“We're not kids!”: Aged Authority in Elementary Students’ Classroom Peer Interactions

Aiming to contribute to the small body of work that analyzes age as not only socially constructed but interactionally accomplished, this paper examines how California second-grade students refer to and perform aged identities (e.g., “baby,” “teenager”) in classroom peer interactions. Through the lens of what they call “aged authority,” the author analyzes how students take authoritative stances by making aged identities demonstrably relevant to their interactions across various types of classroom activities. An ethnographic multimodal analysis combining interactional and intersectional perspectives shows how, through topicalizations, stylizations, (mock) affect displays, storytelling, and ritual insults, focal students take stances of aged authority that variously reinforce and unsettle developmentalism, adultism, and other discourses.