af Dorte Marie Søndergaard 

Key note paper for The 24th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association, Århus, Denmark, August 2008

Abstract

This paper suggests an understanding of bullying as practices which work in low tolerance cultures typically characterized by strong policing strategies, tight sanction practices and an increased state of social and emotional alertness related to maintenance of hierarchy and social order.

A range of entangled forces thus work in the constitution of bullying practices and in the positioning of bullies, bullied and bystanders among children in school.

The paper sets out to explore the analytical potentials in co-focusing discourses, materiality, subjectivities and technology as some of the enacting forces involved in bullying practices, and suggests that a perspective on bullying as intra-active enactments paves the way for multifacetted understandings of statements such as the above mentioned.

A particular focus centres on (violent) media products in terms of, for instance, video games as one of the entangling agents enacting child bodies and subjectivities.

The intra-action of technology (as in particular media), discourse-materiality (as in gendered connotations of/and weapons) and subjectivity (as in emotional and reflexive evaluations) make up constitutive processes folding in and out of real and virtual life in ways that leave some real-life child encounters unintelligible within the individualising categories of everyday meaning-making among adults.

In this analytic approach, Science and Technology Studies and poststructuralist conceptualisations of subjectification processes are brought together and reworked to make space for a complexity-sensitive understanding of bullying as an extreme version of marginalising movement in everyday practices among children.