Playing with ambiguities: Playfulness, affect, and embodiment in preschool children's improvised peer play

This study draws on a video ethnographic study of peer interactions in a Swedish preschool, exploring children's collaborative emotional engagements in playful performances (make-believe, humor, playful contests, teasing, clownery). The study draws on insights from Bateson's and Goffman's seminal work on the transformational power of playframes and uses multimodal conversation analysis to explore how children frame and sustain their interaction as playful, involving serious and non-serious interactional work. The findings demonstrate the improvisational and transformational power of play where everything can be framed as laughable and playful through transformations of embodied actions, affect and play materials. Our findings demonstrate the ambiguous character of playful actions and objects, indexing humorous incongruities and emotional tensions as the fun of the game. It is demonstrated how exaggerated playful actions and upgraded affect displays easily evolve into more serious aggressive actions (playful teasing, mocking, and ridicule) and non-affiliating relationships, that threaten the joyfulness, and how children manage to restore the playful framing and re-establish their mutual relationships on a turn-by-turn basis. Overall, the study highlights children's social competencies and flexibilities in managing and transforming unpredictable situations, contradicting affect displays, and ambiguous actions, and how their playfulness provides an important site for joint emotional sharing, amusement and (language) creativity, being important parts of peer group socialization and young children's cultural learning.