Original Article At a close distance: Dropouts, teachers, and joking relationships

Abstract Is student joking in school always a counter-school cultural practice? Paul Willis has shown how ‘the laff’, as a practice, functions to allow students to distance themselves from teachers and schoolwork. But is it possible that joking in school can be an asset for learning and other processes, not simply a problem? Using fieldwork from a school for dropouts located in Malmö, a multicultural city in southern Sweden, I show how teachers and students engage in lively joking relationships, a practice in which both parties tease each other without anyone taking offense. Through an analysis of these joking relationships and the ways in which such relationships can both stabilize a social order and work for social transformation, the article illustrates how a joking relationship can favor emotional identification and cultural extension between teachers and stu-dents. Contra our assumptions about the disruptive and countercultural power of ‘the laff ’ at school, I show how joking relationships facilitate a bidirectional multicultural incorporation in which behavioral patterns originating from youth and popular culture are used as an embodied resource by teachers