ABSTRACT

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.

part 1|111 pages

Context Stories

chapter 1|23 pages

Curiosities

chapter 2|32 pages

Pedagogical Narrations

chapter 3|54 pages

Mattering Threads, Knots, and Black Holes

part 2|92 pages

Classroom Stories

chapter 4|43 pages

Knotty Doll Tales

chapter 5|47 pages

Tangled Tales of Car(e)s

part 3|16 pages

Invitations