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- Zotevska, Emilia, 1991-
(författare)
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Exploring material things in family life : Morality and intimacy in sibling- and child-parent interaction
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines the everyday family life of 12 families across Sweden. The study aims to explore the ways in which material things figure in the enactment of everyday family life, that is, how family life is accomplished in interaction between children, parents and material things during everyday activities. The empirical material consists of 45 hours of video recordings of the families’ everyday lives and was produced mainly by the families themselves (40 hours) and the thesis author (five hours). The recordings contain the families’ interactions during everyday, routine activities, (e.g., mealtimes), including sibling interaction and conflicts. During these interactions, different aspects of everyday family life emerged as important to the participants, such as moral issues and practices of intimacy.This thesis takes an explorative approach to the study of family life by weaving together Studies in Social Interaction, including multimodal interaction analysis, Child Studies and themes in Science and Technology Studies. The methodological approach illuminates, through micro-focused analysis, how material things and children figure in the enactment of family morality and practices of intimacy in sibling- and child-parent interaction.The results show that serious negotiation and conflicts occurred continuously in siblingand child-parent interaction. In such negotiations and conflicts family morality was enacted which typically related to negotiating local family rules about in/appropriate behaviour with material things. Equally prevalent were family members’ engagements in practices of intimacy and care. Such practices were framed by affective, playful and joyful activities with each other and with material things, even when such activities went against the participants moral expectations of how the activities should be carried out. As such, this study demonstrates how material things are intertwined with, and are central in, the constitution of family morality and intimacy, in practice. This thesis contributes to discussions about how complexities of social phenomena can be explored and embraced through a focus on actors that have tended to fade into the background of research on family life, such as material things and children.
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| 2. |
- Engdahl, Ingrid, 1952-
(författare)
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Toddlers as social actors in the Swedish preschool
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis focuses on interaction among young toddlers during their second year of life in a Swedish preschool. The overall aim of this thesis was to explore interaction, communication and the creation of friendship between the young children during self initiated play activities. In addition, this thesis presents the background of Early Childhood Education in Sweden, which may serve as an extended context for the study. An ethnographic study was carried out in a toddler unit with 15 children. Six one year old girls and boys were in focus during the observations for nine months. Participatory methods, photos, fieldnotes and videorecordings, were used for the data collection. The theoretical framework for the study is built on phenomenology, the view of the child as a social person and a child oriented perspective. The overall findings support a theoretical perspective where the young toddlers are seen as social actors, with social competencies. Their play invitation strategies, as well as their play enactment and play-closing moves, were mostly found to be based on nonverbal communication such as movements, gestures, voice quality and facial expressions. The competencies of attunement, taking others’ perspectives and turn-taking were found in play among the young toddlers, and they also showed negotiating skills while playing. The findings also show how young toddlers make friends. During their second year of life, they monitor and pay attention to individual peers, displaying intentionality and agency by spontaneously greeting their peers, by offering play invitations, and by helping peers. Mutual awareness, joint attention, shared smiles, coordinated movements, as well as other types of synchronized actions are seen as parts of nonverbal elements in emerging friendship. The findings in this thesis support an understanding of young toddlers as social persons in the preschool, engaged in consistent interest and attention towards each other while playing.
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| 3. |
- Svahn, Johanna
(författare)
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The Everyday Practice of School Bullying : Children's participation in peer group activities and school-based anti-bullying initiatives
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the everyday practice of school bullying by examining children's participation in peer group activities as well as in school-based anti-bullying activities within an educational setting. The empirical material is drawn from a long-term (1 year) ethnographic study conducted among preadolescent children in a 5th grade class in a Swedish elementary school. An ethnomethodological approach is used in analysis of ethnographically based fieldnotes, and in detailed analysis of video recordings collected during participant observations. The first study examines, through elaborated investigation of a peer group's everyday peer encounters, how social exclusion is situated within the flow of intricate, subtle and seemingly innocent interactions. In this, the study offers detailed information about how girls' everyday peer group interactions, taken across a range of activities, may be consequential for the process of social exclusion. The second study examines the interactional moral work accomplished within the situated practice of ART classroom sessions on moral reasoning used as part of the school's anti-bullying prevention program. The study contributes an understanding of the interactional managment of children's moral stance-taking, something that has previously been overshadowed by the quest to project the outcomes for individual children's moral reasoning.The third study examines a gossip dispute event, in which a group of girls take action against another girl for reporting school bullying to the teacher. The study demonstrates how, as the gossip dispute unfolds, the girls accused of bullying appropriate and even subvert the social organization of the school's anti-bullying program, and manage to turn the tables so that the girl initially reporting to be a victim of bullying is cast as an instigator, and the girls accused of the bullying as victims of false accusations. The thesis illuminates the complex meanings and functions of social actions referred to as bullying within a school context and in the literature. Also, it sheds light on the difficulties that come with teachers' attempts to structure children's social relationships. All in all, the thesis illuminates the need to challange an individualistic approach to bullying, recognizing the social and moral orders children orient to in their everyday life at school.
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