Paper long abstract:

Conflicts between students concern different, and often contrasting, concepts, emotions and self definitions. As collective and individual experiences, these conflicts, and its violent expression, are subject to multiple appropriations, involving a clear tension between students and school administration. Having in mind emotions, as conductive elements of these processes, implies the analysis of these conflict dynamics also as emotional strategies, noticing in particular the necessity of social incorporation in individual trajectories. By performing these conflicts, students reinforce and/or redefine group loyalties and power configurations, as well as experience and experiment an all set of corporal sensations and social emotions. Some of these interplay become real events, with ample audiences; other remain in a more concealed dimension, far from the school's regulatory mechanisms. Considering school's micro politics, a significant part of these conflict situations are seen as external entities, disruptive, putting at risk school authority and the orderly functioning of daily activities.