What makes a tease a tease? Considering the practice of teasing from a social constructionist perspective

Teasing is artful work, often used to convey messages that may seem negative or hurtful towards a recipient, but in a way that suggests the opposite. It is an extremely difficult concept to define, however; what one individual may consider a tease, another may consider an insult. In the current paper, data from an on-going PhD project was used to demonstrate some of the issues surrounding defining a concept such as teasing. Nine student groups from two UK universities were video recorded as they worked, before episodes of teasing were identified in the resultant data corpus, and used to exemplify some of the issues involved in defining what teasing actually looks like in interaction. Primarily, the paper demonstrates the importance of considering teasing as a collaborative interaction, and so past definitions that consider a tease as something one individual does to another, are questioned.