role in preteen children’s emotional behavior, and serve as important cultural resources for children to address their emergent concerns regarding peer group relationships.

In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, i.e., situations for participation in various communicative practices can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here of a majority language). The analysis draws on a language socialization approach to examine the micro-level contexts of an immigrant child’s preschool interactions with peers and teachers and the interplay between these and macro-level language and educational policies. It was found that the focal girl mainly participated in unstructured peer play due to the preschool educational and language policy. The girl’s limited Swedish (simple nouns, verbs, formulaic expressions) served as a resource for collusive peer language play (negatively keyed recyclings, mimicking, nonsensical words) portraying her language as incomprehensible. In interaction with teachers the child’s nonverbal acts were interpreted into verbal forms (repeating and expanding conversational, lexical and grammatical contributions). The fact that the girl did not align with the teacher’s conversational contributions created a negative affectively valorized language-learning ecology. Our study demonstrates how educational and language policies as they are managed on the micro-interactional level in everyday preschool activities may cast children’s peer group as the main language socialization agent for beginners.

This paper focuses on children’s language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby “talking into being” language and educational ideologies. The present study is based on multi-sited ethnography in two multiethnic educational settings where classroom activities are primarily in Swedish. Theoretically, it draws on sequential identity-related approaches to language alternation practices (Gafaranga, 2001). As demonstrated, children both draw on a range of linguistic varieties, and refrained from involving in poly-lingual practices. In so doing, they were actively engaged in producing and resisting a range of locally valued identities (i.e. monolingual, bilingual, poly-lingual student). Simultaneously a monolingual norm was brought into being, and, importantly, the children appropriated and exploited the monolingual norms-in being for organizing their social relations. Overall the study highlights the links between social and linguistic identities, language choice, and language and educational ideologies. We argue that an understanding of children’s poly-lingual practices in multilingual settings is provided by a close analysis of the local processes of identity work located within the wider socio-cultural context (e.g., language and educational ideologies).Key words: language alternation, linguistic and social identity, monolingual norm, multilingual classes, poly-lingual practices, multi-sited ethnography, Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)

This study examines how young immigrant children in multilingual playful activities with peers and adults engage with and explore heritage language forms (e.g., their features, social values and pragmatic uses), as well as transgress boundaries between different language varieties. It is argued that such ludic language practices located and enacted within micro-interactional processes in turn link to and contribute to macro-level socio-cultural values and tensions of languages. The selected data constitute a case study based on a video-ethnography of multilingual language practices in a preschool (for 3- to 6-year-olds) with a Swedish monolingual policy. It is found that the children's multilingual play involve the exploitation of heritage language and linguistic incongruities: it takes the shape of exaggerated repetitions, transformations of language forms (phonetic, morphological and syntactic features), various keying resources, i.e., affective (serious or ludic) and metalinguistic stances. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account young immigrant children's agency in creating new spaces (e.g., ludic or instructional activities) for heritage language forms and varieties as they are used for entertaining, rather than educational purposes. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This special issue furthers a view in which affective stances are seen as indexical of culturally specific structures of feeling and norms concerning what counts as appropriate conduct in particular settings. The link between affect and everyday morality in the development and negotiations of moral personhood, identities and character work is demonstrated in the empirical studies that examine how affective stances are mobilized by drawing social boundaries, and by criticizing or sanctioning what counts as morally appropriate behaviors in adult-child socializing encounters embedded in time and space. The contributions highlight how socialization into particular forms of moral orders engages issues of affect, and how socialization into affect is permeated with moral work. The special issue draws on two major theoretical perspectives: the interactional perspective involving multimodal interaction analysis and the linguistic anthropologic view on language socialization that considers language use and cultural re-production to be interrelated. The socializing potentials of adult-child interactions, particularly in episodes involving the handling of normative transgressions and practices revolving around moral issues (conflicts, disciplining, non-compliance, negative affect and regulation of emotions), provide a fruitful site for uncovering otherwise rarely articulated normative socio-cultural assumptions of how to perform actions, display knowledge, express emotions and maintain relationships.

Collaboration is an important aspect of social activity associated with young children’s digital gameplay. Children organise their participation as they communicate with and support one another, through sharing knowledge and problem-solving strategies, displaying their expertise, encouraging others and creatively exploring possibilities for collaborative game moves. Drawing on a social interactional perspective, we explore the situated and embodied practices of the young players aged 3–8 years. We present three video ethnographic case studies of young children’s everyday peer interactions from three different settings and age groups: Australia (home), Norway (pre-school) and Sweden (afterschool). Across these settings, the findings identify how children collaborate with one another to progress the game by using multiple strategies, including instructing each other, monitoring each other’s actions and problem solving. In the process, collaborative peer culture was maintained and built as the players worked towards problem solutions that require taking each other’s perspectives, and sharing digital devices and skills. This focus on children’s situated language use and assemblage of multimodal resources shows their moment-by-moment collaborative action. These multimodal interactions create opportunities for peer and sibling learning without the presence of an adult. The collaborative activity was a strategic resource used by the children in their digital game playing. In capturing young children’s own strategies, we highlight their agency in learning occurring through social interaction and gameplay.

In this article, I explore how preadolescent girls, with low-income and multiethnic backgrounds, negotiate social and moral norms of conduct and accomplish the local social organization of the group over time. The girls were audio recorded as part of fieldwork in an elementary school in Sweden. The analysis combines conversation analytic examination of talk-in-interaction and ethnomethodological concerns for members' understanding of social categories. As demonstrated, the girls deploy diverse forms of collaborative judgmental work (complaints, accounts, membership categorization work, etc.) to describe coparticipants as good versus bad friends. Resistance (denials, justifications, recycling, substitutions, counteraccusations) to category ascriptions solidified negative category membership (of a bad friend) and eventually cast a girl as friendless. The detailed analysis demonstrates that the girls provide their own rendering of the seemingly neutral (and romanticized) activity of relational talk, thereby transforming it into an activity for indexing inappropriate behaviors, strengthening social relations of power, and justifying social exclusion.

