”It Farts: The situated management of social organization in a kindergarten peer group”.

This article is a study of play among children at daycare facilities. The goal of this study is to describe how socially competent participants in the game can make use of various social, material, linguistic and communicative resources, whereas less skilled children’s use of the same resources does not guarantee and is not a sign of social and communicative success.

The analysis shows how the group of boys organise their play and social relations at the same time. The author shows that participation in the game is an accomplishment in itself, and that children’s social success in the game depends on their individual competences as well as on the other children’s agendas and strategies. Some participants in the game use other participants to promote their own interests, for example by excluding others from the game or by inviting others into the game. The author stresses that language and social skills are not created easily, painlessly and inevitably in children’s play, and that children’s play experiences are important; both the experiences that are normally considered positive and the experiences that are normally considered as less positive.

The article is based on data collected over nine months, in which the author recorded children’s spontaneous play on a hand-held camera. The children were three to five years old. There were a total of 33 hours of recordings, nine of which were transcribed. The daycare centre was located in a multi-ethnic area, and at least ten different native languages were represented at the centre. The article analyses three minutes of play extracted from a period of 30 minutes with four boys playing together. Focus in the analysis is on the ongoing production of the social order between the four boys.

Karrebæk, M.S. (2011). ”It Farts: The situated management of social organization in a kindergarten peer group”. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 2911-2931.