Humour can be utilised to mark out the boundaries of social groups, to produce and restore dignity, but also to produce contempt, marginalise and exclude. Humour and ridicule can be used to influence hierarchies and positioning among children in the classroom and it can have strong effects in school groups saturated with bullying practices. Ridicule appears to be widespread, very much feared, and not easily amenable to adult interventions. With this article, I look into the many and frequently subtle ways (...) humour intertwines itself in relational practices among children, with a particular focus on children in groups plagued by bullying and social tension. I focus on the entanglement of humour in the complex manoeuvrings that characterise children's worlds, and the subtle mechanisms involved in the self-regulation of their communities in and outside schools. The analyses and analytical understanding that I develop are grounded in qualitative data such as interviews with children and extensive observation in schools and in after school care. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in (...) lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field. (shrink)