The Multiple Geographies of Early Childhood Education and Care: An Ethnographic Approach to the Places and Spaces of Young Children’s Care Arrangements

This contribution demonstrates how child-centred research on day-care childhoods could benefit from ethnographic research strategies that include a wider and more fluid understanding of the field. This topic is discussed on the basis of the on-going research project CHILD that is currently conducted at the University of Luxembourg. The article presents the context and objectives of the study and shows how the research questions are transformed into a multi-sited research design that investigates the genesis, conditions, and everyday conduct of the care arrangements for 2-4-year-olds as an interplay of certain time-space geographies of early childhood education and care. Those time-space geographies represent a methodical and analytical construct, which helps to reveal how child-care policies, local structures and affordances, parents’ beliefs and choices, institutional orders and children’s activities interplay and assemble in the everyday making of their day-care childhoods. This particular assemblage is how we understand care arrangements. How this conception on practiced care arrangements is worked out gets demonstrated on examples from the on-going field research. According to results from three ethnographic case studies, the diverse places and spaces which come into play in the localised interconnections of day-care practices of 2-4-year-olds are highlighted and discussed with regard to the question of how such multi-sited ethnographic research strategies can help to overcome the traditional notion of children as ‘colonisers of small places’.