ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 puts a material feminist theoretical approach to work in situating the book’s key themes—gender, care, early childhood education, and research—as entangled pastpresent materialdiscursive practices. With Chapter 1’s overview of time, knowing and being, matter and discourse as inseparable rather than bounded categories/realities having set the stage, this chapter explores some complex, imbricated histories and inheritances related to gender, care, early childhood education, and research through three partial and connected tales. The first illuminates the materialization of developmental theory—theory bred institutions, intuitions bred theory—and highlights the always already gendered (and racialized, classed, heterosexualized) aspects of this materialization. The second addresses some of the challenges and troublings of the nineteenth and (early) twentieth centuries’ legacy of “paying attention.” Resistance to this legacy has led to calls for methodologies, theories, and practices that contest universal practice prescriptions that do not attend to the complexity of childhood, pedagogy, and research itself. This tale aims to think with these resistances to single stories of childhood, gender, and care. The third tale picks up threads from the previous two—paying careful attention, relationality, and politically embedded—and considers what is shifted with/in these through a material feminist lens.
