“Topographies of Early Childhood Education and Care – Perspectives from the intersection of childhood studies, human geography and educational research”

Modern childhood is not only characterized by age-related but also by spatial segregation, as children and their designated life worlds are mostly located in particular places separated from the rest of society both physically and socially, as especially scholarly work on the ‘making of the child’ in the area of the so-called “New Social Studies of Childhood” has coined for. And, as the concept of children as active agents of their lives is also highly valued in this field, too, this perspective quickly raised questions about children’s own geographies, such as the unique places and spaces they actively create in their encounters with private and public spheres.
With a special focus on such spatial processes the interdisciplinary subfield of children’s geographies emerged in the last twenty years, which is build up by a wide range of research on the physical, social, political and emotional geographies of children and childhood. In line with the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theories, this body of research is driven by the basic assumption that space is a fundamental category for all social processes and that spatial ‘entities’ like places, spaces, and scales are socially produced, engineered and constructed, and therefore, have to be considered both as an outcome of social relations and activities as well as a precondition for them. However, the consideration of space has also gained significance for educational research in the meanwhile as well. Today, ‘space’ is used in different ways to explore the theoretical, structural and political conditions of educational realities (Nugel 2014) and various approaches using spatial imaginations as analytical tools, are applied, like, for example field theory, discourse analysis or theories which are centered around the notions of assemblages, networks and arrangements.
And, according to the international field of research, there are also a lot of studies, which document the increasing interest and potentials, in study the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) with spatial perspectives and approaches. Those studies, for example, investigate how in a variety of multiple, layered, and coexisting lived spaces of day care services, the respective processes of education and care are maintained; and how children make use of those to gain control and agency. But, there is also a considerable strand of research that ask for the changing topographies and landscapes of ECEC and how those, for example, are bound to a “global educational space” or produced in the national and municipal policies affording processes like the re-spatialisation of “governable spaces of ECEC”.
Against this background of ongoing research on the spatial dimension of early childhood (education and care), the symposium aims to explore the potentials and contributions of distinct spatial approaches for a better understanding of those certain geographies of ECEC. This will be done by bringing together scholarly work from different countries (Great Britain, Luxembourg, Sweden and Switzerland) and various disciplines and research fields (childhood studies, human geography, educational research). The presentations, which are all based on recently conducted empirical projects, range from the macro- to the microsociological level and also vary in respect to their theoretical concepts, methodological approaches and not least in respect to the empirical insights they offer in terms of how children’s living conditions and social positions are shaped by the respective production of particular spaces of ECEC.

Presentations (see abstracts attached)

Lesley Gallacher, Northumbria University/UK: ”Inhabiting early childhood environments: objects, materials, bodies and spaces”
Sabine Bollig/Luxembourg “Diverse places, unequal spaces? A spatial approach to children’s enacted day care childhoods”

Danielle von der Burgt/Katarina Gustafson, Uppsala/Sweden: “The mobile preschool as a potential for young children’s education and active citizenship in Swedish divided cities?”

Sascha Neumann/Switzerland: “The Swiss Day Care Atlas. Reframing social reporting from the perspective of childhood sociology”