Collaborative Conflicts: Teens Performing Aggression and Intimacy in a French Cité

This article shows that emergent meanings of impoliteness and insult in interaction are central to communicative exchanges among French adolescents of Algerian descent living in a cité , or low‐income housing project. In the speech event “parental name calling” nonpolite interactions are routinely interpreted as politic or appropriate by adolescents. Yet these performances of conflict are not without risk. The potential slippage between ritual...