In this paper I look at how through the use of teasing as a socially recurrent activity the members of a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic peer group (comprised of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children of Roma heritage) make particular identity ascriptions and displays salient and position themselves and others in particular ways in peer talk during break-time in an Athens primary school. Taking as a point of departure that identities are produced relationally, through systems of opposition (Barth 1969), the paper deals with how members of this school-based peer group exploit teasing as a versatile discursive device to construct one particular peer as a “poor” pupil and themselves by extension as “good” pupils in talk-in-interaction. The focus on the situated and relational construction of identity makes visible how children position themselves with regard to others in order to construct academic hierarchies. At the same time, it brings to the fore how through such positionings children may reproduce but also challenge powerful institutional discourses of academic success and failure in circulation in the classroom by negotiating identity options closer to their peer concerns. These processes of identity construction demonstrate how social selves are produced in interaction through contestation and collaboration and how identities may be simultaneously chosen and imposed through language use.
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Cited by (13)
Cited by 13 other publications
Birolini, Christophe
2022. “Some people work a bit more than me, and so we tease them”: the production of an elite student community in an elite French higher education institution. HUMOR 35:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Bucholtz, Mary, Brendan Barnwell, Elena Skapoulli & Jung‐Eun Janie Lee
2012. Itineraries of Identity in Undergraduate Science. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 43:2 ► pp. 157 ff.
Schnurr, Stephanie & Angela Chan
2011. Exploring another side of co-leadership: Negotiating professional identities through face-work in disagreements. Language in Society 40:2 ► pp. 187 ff.
Schnurr, Stephanie & Olga Zayts
2011. Be(com)ing a Leader: A Case Study of Co-Constructing Professional Identities at Work. In Constructing Identities at Work, ► pp. 40 ff.
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