Ann-carita Evaldsson
Uppsala University, Department of Education, Faculty Member
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This article investigates the local social process through which boys are portrayed as having emotional, social and behavioral problems and, as part of this, categorized in terms of neuropsychiatric diagnoses. The invocation of biomedical... more
This article investigates the local social process through which boys are portrayed as having emotional, social and behavioral problems and, as part of this, categorized in terms of neuropsychiatric diagnoses. The invocation of biomedical categorizations, are here treated from an ethnomedodological and anti-mentalist view as people’s resources for conducting institutional business. Data draws on ethnographic work in a special educational needs unit attended by mainly boys diagnosed with ADHD. It was found that the boys’ through their resistance towards teachers’ authority forced the teachers to account for their actions. The boys’ resistance was mainly read as symptoms of inner emotional and mental states, warranting a solidi␣- cation of their category incumbency as ‘boys with ADHD’. Overall, our study demonstrates that the school is an important player in indexing boys’ troubling classroom conduct in terms of biomedical explanatory resources
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I dagens diskussioner kring larande aterkommer fragan om vad som hander vid sidan av etablerade utbildningar och institutioner. Vilket larande ager rum utanfor den organiserade undervisningen och v ...
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“Ja va inte mobbad ja sa att ja va retad nan gang ja men inte jamt” - Verbal mobbning och normerande praktiker i flickors relationsprat. EDUCARE, Nr 2, 137-156
Research Interests: Psychology and Educare
This study explores interaction in same-sex and cross-sex foursquare games, and, in particular, how throwing (and talk) are adjusted along with diverse configurations of players. The game was played among girls and boys with immigrant... more
This study explores interaction in same-sex and cross-sex foursquare games, and, in particular, how throwing (and talk) are adjusted along with diverse configurations of players. The game was played among girls and boys with immigrant backgrounds (Syrian, Kurdish, Chilean) from low-income families in a multiethnic school setting in Sweden. The study investigates girls’ physicality across various game contexts, finding that as the configuration of players shifts, the forms of bodily actions the girls invoke to construct social identities shift as well. The girls used slams - ways of throwing that require force and muscular strength, physical behaviour that is not conventionally seen as part of femininity. The same girls altered throwing (and language) style, ‘throwing like a girl’, to downplay physical skills with less skilled girls. In cross-sex games, the girls (and the boys) playfully mock challenged gender meanings such as boys’ domination and girls’ subordination. The fact that the girls studied here were not restricted in physicality (or spatiality) indicates that there is considerable variation in female physicality. Overall, the findings underscore that studies of girls’ (and boys’) physicality should be grounded in detailed analyses of interaction in specific game contexts, with attention to cultural and institutional frameworks embedded in the games.
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This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as ‘difficult, disordered and disturbed’. The data draw on... more
This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as ‘difficult, disordered and disturbed’. The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educational needs unit with boys diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Drawing on ethnomethodological work on members’ understanding of social categories (MCA) combined with the related methodology of ‘doing difference’, the focus is on the local social process through which boys’ unruly behaviors are made sense of and treated as the grounds for shifting categorization practices. It is found that both teachers and boys orient to the institutional categories Teacher and Student in teacher–student interactions for the ordering of the classroom . The boys’ conduct is in these instances far from pathological but is meaningful in the sense that it provides local resources to resist teacher authorithy and display agency. Overall, the analysis highlights the complexity of locally accomplished identity practices – in terms of how institutional-, gender- and age-appropriate conduct meshes with diagnostic criteria – in the social identification of boys diagnosed with ADHD.
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Page 1. Boys' gossip telling: Staging identities and indexing (unacceptable) masculine behavior ANN-CARITA EVALDSSON Abstract This study explores the ways preadolescent boys stage identities in gossip telling and index ...
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... a: ja bryr mig° inte ... an argument framework (line 3), which invites Sarah, a girl in line, to participate (lines 45). One after the other, Sarah (lines 45) and Alice (lines 67) deploy multiple resources (different numbers,... more
... a: ja bryr mig° inte ... an argument framework (line 3), which invites Sarah, a girl in line, to participate (lines 45). One after the other, Sarah (lines 45) and Alice (lines 67) deploy multiple resources (different numbers, two-versus three-fingered hand gestures, pitch, footstep) for ...
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This study focuses on how masculinity is oriented to in everyday interactions where both female and male students are learning how to use working tools in an auto-mechanics environment in an upper secondary school in Sweden. Data are... more
This study focuses on how masculinity is oriented to in everyday interactions where both female and male students are learning how to use working tools in an auto-mechanics environment in an upper secondary school in Sweden. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a beginner's level workshop within a Vehicle engineering program. The study contributes to research on masculinity and technology. An ethnomethodological approach is taken in order to explore how gender is oriented to in everyday teacher–student and student–student interactions within everyday auto-mechanic practices. It is demonstrated how the handling of auto-mechanic devices in the beginning of term becomes associated with conventionalized understandings of what it means to be a man. However, when students start to work together in mixed gender teams any social actions that link auto mechanics with masculinity are downplayed or playfully challenged. We argue that the shifting enactments of gendered forms in everyday auto-mechanic work suggest certain openness for future changes in the gendered relations of vocational practices.
