‘I don't have no damn cultures’: doing ‘normality’ in a ‘deviant’ setting

Abstract

This paper extends earlier interview-based work on youth in institutions, which is seldom grounded in actual analysis of the interaction taking place in the parties to the interview. In line with work within discursive psychology (DP) as well as ethnomethodology (EM), it fleshes out the interactional means through which both parties concertedly produce and interpret locally sensitive formulations, descriptions and accounts. The data consists of ten interviews with female residents in Swedish Youth Detention Homes specialized in assessments and/or treatment. Broadly, the study shows how various notions of ‘normality’ are locally constructed and exploited to account for presumably deviant behavior, typically by relocating the notion of device from the subject herself to the social circumstances. Finally, direct claims of being normal served to build up explicit opposition toward previous institutional categorizations of the teenager. This research emphasises the need for researchers to attend to such interactional phenomena as joint categorization of persons, construction of events and production of accounts, as well as the locally relevant rationalities underlying these discursive constructions.