Tuija Huuki

What (else) can a kiss do? Theorizing the power plays in young children’s sexual cultures

This article draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (in South Wales, UK and north Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007) of gendered/sexual power in young childrens (aged 5–6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kissing hut’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling or restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.

Humour as a resource and strategy for boys to gain status in the field of informal school

Through a feminist approach this paper illustrates how humour is used as a resource and strategy for status among Finnish school boys and in constructing culturally accepted masculinity in the field of informal school. Based on interview and observation material collected in three schools, the results suggest that although humour is often affiliative and positive in nature, exclusive, violent humour is also used as a resource and strategy, which might have serious consequences on targeted students’ lives. The effect of humour as a symbolic resource of status depends not only on context and power relations between the agents, but also on a credible, strategic usage of the resources available to a boy. Humour has an important influence on constructing masculinities and the social status of boys. Furthermore, the status of a boy defines the value of his humour among his peer group.

Crush: mapping historical, material and affective force relations in young children's hetero-sexual playground play

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic multi-modal data of the gendered and sexual dynamics of pre-school play (age 6) in a rapidly declining fishing and farming community in North Finland, this paper offers a glimpse into our sense-making of a short video-recorded episode in which three boys repeatedly pile up on and demand a kiss from one of their girl classmates. Our analyses resonate with a wider community of feminist and queer scholars who are bringing affective methodologies and posthuman approaches to re-invigorate how we might understand the complexities of gender and sexual power relations in the early years. Inspired by the writings of Guattari and his concept of ‘existential refrains’, we create three ‘crush’ assemblages to map the more-than-human territorialising and de-territorialising force relations at play. Each assemblage offers a thinking Otherwise about gender, sexuality, violence and consent in which place, space, objects, affect and history entangle in predictable and unpredictable ways.

Earn Yo’ Respect! Respect in the Status Struggle of Finnish School Boys

What is respect among school boys and how can it be earned? Reaching across disciplines, this article contends that respect is a dimension of status in the context of masculinities in peer relations, as are peer likeability and power positions. Drawing on longitudinal interviews and observational material, the authors scrutinize violence, physicality, materiality, and performances, exploring how school boys use these resources strategically to gain respect and to affect power relations. The authors conceptualize respect further, suggesting that respect among school boys refers not only to peer likeability but to a self-oriented stance tied to power and masculine veneration. This research aims to dig deeply into the complexities of masculinities, status, and power; to openly subvert, change, and make room for ‘‘fair power’’ instead of ‘‘fear power’’ in schools.

Standing by?…?Standing off--Troublesome Compassion in the Relationships of School Boys.

This paper draws on the story of ‘Mikael’, a schoolboy from northern Finland, to examine how his affective ties of compassion and his pursuit of dominant forms of masculinity evolve in his journey from middle childhood to young adulthood. In his earlier years, Mikaels speech regarding his relationships with peers and family members indicates a non-hierarchical sympathetic orientation, enabling sensitivity to diverse vulnerabilities. Over time, his speech reflects more and more the ideals of dominating masculinity and hierarchical relationality, and it is marked by ‘inner-circle’ compassion that excludes people considered vulnerable and/or ‘Other’. The authors argue that the challenge of balancing compassionate concern, masculinity and social position generates heavy costs, imposing on young men not only the heavy burden of fulfilling the requirements of culturally esteemed masculinity, but also a partial loss of being in touch with ones inner faculties of emotions and imagination.

Violence Detection From ECG Signals: A Preliminary Study

This research studied violence detection from less than 6-second ECG signals. Features were calculated based on the Bivariate Empirical Mode Decomposition (BEMD) and the Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) applied to ECG signals from violence simulation in a primary school, involving 12 pupils from two grades. The feature sets were fed to a kNN classifier and tested using 10-fold cross validation and leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation in subject-dependent and subject-independent training models respectively. Features from BEMD outperformed the ones from RQA in both 10-fold cross validation, i.e. 88% vs. 73% (2nd grade pupils) and 87% vs. 81% (5th grade pupils), and LOSO validation, i.e. 77% vs. 75% (2nd grade pupils) and 80% vs. 76% (5th grade pupils), but have larger variation than the ones from RQA in both validations. Average performances for subject-specific system in 10-fold cross validation were 100% vs. 93% (2nd grade pupils) and 100% vs. 97% (5th grade pupils) for features from the BEMD and the RQA respectively. The results indicate that ECG signals as short as 6 seconds can be used successfully to detect violent events using subject-specific classifiers.

An instance-based physical violence detection algorithm for school bullying prevention

School bullying is a common social problem around the world which affects teenagers, and physical violence is considered to be the most harmful. This paper proposed an automatic physical bullying detection method with movement sensors to protect teenagers. Four features were extracted from acceleration and gyro data, and an Instance-Based classifier was applied upon them. Altogether eight kinds of activities, including three bullying kinds and five daily-life kinds, were acted by role playing. Simulations were performed on these data, and the results showed that the proposed algorithm could recognize physical bullying events and distinguish them from daily-life ones at an average accuracy of 80%. This showed a promise in automatic school bullying prevention with activity recognition techniques.

Reconfigurings of Non-violence as a Matter of Sustainability and Response-ability

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore non-violence and the responsibility for non-violence inspired by Karen Barad’s work on the material–discursive notion of response-ability. Our analysis, by way of thinking with theory, is based on a careful engagement with the life of one woman, Lena, as told by her in writing and interviews between the years 2007 and 2015. Based on her talk about violence and non-violence in her life, we produced three stories of non-violence “in-becoming”. Through these stories, our aim is to shed light on non-violence as relational; that is, how it is reconfigured in the complex entanglements of bodies, things, abstractions, and histories and how these different entanglements enable an ethically sustainable response for non-violence. In the end, by foregrounding relationality, response, and sustainability, we argue that nurturing sustainable non-violence could be enriched by expanding the focus from individual agency or collective action to the co-constituted conditions of possibilities for response-ability.

Thinking beyond Student Resistance: A Difficult Assemblage in Teacher Education.

Abstract This paper draws on feminist new materialist, poststructuralist and post-human theories to rethink discomforting moments when engaging with sensitive topics in teacher education. It is argued that the common approach to such events – as instances of student resistance or pedagogical failures – is both simplistic and problematic, and that a more holistic and in-depth approach is needed. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of assemblage and affect, our aim here is to re-theorise an instance of such an event in an attempt to make visible how place, space, objects, emotion, affect and history entangle in predictable and unpredictable ways in teacher education. The aims of the paper are to propose new ways of engaging with discomfort in teacher education and, secondly, to introduce post-human approaches in the field of teacher education, where they are underrepresented.