This article examines how young people in a Swedish online forum and in blogs engage in discussions of one popularized psychological personality trait, the highly sensitive person (HSP), and how they draw on different positionings in discursive struggles around this category. The material is analysed with concepts from discursivepsychology and post-structuralist theory in order to investigate youths’ interactions.The first is a nuanced positioning, from which youths disclose the weaknesses and strengths of being highly sensitive. Some youths become deeply invested in this kind of positioning, hence forming a HSP subjectivity. This can be opposed using contrasting positionings, which objects to norms of biosociality connected to the HSP. Lastly, there are rather distanced and investigative approaches to the HSP category. We conclude that while young people are negotiating the HSP category, they are establishing an epistemological community.

Aggressive, sexist humor is often understood as expressions of inner, misogynist attitudes. This article, however, investigates rape humor as a collective and interactive phenomenon. Drawing on an infamous Swedish podcast episode, we illuminate rape humor in terms of affect, desire, and repression (Butler 1987; Billig 1999), and as such, how taboo-breaking arouses both pleasure and fear among the participants. The analyses detail affective practices that both promote and discipline affects. The men in the group interpellate one of the participants as a clown, someone whose taboo-breaking they interactionally support and simultaneously distance themselves from. The article concludes that affects, like subject positions, are interpellated in interaction. Building on Wetherell’s (2013) understanding of affect as both discursive and embodied, we suggest a reintroduction of repression/desire into a discursively oriented framework. 

Background and aim. Previous literature has discussed tensions between the field of game design and the field of education. It has been emphasized that it is important to address this tension when developing game based learning (GBL). In order to find potential ways of approaching this problem, we investigate the development of GBL when performed by those who have both pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and experience in game development. Method. Two case studies about serious games production were conducted, a game section at a national defense college and a university course in educational game design. The cases, as well as individual development projects within the settings, were analyzed with a focus on the role of PCK during serious games development. Results. While the developers and instructors at the defence college, who designed games for their in-house needs, had both PCK and knowledge about game development, these competencies varied a lot among the participants at the university course. The results show that educational goals added complexity to the design process. By comparison, some studied game projects at the university course avoided this complexity. These projects legitimized their games as educational by suggesting unproven far transfer. In other cases, where the developers did have PCK, the instructional goals where taken as a starting point that guided the whole development process. This lead to games that were designed to match highly specific educational contexts. The developers, instructors and teachers in both of the settings who used their PCK tended to break a number of established game design heuristics that would have been counter productive in relation to the learning objectives of the games. Conclusions. The paper suggests that there is a need for people with pedagogical content knowledge AND knowledge about game development. Enhancing these dual competencies in game workers could forward the field of GBL.

Recent attention to the question of preservation and exhibition of video games in cultural institutions such as museums indicates that this media form is moving from being seen as contentious consumer object to cultural heritage. This empirical study examines two recent museum exhibitions of digital games: GameOn 2.0 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm (TM), and Women in Game Development at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, Oakland (MADE). The aim is to explore how games are appropriated within such institutions, and thereby how they are configured as cultural heritage and exhibitable culture. The study uses actor-network theory in order to analyse heterogeneous actors working in conjunction in such processes, specifically focusing on translation of games and game culture as they are repositioned within museums. The study explores how games are selectively recruited at both institutions and thereby translated in order to fit exhibition networks, in both cases leading to a glossing over of contentious issues in games and game culture. In turn, this has led to a more palatable but less nuanced transformation of video games into cultural heritage. While translating video games into cultural heritage, the process of making games exhibitable lost track of games as culture by focusing on physical artefacts and interactive, playable fun. It also lost track of them as situated in our culture by skimming over or ignoring the current contentious nature of digital games, and finally, it lost track of games as being produced and experienced in a particular context, or games of culture.

New forms of information and communications technology (ICT) form parts of contemporary communication. At large, connected presence (e.g. through mobile phones) is seen as something positive that facilitates social connectedness in family life. Yet, there are also instances of what we call contested connectedness. This article analyses courtroom proceedings in child custody disputes. The analyses (from 68 audio-recorded high-conflict trials) highlight how mobile phone connectedness reshapes boundaries of public/private in post-separation family life. A number of cases were chosen to illuminate different ways in which connectedness through mobile phone contacts was contested by the child or one of the parents. Three cases document recurring ways in which children's rights and responsibilities were intertwined in complex ways in post-divorce life and how mobile phone connectedness would not offer the child new rights, yet make them more responsible for monitoring their parents' unresolved problems.

Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting.

Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafés (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures.

Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether.

Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.

This chapter examines conversations during computer gaming, showing that players spontaneously engaged in mutual assessments in the form of blame, praise and criticism that produced a social order where some players were ranked as noobs (novices) and others as imba (experienced). This involved categorizations (Sacks 1974) of gaming where the participants assessed their own and others’ learning trajectories in terms of learner or expert identities. The findings indicate that models of learning should account for such local hierarchies. By including participants’ assessments of learner identities, our analyses extend work on communities of practice (e.g., Lave and Wenger 1991).