Making day care childhoods. Approaching the diverse spaces of the Luxembourgian field of early childhood education and care

This paper focuses on the diversity of care arrangements of 2- to 4-year-old children in Luxembourg. In line with a childhood-sociological perspective on day care childhood as a socio-structural form and a way of living, those care arrangements are viewed as unique spaces of ECEC because they are the ‘places’ where day care policies, local structures, parents’ beliefs and choices, institutional orders and children’s activities and daily travels merge and interrelate. The part of the CHILD study presented in this article asks how this relations are embedded in and facilitated by spatial practices which create the distinct places of positioning and agency for children. The research questions, methodologies and methods of the CHILD study are introduced and discussed using one empirical example from the ongoing process of writing ‘thick portraits’ of each of the 12-15 case studies, the CHILD study aims to complete.