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In the present article, we explore identity making in narrative interaction in preadolescent girls’ friendship groups. The data draw on focus group discussions with three groups of preadolescent girls who in the presence of a moderator... more
In the present article, we explore identity making in narrative interaction in preadolescent girls’ friendship groups. The data draw on focus group discussions with three groups of preadolescent girls who in the presence of a moderator narrate different versions of an incident that was recognized as bullying by the authorities at their school. The constructions of multiple narrative versions of ‘what happened’ display the girls’ ongoing negotiation of potentially contradictive and multiple constructions of what it is (or should be) to be a girl, bully, victim, friend, etc. In so doing, the girls agentively position themselves vis-à-vis a normative discourse on bullying, based on predefined characterizations of individuals as either bullies or victims, that is being tested and put up for negotiation within and through narrative interaction.
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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... more
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.
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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... more
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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... I don't take advantage of her [I don't take advantage of her Through a pitch leap, shift in pronoun, and a negation, Leena takes a powerful stance to resist the negative category-bound activity of tak[ing] advantage of... more
... I don't take advantage of her [I don't take advantage of her Through a pitch leap, shift in pronoun, and a negation, Leena takes a powerful stance to resist the negative category-bound activity of tak[ing] advantage of Zaida (line 26). ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Social Psychology, Conversation Analysis, Negotiation, Ethnomethodology, and 11 moreSocial Exclusion, Categorization, Friendship, Social organization, Elementary School, Language Culture and Communication, Social Relation, Social Organization, Indexation, Low Income, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
Konsskillnader och regellekar. En studie av flickors sociala interaktion (verbal och kroppslig) i regelleken boll i fyrkant
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Throwing like a girl? Situating girls' experiences of embodiment within social interaction in games.
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Resisting the categorization of "victim" and "bullies" - Identity constructions in preadolescent girls' peer talk
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Om vikten av att ha en basta van : En mikroanalys av larar-elev-foraldra-samtal om elevens sociala relationer
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Resisting the categorizations of victim and bully. Identity constructions in girls relational talk.
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This thesis presents a comparative study of everyday life in two Swedish after-school centers (the Bumblebee and the Panda). It is based on 18 months of fieldwork at the two centers and in their surrounding neighborhood. The ethnographic... more
This thesis presents a comparative study of everyday life in two Swedish after-school centers (the Bumblebee and the Panda). It is based on 18 months of fieldwork at the two centers and in their surrounding neighborhood. The ethnographic focus is on the micro-analysis of everyday speech and children's conduct in their peer cultures and their interaction with the center's staff. This work draws on theoretical traditions in anthropology (ethnography of speaking and language socialization) and sociology (ethnomethodology and micro-sociology), in demonstrating that language, conduct and culture are interrelated. The primary concern of this study is how the participants at the two centers organize their lives, creating and maintaining particulair cultural, social and linguistic orders. Situated activities such as play, disputes, teasing, secrets and control events are interpreted as they convey how talk and actions are organized and organize the social order at the respective center; reflecting the participants' notions of self, cultural values and ideas, and patterns of socialization in Swedish culture. The examination of social practices at the respective center reveals different ways of controlling children ('order through talk' and 'talk about order), but also different interactional patterns among the children at the respective centers. Disputes is the predominant activity among the children at the Panda whereas the children at the Bumblebee are more often involved in teasing and secrets. In this way, two different types of social organizations develop at. the two centers. From this, the interdependence between children's ways of acting and the staffs way of dealing with the children are discussed. Although control events are differently displayed at the two centers, they also reveal homogeneous cultural patterns about how authority is handled. At both centers authority is problematic, and is handled. through indirectness and alliances. Alliances are shown to play a central role in children's peer culture as well. An examination of the peer culture shows how the creation of social identities and alliances is linked to the children's involvement in play activities {disputes, teasing and secrets). The analysis of the peer activities illuminates children's interactional order, which differentiates children from adults. The children's peer culture is related to the broader socio-cultural context, as well, including child-rearing practices, child care ideology, and Swedish culture, in order tounderstand how these permeate the children's everyday lives.
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Med kvartsamtalet i fokus. : En studie av hur personlighet och fostran framstalls i officiella dokument for skolan 1940-1990-tal
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In this chapter particular attention will be given to empirical studies on play and games as social action, with a focus on children’s everyday play and game participation in situated activities across various settings. As will be... more
In this chapter particular attention will be given to empirical studies on play and games as social action, with a focus on children’s everyday play and game participation in situated activities across various settings. As will be demonstrated, studies of how children organize play activities in situ provide a special arena for rethinking a set of binarisms that consistently reappear in the literature, such as children’s play as separate from the adult word, play and games as different activities, gender differentiation in play, and the distinctions between play and seriousness, play and work, and so on. Before that, in the first two sections, I will recapitulate how the study of play and games has evolved through several phases within different disciplines that have attributed to play and games an important role in (a) children’s development of cognitive and social skills and (b) the production of a children’s folklore, thereby providing a platform for further studies.
