Retande, berättelser och kategoriseringar: Om vänskap och kärlek i barns relationsprat

Abstract in English

This thesis focuses on how middle school children organize peer group relationships through various forms of so-called relational talk (Evaldsson, 2007), while they also negotiate and more generally make sense of friendships and romantic relationships. Prior micro-sociological research has demonstrated how children in everyday language practices through, for example, teasing, assessments, and storytelling—articulate and manage social relationships and behaviors, moral views, and shared cultural knowledge, thereby constructing their emerging social worlds (see Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011, for an overview). Several ethnographic studies have also shown how children in everyday peer group interactions construct gendered cultures, encompassing gender hierarchies and heteronormative ordering, while managing social relationships (Renold, 2005). This study is a continued exploration into these areas, building on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observations, video recordings, and focus group interviews with friendship groups among children in two fifth grade classes in a Swedish school setting. The analysis draws on an ethnomethodological multimodal interactional approach to talk-in- interaction (Goodwin, 1990), combined with membership categorization work (Stokoe, 2010) and ethnographic knowledge of the local culture (Evaldsson, 2021; Goodwin, 2014).The analysis shows that humor-oriented language practices, such as teasing and joking, function as a resource for children to address potentially sensitive and/or embarrassing aspects of social relationships, where humor and collective laughter work as a de-dramatizing resource while building local peer group relationships (cf. Eder, 1991). Moreover, the results show that children’s way of articulating and making sense of their views on friendship and romance through storytelling, assessments, and jocular play is related to a moral dimension, as they index and negotiate (un)acceptable behaviors. This dimension becomes visible through their invocation and management of membership categorizations, person descriptions, and evaluative comments in their local identity work. Simultaneously, the analysis demonstrates how ethnographic knowledge of children’s social life is central in understanding how wider social dynamics become part of the local peer cultures of preteen children (Evaldsson, 2005a; Goodwin, 2011), especially regarding how the negotiation of local categories and their embedded meanings is related to wider social categorizations of gender, social class, and age. Overall, this thesis demonstrates how children as social actors use a variety of interactional resources (i.e., talk, laughter, loud voices, facial expressions, smiles, and gestures) to organize local peer group relationships, while collectively staging, negotiating, and making sense of both romance and friendship.