Bewildering early childhood 'pioneers'

2015

Unsettling Early Childhood Education No matter how familiar and commonsensical things seem, they never just are and they are never finally settled. This includes the everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education in settler colonial societies. To do unsettling work requires preparedness to be unsettled or disconcerted. It is risky business. It involves asking hard and provocative questions, disturbing complacency, troubling norms and interrogating conventional truths. It involves interrupting the business-as-usual of everyday life and practice. The underlying premise of this edited collection is that in settler colonial societies, the seemingly unremarkable, everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education remains inadvertently (albeit often unknowingly) entangled in the social and ecological legacies of colonialism. The contributors to this book attempt to unravel some of these entanglements in order to expose and respond to these legacies. Their intention is to unsettle the things we take for granted. They do this by applying what Carter refers to as "a postcolonial and reflexive contemporaneity" (2006, p. 684) to everyday educational practices, issues and events that they themselves have

From ancient Greek mythology comes the tale of Pandora's Box. Whilst there are many variations on the tale, depending upon the translation, the interpretation and the intended audience for which it has been re-crafted, the myth might be useful for thinking-with when considering post-modernist perspectives in early childhood education. Our everyday, 2 commonsense reference to 'Pandora's box' is typically in relation to warning against allowing curiosity to get the better of us for fear of unleashing some source of endless trouble.

2015

Unsettling Early Childhood Education No matter how familiar and commonsensical things seem, they never just are and they are never finally settled. This includes the everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education in settler colonial societies. To do unsettling work requires preparedness to be unsettled or disconcerted. It is risky business. It involves asking hard and provocative questions, disturbing complacency, troubling norms and interrogating conventional truths. It involves interrupting the business-as-usual of everyday life and practice. The underlying premise of this edited collection is that in settler colonial societies, the seemingly unremarkable, everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education remains inadvertently (albeit often unknowingly) entangled in the social and ecological legacies of colonialism. The contributors to this book attempt to unravel some of these entanglements in order to expose and respond to these legacies. Their intention is to unsettle the things we take for granted. They do this by applying what Carter refers to as "a postcolonial and reflexive contemporaneity" (2006, p. 684) to everyday educational practices, issues and events that they themselves have

This text was delivered as a plenary lecture at the conference Barndom och ungdom i förändring (Childhood and Youth in Transition: Discipline and unrest in the modern welfare state) on October 29, 2010 at Malmo University, Sweden. It offers a diagram for visualizing modern childhood as a product of the discursive tensions between four dominant figures: the conditioned child, the authentic child, the developing child, and the political child. The lecture focuses on the creative dynamics between conditioning and authenticity as they appeared in the 17th through the 19th-centuries in Anglo-American discourse. It argues that a search for the conditions of authenticity through childhood became manifest in the disciplinary practices of institutions for children’s education and care. The resulting generative tensions were important for constructing the landscape of modern childhood as a whole. Finally, it suggests that the tensions between romantic authenticity and rational conditioning continue to provide a significant discursive framework for contemporary child rights talk.

Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2011

This paper considers how research practices on racialization in early childhood education might be reconceptualized when racialization is placed within relational intricacies and affects in multiple encounters. By foregrounding race and its emergence in multifarious, unpredictable ways in everyday encounters between human and non--human bodies, space, and discourse, the paper investigates how a movement toward research analyses that engage with both the materiality of race and its systemic and discursive formations might be used to constantly seek new ethical ways of responding to and acting against racisms and colonialism in early childhood. A biracial (African/Asian) child in a small early childhood classroom in North America draws herself as a blonde, blue--The drawing activates and charges race fears, stereotypes of desirable beauty, histories of racialization within a racialized regime of vision for the educator and the researchers. So we ask, where else can this go? The educator decides to provide opportunities for all the children in the classroom to draw. Our interest was in exploring gender and race identity, to bring racialization to other places, to make it function with other bodies/objects. In this drawing activity, some mirrors are set up at a table with drawing paper and black pencil crayons. The children, who are of various racial on their faces. The child who drew herself as Rapunzel now draws herself smiling, with -investigation of identities, magnifying new becomings. The mirrors, the reflections, the crayons with their intense smell, the proximity of the childre Nomadic Research Practices 20

2013

IN 1973, Charlotte Hardman published an article in JASO entitled 'Can there be an Anthropology of Childhood?' Long before childhood became of general interest to anthropologists, she argued that children were a worthy subject of study. They were, she claimed, a further example of a group with 'muted voices' and in fact possessed a culture of their own. She challenged the idea that children were interesting only in so far as they were subject to processes of socialization and enculturation. She argued that anthropologists had left the study of children to psychologists such as Vygotsky (1962) and Piaget (1932) and sociologists such as Aries (1962), and had not taken up the challenge of looking at children as subjects in their own right, with their own forms of language, meanings, and understandings. She concluded that there could legitimately be an anthropology of childhood. Her article remained obscure, however, and it was another ten years before anthropologists, mo...

Unpublished Qualifying Exam

Children are a discursive fiction, a nostalgic memory, and a material reality. Young people exist, but how any adult makes meaning of their youth is personally, socially, epistemologically, and historically determined. Moreover, the allocation of who gets to be a child and why is uneven. Even if childhood does not have one consistent definition, the boundaries of the category include some and exclude others, following historical flows of power and domination. The material-discursive complexity of children and childhood presents a challenge for scholarship on either topic. This challenge is especially salient in historical work, since the dominant historical constructions of children have shaped what kind of documentation was considered worth archiving, which children were considered worth documenting, and how those children were documented, among other factors.