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

Abstract

This study uses a multimodal interactional approach to investigate how a group of three girls organizes their play participation to protect interactional spaces and relevant play territories from the intrusion of a third party. A multimodally organized play trajectory is constructed from video-recordings of everyday play activities in a Swedish preschool setting. Drawing on Goffman's (1971) work on interactional space and participation (as developed by C. Goodwin & M.H. Goodwin, 2004; Mondada, 2013) the analysis investigates the participants use of different communicative modalities and the material environment to establish alignments (or not), and to control and monitor one another's actions in situated play activities. It is found that the three girls form collusive alignments of two-against-one through talk-in-interaction (ignoring and rejecting requests for access), bodily arrangements (gaze, bodily postures, touch) and manipulations of play objects. The girls' territorial claims gradually change over time from direct verbal (denials, accusations, bald imperatives) into physical confrontations (holding, pushing, hitting) in regard to different spatial and material features within the different play activities. The findings shed light on how embodied processes of social exclusion develop as children protect interactional spaces and build exclusive friendship dyads, and the difficulties in establishing a three-party constellation.