Fighters, Girls and Other Identities
This book examines how young people at a martial arts club in an urban setting participate and interact in a recreational social community. The author relates analyses of their interactions to discussions of relevance to the sociology of sports, anthropology and education, ultimately providing an analytically nuanced contribution to the study of contemporary sociolinguistic processes and identity practices. The author explores how the young participants negotiate their place in the social order, create and maintain friendship groups and relate to different social categories using the ecological descriptions provided by linguistic ethnography. The book will appeal to researchers of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, sport sociology, extra-curricular education and anthropology.
Lian Malai Madsen is Associate Professor of Psychology of Language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research interests include linguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, language and diversity, youth language, leisure communities and education, popular culture, and identities, style and stylisation.