Whereas educational policies historically has shaped ideals for the children through schooling, a simultaneous movement in education and early childhood education has been to handle diversity and exclusion.  This has become even more current at present when the society has been analysed as being a society at risk. Ecological disasters and new types of human crisis led German sociologist Ulrich Beck to talk of late modernity as a risk society (Beck 1993). Historically, however, the very idea of present time as precarious and in need of action is not new. Neither is education as the mean to meet those risk-full times. Some would argue that national schooling, social work or early childhood institutions can be seen as acts of handling the perceived risk of moral decay, social deviance or the risk of a potential unloyal population within the boundaries of a territory (Popkewitz 2008; Villadsen 2004; Plum 2014; Buchardt & Plum in press). Thus, rather than answering how to solve present and future risks through education, this symposium focuses on how educational policies and practices emerge as answers to perceived risk or fears of the future (Hultqvist 2006) in different institutional settings. This implies that the symposium questions basic assumptions about institutions and especially the child and child nature. Instead of a given, the five papers address how the child is fabricated as a historical and political site for dealing with risk.

In different ways, the papers analyse how the young child is put forth as an important site for intervention in order to steer free of potential risk of the present, thereby creating not only narratives of today and tomorrow, but also of how to understand and act in relation to children. And as part of that, how to institutionalize childhood and education. It is highlighted how the young child is historically conceptualised as both the source of innocence - the yet un-modelled future -, while at the same time thought of as an object of intervention, a place of risk. It is also explored how certain trademarks such as creativity, competence, vulnerability etc. are being attached and embedded into the very idea of what a child is, and how such trademarks come to serve as ways of categorising children ‘at risk’ and in need of further intervention. Likewise, categorising practices constituting boundaries between the inside and outside of nationality and normality are analysed as part of the educational work to redeem the child of a nation facing articulated risks such as migration. Articulating educational problems as problems of handling risk legitimates interventions, which in themselves may lead to new forms of diversity and exclusion.      

References: Beck, U. (1993). Risk society, towards a new modernity. London: Sage Bloch, M.N., Kennedy, D., Lightfoot T. & Weyenberg, D. (Eds.) (2006). the child in the world/the world in the child. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Buchardt, M. & Plum, M. (In press). Nordic education as schooling for ‘life’ between two ‘Sputnik shocks’. In Educational Temporalities: Local, National, and Global Perspectives Sense Publishers. Hultqvist, K. (2006). The Future is Already Here. In U. Olsson, K. Petersson & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), The Future Is Not What It Appears To Be. Pedagogy, Genealogy and Political Epistemology. Stockholm: HLS Förlag. Plum, M. (2014). A ‘Globalised’ Curriculum: International comparative practices and the pre-school child as a site of economic optimisation. Discourse - Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(4), 570-583. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.871239 Popkewitz, T. S. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform : science, education, and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge. Villadsen, K. (2004). Det sociale arbejdes genealogi. Om kampen om at gøre fattige og udstødte til frie mennesker. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.