This study explores how pre-adolescent boys of immigrant and working-class backgrounds stage insults and, as part of this process, mobilize categorizations. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of video records from peer interactions in an elementary school in Sweden. It was found that the boys deploy multiple resources (of syntactic and phonetic shapes) provided by the talk of the prior speaker and the turn structure of different activities (i.e. games, ridiculing, gossiping) and transform this talk (shifting emphasis, substituting insult terms and pronouns, recycling arguments, repeating striking parts, code-crossing) to collaboratively stage a counter to insults. A variety of negative characteristics (concerning linguistic, social and economic standards) are invoked and negotiated in the boys’ insult talk, which both colludes with and transgresses local norms of conduct and institutional discourses. Overall, this study demonstrates the political character of pre-adolescent children's everyday talk in terms of its orientation towards dominant language ideologies and the place that gender, ethnicity and social class occupy within it.

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This article is an ethnographic study of children's production and participation in play and games in an Italian preschool and an afterschool program in a Swedish elementary school. Most traditional theoretical and empirical work on children's play and games has focused on the contributions of these activities for children's development of social, cognitive and communicative skills. Other research has extended this developmental focus by examining play and games as valued activities in children's production, organization and maintenance of their peer cultures. This article extends this work by examining play and games as part of a process of interpretive reproduction in children's lives. We demonstrate how children in the production of play and games simultaneously use (as well as refine and develop) a wide range of communicative skills, collectively participate in and extend their peer cultures, and appropriate features of, and develop an orientation to, the wider adult culture.

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This study explores the ways preadolescent boys stage identities in gossip telling and index a particular behavior as masculine as part of this process. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with recordings of Swedish preadolescent boys' everyday interaction in an afterschool program situated in a low-income suburb in Sweden. When examined in detail it is found that the boy's gossip telling, similar to findings from among females, provides rich interactional resources for the speaker to depict others' characters as deviant, solicit support, and strengthen solidarity. These similarities do not, however, indicate that the boys' social organization is similar to the girls' social concerns, but that boys and girls construct overlapping identities in interaction. The indexing of (unacceptable) behavior in the boys' gossip telling demonstrates, however, that the boys have not adopted behavior typical of females. The social identities the boys invoke were animated by traditional working-class masculine anxieties about being socially excluded, associated with physical and emotional vulnerability, weakness, and cowardice. The findings underscore the need to account for the ways particular boys (and girls) occasion and index identities in everyday gossip telling and the (institutional and cultural) frameworks embedded in the interaction.