This chapter presents ethnographic research on preadolescent girls’ and boys’ peer language practices, focusing on the emergent and changing nature of stance and social identities (gender, class, age, race, ethnicity), and how affective alignments and positions come into being and are negotiated in interaction. The research draws on recent work in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and/or ethnomethodology (EMCA) on the performative, embodied, and normative character of gender, affect, and stance. It will be shown how research on stance provides powerful means to explore how children and youth create alignments and local social hierarchies, while they produce social categories that are important in their social life.  The first part presents research on preadolescents’ creative stance taking and playful stylizations of others to affectively align into a common framework of stance, and hence build identities and social orders, that index normative forms of gender, sexuality and affect in local interactional peer contexts. The second part presents a multimodal interactional analysis of how girls and boys in two peer group settings are positioning self and others by displaying affective stances and alignments in stylized performances whereby affect, embodiment, (feminine/masculine) gender, heterosexual relations and age norms come into being, and are playfully exploited by group members for local interactional purposes.

This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as ‘difficult, disordered and disturbed’. The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educa- tional needs unit with boys diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Drawing on ethnomethodological work on members’ understanding of social categories (MCA) combined with the related methodology of ‘doing difference’, the focus is on the local social process through which boys’ unruly behaviors are made sense of and treated as the grounds for shifting categorization practices. It is found that both teachers and boys orient to the institutional categories Teacher and Student in teacher–student interactions for the ordering of the classroom . The boys’ conduct is in these instances far from pathological but is meaningful in the sense that it provides local resources to resist teacher authorithy and display agency. Overall, the analysis highlights the complexity of locally accomplished identity practices – in terms of how institutional-, gender- and age-appropriate conduct meshes with diagnostic criteria – in the social identification of boys diagnosed with ADHD.

This chapter outlines how an ethnomethodological approach to gender as locally accomplished in interaction (Benwell and Stokoe 2016; Speir and Stokoe 2011), combined with a linguistic anthropological approach to gender as mediated by stance (Ochs 1992; Goodwin and Alim 2010), makes possible a dynamic view of gender for girls. The methodological starting point is how gender is made relevant and accomplished among a group of girls in their everyday interaction and social life with peers. This involves examining recurrently occurring language practices, such as gossip disputes in which group members display ‘culture-in-action’ in relation to the accomplishment and negotiation of social and moral organization (Evaldsson and Svahn 2012, 2017; M.H. Goodwin 1990, 2006). It will be argued that girls’ gossip-dispute practices provide crucial insight for analysing how gender is co-produced in ongoing actions when concerns of identity are oriented to as morally ‘transgressive’ for one’s gender (Speer 2005: 119).

I det här kapitlet lyfter jag fram betydelsen av att närma sig barns lekar som en del av hur barn i sitt samspel med andra barn skapar unika kamratkulturer (Corsaro 2011 s. 219). Genom att fokusera på hur barn samspelar med andra barn vill jag också betona betydelsen av att utgå från barns perspektiv på lekar för att på så vis förstå vad lekar betyder för de barn som deltar, ett barnperspektiv som bland annat utvecklats av William Corsaro, en av barndomssociologins främsta företrädare. Att delta i lekar och aktiviteter med andra barn är för barn en central del av deras sociala liv. Som Brian Sutton-Smith, en av lekforskningens pionjärer, så tydligt formulerar med orden, ”Peer interaction is not a preparation for life. It is life itself’’ (1982 s. 75). Jag vill med det här kapitlet därmed också visa på den betydelse som språk och kommunikativa praktiker har för barns socialisation och lärande med andra barn samt hur barn med en hög grad av språklig kreativitet (re)konstituerar sin sociala värld i sitt ständiga lekande.

Det här kapitlet handlar om hur man kan kombinera etnografiska ansatser med videoinspelningar och samtalsanalys för att studera barns samspel i förskolan. Barns vardag i förskolan består till stor del av samspel med andra barn och med vuxna i lekar, samlingar, måltider, bokläsningsaktiviteter, utflykter, med mera. I den här formen av vardagliga aktiviteter spelar både det talade språket, rösten, kroppen och den materiella omgivningen en central roll. I kapitlet ges exempel på hur man med etnografiskt baserad samtalsanalys i form av etnometodologisk konversationsanalys (Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, EMCA) och multimodala interaktionsanalys kan utforska den sociala dynamik och kreativa potential som ryms i barns interaktion i kamratgrupper och med vuxna i pedagogiska sammanhang (se Melander & Evaldsson, 2020). Syftet är att ge en fördjupad förståelse för hur samtal, omfattande tal, gester och kroppsliga rörelser kan studeras som sociala handlingar och som en del av hur barn genom sitt deltagande i aktiviteter med andra lär sig agera i förskolans vardag.

This study examines how exclusionary acts of status degradation are performed through embodied stances and pejorative category ascriptions in the midst of a situated game activity where two boys align in mockful stances and stylized enactments towards a targeted boy. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach to stance and membership categorization combined with sociolinguistic work on indexicality and identity, it shows how the cumulative patterning of derogatory stances index a deviant gender identity for the targeted boy. While the target is repeatedly cast as ‘abnormal’ and an ‘outsider’ by attributing (non-)boyhood features as ‘incompetence’ and ‘cowardness’, the two boys’ elevate own positions and display shared commitments to themselves as ‘real (warrior) boys’.