ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the question of how ethnographers in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can respond to the ontological turn in the social studies of childhood. Against the background of ECEC’s deeply sedimented orientation towards the uniqueness of the individual child, the paper wishes to complicate the rationale of de-centring the child and childhood-research’s child-centredness. Building on ethnographic field notes from a nursery class in the Early Years Unit of an Infant School in England, the authors discuss how ethnographers become entangled into the phenomenon of child-centredness, and how this entanglement is central for ethnographers to become answerable and response-able to the field of ECEC. The paper suggests that Karen Barad’s concept of agential seperability offers possibilities to explore how the individual child is enacted in ECEC and to understand, how ECEC is entangled into performing and producing children’s need for education.

摘要

本文探讨了早期儿童教育和保育 (ECEC) 领域的民族志学家如何应对儿童社会研究中的本体论转向的问题。在 ECEC 对个别儿童独特性的深刻定位的背景下，本文希望使去中心化儿童和儿童研究以儿童为中心的基本原理复杂化。以英格兰一所婴儿学校幼儿班的民族志实地笔记为基础，作者讨论了民族志学者如何陷入以儿童为中心的现象，以及这种纠缠如何成为民族志学者变得负责任和回应的核心——能够进入ECEC领域。该论文表明，Karen Barad 的代理可分离性概念 提供了探索个体儿童在 ECEC 中如何制定的可能性，并了解 ECEC 如何与执行和产生儿童对教育的需求有关。