Pog game practices, learning and ideology : Local markets and identity work.

• The present study draws on ethnographic work in an after-school centre for 6 to 8 year-old children, focusing on visual culture and its role in children-s everyday interaction and informal learning. In Sweden, collector games of visual artefacts, such as Pokemon cards, have recently been banned in many schools and pre-schools. The present children-s play and conversations were video recorded in relation to pog game practices involving negotiations, trade and actual play with pog disks, that is, a set of small round disks, featuring geometric patterns, comic strip characters, fantasy motifs or other motifs from commercial culture for children. By analysing actual play practices, we hope to move beyond moral panics around commercial childhood culture, on the one hand, and romantic idealisation of modern childhood, on the other. The analyses primarily concern informal learning in the children-s negotiations about the symbolic and economic value of individual pogs, a type of informal mathematics or symbolic calculus in a local field of symbolic power. Much as in the game of marbles, a substantial part of children-s playing time was devoted to metacommunication on the game, more specifically to play presequences or other play commentaries, rather than to the playing as such. The children engaged in extensive negotiations about local value hierarchies, for instance, how many pogs of type-x that would match one pog of type-y. Such value hierarchies were invoked both in economic trade negotiations, and in conversations on the aesthetic qualities of distinct pogs. These negotiations had a bearing both on access rituals in children-s play and in the subject positioning of the players and co-players. Moreover, the give and take of these game practices played a role in the formation of notions of equal rights and democratic values. Ultimately, pog game practices formed a symbolic arena for the display and negotiations of local identities.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

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INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AREAS

TVÄRVETENSKAPLIGA FORSKNINGSOMRÅDEN

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