“This friend was nice”: Young children’s negotiation of social relationships in and through interactions with (play) objects

This paper explores children's deployment of objects in negotiating social relationships during peer play. Drawing from video-ethnographic research in a Swedish preschool, this study builds on insights from a cultural-historical perspective on children's learning and development, which is integrated with a multimodal interactional perspective on human social action. Specifically, the article analyzes an extended sequence of play (inter)actions with objects among children aged 5, focusing on how children interact not only with other humans, but (with)in a material culture and environment. As the analysis illustrates, children ingeniously transform and use material (play) objects, including their positioning in the play space, to index affiliative or disaffiliative stances toward playmates. It is argued that children's local deployment of objects is germane to children's negotiation of their friendship relationships and is further related to the social hierarchy of the peer group, which is (re-)negotiated on a turn-by-turn basis. The practices under scrutiny are also relevant and an example of children's acquisition of various social skills: by locally playing with objects, children refine interactional strategies that allow them to competently manage their social bonds and networks in preschool.