Positioning, preschool children, and cultural psychology

This chapter focuses on how positioning theory (Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) can be applied to research in the field of human development. Positioning Theory can be considered a specific strand within the field of Cultural Psychology (Harré, 2012) and its interest in studying how people construct meaning in mundane every day social interaction. I will start out from such a perspective to illustrate how positioning theory can be fruitfully applied to study how children are socialized towards specific discursive productions of selves and an understanding of the rights and duties that go along with constructions of normativity. I suggest enhancing positioning theory by including embodied resources of positioning that people draw on in tandem with discursive devices when studying social interaction.

I propose the following basic outline for the chapter:

1. Theoretical reflections on combining Positioning Theory with other strands of Discursive (Bamberg, 1997, Edwards & Potter, 2000) and Cultural Psychology (Valsiner, 2014)
2. Methodological reflections on enhancing positioning research by a multimodal approach to analysis (Demuth, 2021a,b).
3. Empirical examples from an everyday classroom interaction in an Indian preschool
4. Conclusion and outlook