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This study aims to contribute with knowledge of how the autismspectrum diagnosis is used by education professionals and stu-dents in special educational environments in Sweden. Despitehaving been seen as focusing on inclusion, the Swedish schoolsystem offers various special and separate school contexts forstudents with autism. It is important to deepen our knowledgeon how an autism diagnosis informs the reasoning of bothstudents and education professionals, both as a matter of self-knowledge and as a tool to plan the students’ education. Thestudy reports data gathered through interviews (n = 23, withstudents) and open-ended questionnaires (n = 18, with educationstaff) and analyses the results using the MADIT methodology ofdiscourse analysis. The results show that the students are config-ured as individuals and that the diagnosis does not play a keyrole, despite the schools being special educational schools witha profile towards autism. At the same time, the schools useinteractive processes in which the diagnosis becomes a centralelement, especially to make ‘justifications’. The results are dis-cussed in relation to promoting the students’ development andkeeping possibilities open for them.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork including video recordings, this study examines how pre-teen girls, in everyday peer interaction, deal with controversial issues on a social media network. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach, we analyze the situated affective and collaborative embodied work through which a peer group unravels and remedies problematic online behaviors (cheating, scamming,stealing). The results show how the girls affectively align themselves to deal with online risks in ways that demand different social media skills as well as networks of supportive peers. The girls agentively draw upon the affordances (texting, images, social norms) of the social media network as well as their expertise and collective knowledge of similar online events. The creative power of the peer group plays an important role, in terms of how the girls nourish their peer culture while building mutual trust and collaborative competencies for interpreting and anticipating risky practices in their lives with peers.

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 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.

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’.

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.

In this chapter we explore the moral interactional work that preschool teachers and children accomplish in everyday preschool practices. We explore how teachers solicit accounts in assisting the children to remedy a problematic conduct of excluding a child from play. It will be shown how the children justify their actions to avoid being blamed for faulty conduct. In their response the preschool teachers use hypothetical scenarios to avoid blaming and instead modeling the children’s actions and feelings to experience the hurt feeling by a peer. The study shows how an EMCA approach can provide insights into how childhood educators socialize children into accountability and compassion while maintaining a democratic ethos. 

This multimodal conversation analysis study is part of a larger video ethnographic project that explores the media literacy practices that children develop as they use digital and mobile technologies. The study investigates how Swedish students in grades 3–4 make use of text to speech (TTS) technology as an interactional resource during collaborative writing on iPads in the classroom. The results show that students routinely make use of synthetic voicings to display and claim knowledge about the voiced written units and negotiate writing roles with differing epistemic rights and obligations to assess voicings and practice repair. 

The present study examines sibling' conflict trajectories with a specific focus on acts of sabotage - deliberate obstruction or destruction of activities with an object. Multimodal interaction analysis is used to understand how siblings' conflicts are organised through multiple (verbal and embodied) practices. We further draw on childhood studies that focuses on children's material practices and use the term enactment to better understand human-nonhuman relations. The study found that children put considerable time and energy into configuring deceptive bodies that both organised and disrupted their local moral orders.

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).