Friendship tends to be associated with discourses of positivity, belonging, etc. It is something parents, teachers, peers and the surrounding world uncritically think of as a perfect safe harbor saving us from ‘loneliness’ and describing a state of non-violence. Studies however show that in about 25% of emotional and or physical violence cases this happens in friendships (Bouchard et al., 2018).

I am currently writing my PhD as a part of the MEND project situated in the faculty of education and psychology in the University of Oulu. The aim of the research in MEND is to create knowledge on the ways friendship violence amongst Finnish youth becomes normalised and silenced.  The main focus is on everyday school life as well as the narrative stories of young people.

In my doctoral research I will specifically dive into this topic from the perspective of gender studies and educational sciences. I am interested in the ways heteronormativity and gender normativity are discursively produced in children’s friendships. Finnish queer youth still face heteronormative violence in school life and elsewhere (Lehtonen, 2023). I study friendship as a pedagogical phenomenon and ask what kind of a role do subject positions and power play in this relationship that can be both interactive and unilateral. Heteronormative gender and sexuality I see, in a Butlerian and Foucauldian way, become produced in discursive-performative repetitions and affects twisted in power.

This presentation covers my first article in which I will study Finnish text books as well as equality and diversity plans through the lens of critical discourse analysis. I use project data collected within the broader project, including educational policy documents, textbooks, ethnography and interviews. In this article I focus on documents and textbooks.

My research question is as follows:

1. What kinds of subject positions does social-emotional learning in school produce for children?

Social-emotional learning (abbrev. SEL) has been generally defined as a process through which children build skills for recognizing, understanding and managing emotions, feeling and showing empathy, developing healthy identities as well as maintaining supportive and positive relationships (Jagers et. al, 2018; Weissberg et. al, 2017). SEL has garnered praise and research has shown many positive outcomes e.g. in students’ social behavior and attitudes towards self and others (Durlak et. al, 2011) as well as reducing bullying (Espelage et. al, 2015).

The aims of SEL have widely been recognized as positive. However, also critical points of view have increasingly surfaced among educational research. One key critique has been the fact that SEL does not seem to serve students in intersectional minorities (Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Cipriano & McCarthy, 2023). This, in part, is why I view critical analysis of SEL, amongst many others, extremely important. When practiced productively, I argue that social-emotional learning implements could be beneficial to overall school safety. I argue that to implement anti-oppressive applications into SEL, should ensuring the production of different subject positions be one of the main approaches. According to Davies and Harré (1990, 48) “a subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire”. By this they mean that a person sees and makes sense of the world through the concepts and discourses that are produced in and provided by the subject position they have taken.

For the text books and equality and diversity plans I will be employing critical discourse analysis from the perspective of affect theory and Butler’s discursive-performativity. The theories of performativity have been thought to be too abstract for discourse analysis (McIlvenny, 2002; Speer & Potter, 2002). Therefore, these theoretical frameworks have not been combined much in research. In their article, Scharff (2011) however provides insights into how discourses, Butler’s performativity theory and Ahmed’s affect theory can work together to build a pluralist approach into qualitative analysis. Because in this article I am analyzing text books and equality and diversity plans rather than students’ own narratives, my perspective is however more in the Foucauldian theories of power and agency. As these plans and books can’t provide the perspective of students themselves, I am using performativity to the extent to which it is useful in comprehending the concept of subject positions as something educational documents have the power to either produce or purkaa for students. I am not, however, denying the individual power of forming subject positions, subjectivity and agency. This, I argue, becomes possible from the perspective of Bildung (see Koivupuu, 2025) in addition to the discursive-performative and affective approach presented in this article.

In an ongoing analysis of ethnography diaries from the MEND project we have found that students actively produce safety by both reproducing and deconstructing norms and power. Safety becomes produced through different subject positions located in what is typically referred to as ‘informal school’. The need and importance for enabling the production of students’ agency in social-emotional learning is eminent. However, based on recent critical findings concerning social-emotional learning as well as school climate in general, my hypothesis is that through social-emotional learning schools end up producing counterproductive subject positions and therefore denying their agency. According to Camangian and Cariaga (2021) social-emotional learning fails to analyze oppression and ends up justifying “existing power relations in communities and schools”. In addition, it has previously been found that schools and teachers marginalize students’ subject positions for example through discourses of heteronormativity and exclusion (Abbott et al., 2015). Accordingly, in my master’s thesis (Koivupuu, 2025) I found that Finnish upper secondary schools ended up both denying students’ subject positions as well as discursively reproducing heteronormativity in their equality and non-discrimination plans. Petäjäniemi et al. (2025) have argued that schools also end up denying students’ agency in misopedic discourses. One of the aims of a previously conducted textbook analysis in the MEND project was to study the forms of self-governance that primary school textbooks produce for students in the depictions of SEL (Väisänen et al., 2025). Väisänen et al. found that textbooks impose normalized positions of the ‘friend’ and the ‘bully’ on students. These positions are produced in a contradictory manner as they are simultaneously seen as fixed but also available for choosing and adopting by the students.

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