Protecting interactional spaces: Collusive alignments and territorial arrangements of two-against-one in girls’ play participation

The study investigates how and why kindergarten children exclude other children because they want to play together in pairs. The researchers are investigating how two girls organise participation in a game in order to protect it from intrusion by a third party. The study analyses the participants’ use of different communicative modalities and the physical environment to create, or not create, coalitions and control, and monitor each other’s actions while playing.

The results show that the girls form a two-against-one interaction through conversation and interaction (such as ignoring and rejecting requests for access to play), bodily rejection (such as gaze, body poses, and touch) and manipulation of play objects. The girls’ behaviour gradually changes during the game from verbal expressions (denials, accusations and imperatives) to physical confrontations (holding, pushing, hitting). The results show how social exclusion develops when children want to protect friendships in pairs and why it is difficult to establish tripartite constellations.

The data material consists of video recordings of three five-year-old girls in free play in a Swedish kindergarten. The analysis focuses on how the girls’ play develops and changes during an hour of play in the kindergarten’s outdoor area. The game was recorded with a video camera and analysed using multimodal conversation analysis.

Evaldsson, A.-C. & Karlsson, M. (2020). “Protecting interactional spaces: Collusive alignments and territorial arrangements of two-against-one in girls’ play participation”. Journal of Pragmatics, 155(1):163-176.