Gender and Care with Young Children

Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of how children, educators, and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. Drawing on a collaborative research study with early childhood educators and young children, the author examines what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality does to complicate conversations about gender and care. By employing a feminist material analysis of early childhood education, this book rethinks dominant Euro-Western individualist pedagogies in order to reposition them within a relationality framework. The analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood education and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations.