”You have to have a red shovel”: Tricksters, mini-politics and social relations in preschool

Abstract

In this article, the aim is to explore how a group of 4-year-old children seeks to manage social relationships in conflict with an overall institutional context characterized by inclusive ideals. It focusses on the children’s use of frames and contextualization to control inclusion and exclusion in an activity taking place in the underlife of preschool, where children’s activities and relational work are not immediately supervised by adults. The children in the activity analyzed continually activate different frames and contexts in order to either become included in the activity or exclude someone from it. Within this process, all participating children, like frameshifting tricksters, move within, outside and between multiple coordinated framings, contexts, and norms in a political act of both resisting and (re)establishing the institutional social order. The study builds on video ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish preschool setting.