Internationally, in conversations about how to reduce economic and social inequalities in society, there is considerable interest in the role early childhood education and care (ECEC) can play in achieving political goals, such as social mobility for children growing up in low-income families and improved student achievement at later stages of education (see e.g. Familiedepartementet, 2024; Strietholt et al., 2020). Moreover, in the Norwegian context where we are positioned, there seems to be a growing interest in how ECEC can function as social equalizers (Familiedepartementet, 2024; Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2024). This paper emerges from an ongoing project in which we engage with how early childhood is entangled with the issue of socioeconomic differences. And further with how educational institutions for young children are understood as both part of and as solutions to challenges often associated with socioeconomic differences in the broader society, such as social exclusion, health problems, low educational achievement and barriers to labour market participation. More specifically, in the project we are interested in responsibilities given ECEC institutions in relation to socioeconomic differences and the above-mentioned associated challenges, and in kinds of research and pedagogies these hopeful imaginaries seem to both produce and sideline. 

The educational responses ECEC institutions are encouraged to practice in relation to the above-mentioned inequalities, through policy, research and other knowledge-producing fields such as media, depends on how children and childhoods are philosophically approached, and what kind of knowledge these approaches might create (and not). It is here, at the intersection of onto-epistemology, knowledge creation, and pedagogical practices that our project takes shape. Inspired by Nxumalo and Brown (2020) and de Oliveira (2021), among others, we understand pedagogical work aimed at social and economic equity as something more than just a problem to be solved, but rather as a complex difficulty requiring sustained attention and effort. To sit with this complex difficulty we think and imagine with the concept ‘hospicing’ (Andreotti et al., 2015), which might help us turn our gaze towards how we have arrived at this situation as a society, and which, instead of accelerating more of the same as a response, can provide a foundation for palliative care and open up for other pedagogical practices.

The presentation also engages with figurations as a theoretical-methodological concept. In tracing modern figurations of child, we lean on insights from thinkers such as Claudia Castañeda (2002), Erica Burman (2024), and Donna Haraway (1988, 2008). Our interest in modern figurations of child and childhood thus lies in a) what these figurations bodies forth, b) their relations to the world-making circulations of ideas about ECEC as a means to reduce social inequalities and exclusion, c) and how one through tracings of these figurations might push to dissolve the spell of modernity (Andreotti & Pietroiusti, 2023) and make space for more liberatory ways to engage with injustices in ECEC.

As Haraway writes forth, figures help her “grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making entanglements that [she] call[s] contact zones” (Haraway, 2008, p. 4). Thinking with Haraway (2008), “figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another” (p. 5). Within modernity, however, conceptions of personhood are treated as social categories where certain properties can be ascribed and attributed to a delineated group of persons. These processes are located in time and space and therefore bring forth particular conceptions of child and childhood. One of the problems with such conceptions is the ongoing reification of them. Categories tend to be used as if they are representations of concrete children, childhoods or persons. As Lee (2020) frames it, actual children go about their lives “shadowed by a figure of ‘the child’”, a figure that has “deep historical, cultural, and political roots” (p. 190). In formulations such as “the flexible child”, “the innocent child”, “the robust child” or “the vulnerable child” these reifications continue. Castañeda (2002; 2020) brings Haraway’s concept of figurations into childhood studies. She argues that “to inhabit these figures as a theorist is both to account for their power and to make space for alternative, more liberatory figurations” (Castañeda, 2020, p. 317). Processes of figuration might ascribe and generate ideal and hierarchical notions of child and childhood, that according to Burman (2024, p. 1), can be seen to rely upon or be co-constitutive of abjected or peripheral children and childhoods. In tentative acts of palliative care for (hospicing) modernity, it is important to be both “properly taught by”, and “to attend to” its earlier and ongoing affliction (Andreaotti et al., 2015 p. 28). One of the methodological approaches we are exploring to become able to do this philosophical labour of care, is tracings of modern figurations of child and childhood. A possible next step then, can be to trace how figurations of child and childhood participate in the constitution of hierarchical or peripheral children and childhoods. Through tracings of figurations of child and childhood we are in the midst of attempting to learn from modern conceptions of personhood, child and childhood, and to explore our own self-implicatedness (Andreotti et al., 2015, p. 28) within these figurations.

As the conference call encourages, we curiously reach out for a methodological approach which might help us create knowledge about how we can continue to live in times of polycrises. Andreotti (Andreotti & Pietroiusti, 2023, para. 2 ) connects this time of polycrises to what she calls “the spell of modernity”. Through hospicing modernity she seeks to find remedies and tools to keep on living and giving palliative care for modernity. We will share our tracings from readings of various texts, such as policy documents, research reports, journal articles, seminal historical texts and curriculum in ECEC teacher education, as well as other informal sources such as mass media and social media. With Castañeda (2002, p. 3) we ask: What figurations can be traced through these texts and what might these figurations have bodied forth and continue to body forth? Thus, we are curious about and are exploring what properties are ascribed discursively (semiotically) to figurations of child and childhood within modern knowledge practices. Further we explore what material practices are generated and constituted in entanglement with these discursive practices. By tracing and presenting figurations of modern notions of personhood, children, and childhood, this presentation seeks to contribute with methodological explorations of how knowledge production related to social inequality can be conducted. In this respect, the presentation aims to experiment with ways to learn from the afflictions of modernity as an entry to carefully dismantle some of modernity's spells that contribute to maintaining particular figurations of children and childhood, as well as the expectations related to their outcomes. The findings we will share in this presentation are some of the figurations, along with some preliminary thoughts on what such a methodology might contribute for creating fugitive spaces (Trafi Prats, 2024).

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