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Purpose – In this chapter, we examine an extended gossip dispute event, in which a peer group of 11-year-old girls take action against a girl who has reported about school bullying to the teacher b ...
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The present article approaches the phenomenon of indirect bullying through detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preadolescent girls make use of as they reconstruct the social organization of their peer group,... more
The present article approaches the phenomenon of indirect bullying through detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preadolescent girls make use of as they reconstruct the social organization of their peer group, the effect being that one girl is eventually excluded. The data are drawn from ethnography combined with video recordings of the girls’ peer group interactions in a Swedish elementary school, during one school year. The interactional data cover three different periods of the exclusion process. Overall, the study highlights how processes of social exclusion are situated within the flow of subtle and seemingly innocent actions that are embedded in ordinary everyday interactional peer group practices.
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Vi befarar att lasarna av denna debatt borjar fa svart att orientera sig i vad det hela handlar om. Risken med en debatt ar ocksa att den staller motsattningar i fokus. Vi tror att vi och Bohlin delar fler gemensamma utgangspunkter an vad... more
Vi befarar att lasarna av denna debatt borjar fa svart att orientera sig i vad det hela handlar om. Risken med en debatt ar ocksa att den staller motsattningar i fokus. Vi tror att vi och Bohlin delar fler gemensamma utgangspunkter an vad som verkar vara fallet. Detta kan illustreras med utgangspunkt i foljande passage i satiren Os pa SO – sanningen om Sveriges utbildningsvasen fran 1977 av den fiktive amerikanske doktoranden Neville J. Chamberlain. I boken redogor han for sina fiktiva undersokningar av det svenska utbildningssystemet (alltsa vid en tidpunkt da det svenska utbildningssystemet sags som ett foredome i stora delar av varlden):
Research Interests: Art and Political Science
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Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis integrated with ethnographic approaches, we examine the organizing force and normative character of anger and aggression as jointly configured in the affective stances and moral actions... more
Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis integrated with ethnographic approaches, we examine the organizing force and normative character of anger and aggression as jointly configured in the affective stances and moral actions displayed in the sequential and sociocultural context of an elaborated gossip event. Analytic attention is on the constitutive role of affect displays and membership categorization in mobilizing negative affect and evaluative actions toward a targeted girl leading ultimately to direct and verbal and physical confrontations. The analysis highlights how collaboratively performed affect displays (high-pitched voices, exaggerated faces, response cries, bodily re-enactments, laughter) and animated performances intensify reported insults (actual and imagined) and negative categorization of person and thus are mobilized in taking up oppositional stances and strengthening in-group alignments. It is found that the moral status of the targeted girl as a familiar ‘offender’ is incorporated into the affective moral stances and negative membership categorizations displayed in the moment-to-moment interactions, which in turn affect how and why the particular girl, cumulatively and over time, becomes a customary target of the others’ verbal and physical aggression.
Research Interests: Psychology, Social Psychology, Anger, Laughter, Categorization, and 3 moreConversation, Aggression, and Girl
... of telling(Ann-Carita Evaldsson och Johanna Svahn) Avhandlingar som skrivs inom projektet: Carlsson, Marie: Från pengar till pedagogik.(slutseminarium planerat till HT 2010)(arbets-namn) Svahn, Johanna: Bullying in ... 2007. Mats... more
... of telling(Ann-Carita Evaldsson och Johanna Svahn) Avhandlingar som skrivs inom projektet: Carlsson, Marie: Från pengar till pedagogik.(slutseminarium planerat till HT 2010)(arbets-namn) Svahn, Johanna: Bullying in ... 2007. Mats Myrbergs Dyslexien kunskapsöversikt. ...
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In this chapter, we draw on an ethnomethodological framework to examine how shifting forms of ‘disability identities’ (see Renshaw,Choo and emerald, 2013) are accomplished for Annika, a preadolesce ...
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Att normalisera de marginaliserade : Om motstand och kategoriseringsarbete i specialpedagogisk praktik i Sverige
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POJKAR I BEHOV AV SARSKILT STOD – : en studie av maskulinitet, sarbehandling och socialisation i sarskilda undervisningsgrupper.
Denna nordiska antologi handlar om hur barn och ungdomar i flersprakiga miljoer samspelar i skolan och visar darigenom hur flersprakighet kan forstas som nagot manniskor anvander i sin vardag for e ...
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Flersprakighet bland barn ar ett aktuellt amne i Norden, saval for forskare som inom skolans varld. Men synen pa flersprakighet praglas fortfarande i mangt och mycket av en ensprakig varldsaskadnin ...
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Making boys accountable for classroom disorder : Gender and category-work in regulative talk.