At A Close Distance: Dropouts, Teachers, and Joking Relationships

• In Event: 283 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies 2

Abstract

Is student joking in school always a counter-school cultural practice? Willis (1977) has shown how ‘the laff’, as a practice, functions to allow students to distance themselves from teachers and schoolwork. But is it possible that joking in school can be an asset for learning and other processes, not simply a problem? Using fieldwork from a school for dropouts located in Malmö, a multicultural city in southern Sweden, I show how teachers and students engage in lively joking relationships. A practice in which both parties tease each other without anyone taking offense. Through an analysis of these joking relationships and the ways that such relationships can both stabilize a social order and work for social transformation, the article illustrates how a joking relationship can favor emotional identification and cultural extension (Alexander 2006a) between teachers and students. Contra our assumptions about the disruptive and counter cultural power of ‘the laff’ at school, I show how joking relationships facilitate a bi-directional multicultural incorporation in which behavioral patterns originating from youth and popular culture are used as an embodied resource by teachers.

Author

• Anna Lund, Linnaeus University