Rachel Langford - Theorizing Feminist Ethics of Care in Early Childhood Practice: Possibilities and Dangers

Theorizing Feminist Ethics of Care
in Early Childhood Practice

Feminist Thought in Childhood Research

Series editors: Jayne Osgood and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

Drawing on feminist scholarship, this boundary-pushing series explores the use of creative, experimental, new materialist and post-humanist research methodologies that address various aspects of childhood. Feminist Thought in Childhood Research foregrounds examples of research practices within feminist childhood studies that engage with post-humanism, science studies, affect theory, animal studies, new materialisms and other post-foundational perspectives that seek to decentre human experience. Books in the series offer lived examples of feminist research praxis and politics in childhood studies. The series includes authored and edited collections from early career and established scholars addressing past, present and future childhood research issues from a global context.

Also available in the series

Feminist Research for 21st-Century Childhoods: Common Worlds Methods, edited by B. Denise Hodgins

Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods: Generative Entanglements, edited by Jayne Osgood and Kerry H. Robinson

Theorizing Feminist Ethics of Care
in Early Childhood Practice

Possibilities and Dangers

Edited by

Rachel Langford

Sonja Arndt is Senior Lecturer in early childhood education in the Early Years Research Centre. She is a Director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her teaching covers a wide range of topics across the early childhood education and teacher education programs, with a particular interest in using post-structural, philosophical, and feminist perspectives to question taken-for-granted truths and assumptions.

Marian Barnes is Professor Emeritus of social policy at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Caring and Social Justice (2006) and Care in Everyday Life: An Ethic of Care in Practice (2012) as well as the lead editor of Ethics of Care: Critical Advances in International Perspective (2015). She has written numerous articles on her research that seeks to conceptually and empirically draw connections between care, social cohesion, and social justice.

B. Denise Hodgins is the Executive Director of the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network in British Columbia, Canada, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria. Her work as a researcher, pedagogist, and educator is rooted in feminist materialism and explores the implications that postfoundational theories and methodologies have for twenty-first-century childhood studies.

Maria Karmiris is a PhD student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada, in the Department of Social Justice Education. Some of her research interests include disability studies, elementary curriculum studies, post-structural feminist research methodologies, and decolonial studies. She is also an elementary school teacher with the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Since beginning her career in 2002, she has taught students from Kindergarten to Grade 6 in both the regular classroom and in segregated special needs settings.

Rachel Langford is Associate Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. From 2006 to 2016 she served as the director of the School. She is a co-editor of Caring for Children: Social Movements and Public Policy in Canada (UBC Press, 2017). Other publications focus on the inclusion of children with disabilities in early childhood settings, early childhood pedagogy, and ECE workforce issues. Her current research project, Caring about Care: An Examination of Care in Canadian Childcare, is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Amy Mullin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare and numerous articles about children, caregiving, and ethical responsibility.

Colette Rabin (Associate ProfessorElementary Education) teaches in the joint credential/masters program at San Jose State University, United States. She teaches educational foundations, research, classroom management, and student teaching courses. Prior to teaching graduate school, she taught grades kindergarten through middle school for twelve years. Her research interests are in care ethics, aesthetics, sustainability, and social justice. Colette has explored the nature of relationships in schools from multiple perspectives and how to create and sustain them from the perspective of an ethic of care as a conceptual schema.

Griet Roets is a tenure track Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Ghent University, Belgium. Her research is mainly inspired by feminist theory and attempts to challenge binary and categorical thinking in social work and social welfare issues. Her research interests include concepts of citizenship and welfare rights; intersections of gender, poverty, disability, and age; and interpretative and biographical research methodologies.

Rachel Rosen is Lecturer in Childhood at University College London, UK. Her current research is focused on the care of children, by children, on migration journeys, as well as how these caring practices are taken into account (or not) in childrens efforts to settle and claim asylum in the UK and the perceived commonalities and conflicts between childrens interests and womens interests and, more broadly, intersections and antagonisms between feminisms and the politics of childhood. She is a co-editor of two books: Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes?, with Katherine Twamly (UCL Press), and Reimagining Childhood Studies, with Spyros Spyrou and Daniel Cook (Bloomsbury Press).

Geoff Taggart is Lecturer at the University of Reading, UK. He teaches and researches on the subject of care, reflective practice, and professionalism in the preparation of people for caring professions. He is also an ordained interfaith minister with an interest in contemplative pedagogy.

Marek Tesar is Associate Professor in Childhood Studies and Early Childhood Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, with a focus on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, and the history of education/childhood. His research is concerned with the construction of childhoods, notions of place/space of childhoods, and newly qualified teachers.

Michel Vandenbroeck is Professor in Family Pedagogy and Head of the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on early childhood care and education, parent support, and family policies, with a special interest for processes of inclusion and exclusion in contexts of diversity.

Katrien Van Laere works in VBJK, Centre for Innovation in the Early Years, affiliated with the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Ghent University, Belgium. Recently she finished a doctoral research project on conceptualizations of care and education. Her research interests include feminist ethics of care, social justice, and accessibility of ECEC services.

Kelsey Wapenaar is an early childhood educator at the University of Victoria Child Care Services. With a background in early education and arts, her interest in a common worlds framework, multi-species relationships, and sustainability influences her approach to teaching. She is intrigued by the entanglements that are entwined within assemblages of gardens and how the arts can be a vehicle to make sense of these relationships.