Care: Cartographies of power and politics in ECEC

Abstract

Early childhood educators’ work is embedded in the complexities of relations and relationships, and this relational work is entangled in care. Care can be difficult to define and is often assumed as an inherent ‘good’ in education. In heavily feminised work environments such as early childhood education, it is easily assumed to be part of what naturally occurs amongst educators and children. However, I suggest that it is dangerous to assume we understand a concept as complex and value laden as care without also engaging in reflection and analysis about the complexity and multiplicity of care. In this paper I will explore some threads of care in early childhood education and care. I make use of Braidotti’s concept of cartographies to critically examine aspects of care in early childhood education. A cartography enables an exploration of power and knowledge in relation to care. Care, like classrooms, is messy, relational, in action, situated and contextual. This examination of care enables the perceived connection between care as a necessary ‘good’ to be contested. Instead, care is mapped across multiple threads and potentials, threads that might sometimes be warm and sustaining, while sometimes being oppressive and stressful.

Introduction

Early childhood educators’ work is embedded in the complexities of relationships, and this relational work is necessarily entangled in care. Despite the centrality of care in the work of early childhood educators, it can be difficult to define care in the context of early childhood education. Within a dominant discursive framework of education in early childhood, rather than care, the place of care and caring becomes marginalised and silenced, taken-for-granted and assumed as an inherent ‘good’. In heavily feminised work environments such as early childhood education, it is simply considered part of what naturally occurs amongst educators and children.

However, I suggest that it is dangerous to assume we understand a concept as complex and value laden as care without also engaging in reflection and analysis about the complexity and multiplicity of care. In this paper I will explore some threads of care in early childhood education and care. I make use of Braidotti’s concept of cartographies to critically examine aspects of care in early childhood education. A cartography enables an exploration of power and knowledge in relation to care. Care, like classrooms, is messy, relational, in action, situated and contextual. This examination of care enables the perceived connection between care as a necessary ‘good’ to be contested. Instead, care is mapped across multiple threads and potentials, threads that might sometimes be warm and sustaining, while sometimes being oppressive and stressful. In undertaking such mapping of care in the early years, I aim to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of the idea, while also contributing to the creation of a space for examining care in early childhood education and care.

Genealogies and cartographies

In November 2016 at the Summer Institute of the Antipodes conference, Rosi Braidotti, in her keynote address asked her audience: ‘What are we in the process of becoming?’ Braidotti asks this as a way of thinking with and beyond histories of the present. Cartographies, as the word suggests, are mappings that help us to understand the present as a combination of where we have been, what we are seeking to be, and the traces of who we are becoming (Braidotti, 2016). Braidotti’s use of cartographies as an expansion of genealogies, are a ‘theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present’ (Braidotti, 2011: 216). These are readings that enable a mapping of ourselves in time and in space while also locating possibilities for the future.

Rose (2007) has suggested that genealogies, or histories of the present, sought to disrupt, to make space, to remind us of the contingency and non-necessity of the way things are. But as he went on to argue, we are already living through disruptive times, times ‘of maximal turbulence’ (Rose, 2007: 5), so perhaps instead we should be working towards modest cartographies mapping multiple histories and multiple futures that might serve to intervene in new ways. Cartographies push out the edges of genealogy, remaining historically located, theoretically driven, and political but also continuing through and across the present, and tentatively into the future. They invite us to reflect in non-linear and mobile ways upon how we came to be who we are today, while pushing the boundaries further to also ask what it is we might be seeking to be or become while searching for the traces of that becoming. This might also be thought of as a zig zagging as we locate ourselves in space and time (Braidotti, 2013: 164). Or as Lenz Taguchi (2016), suggests these are ‘. . .multiple threads and lines of articulation that together form a larger assemblage that works in mechanic and power-producing ways’ (p. 42). In the following section I consider how it might be possible explore care in the light of this zigzagging and mapping of cartographies, including the power and politics of care.

Thinking with care

To think with care it is necessary to find ways to make this very slippery word hold some ground, we need to stay with the trouble, as Haraway (2016) famously suggested, to sit with this problem of care. One part of this problem is that care matters deeply to those of us who engage with children in the early years. It is a part of our professional identity as early childhood educators; just as education, learning or pedagogy matter. We have a language for articulating our work as educators and of the importance of learning in the early years, yet care is easily marginalised. As Gibbons (2007) has pointed out, care has been assimilated by education. This assimilation marginalises questions of who cares and under what conditions caring is enacted. However, it has long been argued that all teachers, from early childhood through to tertiary, base their professional identity at least in part, in their care for students (Acker, 1995; Connell, 2013; Goldstein, 1997).

In early childhood education, it is critical to find ways to talk about this aspect of our professional lives without slipping into constructions of care as a natural or normalised. This is especially important in a field that is overwhelmingly dominated by women and historically based in maternalism or ‘mother care’ as a valourised ideal (Ailwood, 2007; Bown et al., 2011). Early childhood education and care has long been a feminist issue. So is care. There is a large field of research for us to draw upon to explore the complexities of care, especially that within the field of feminist ethics of care (e.g. Noddings, 2012; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 2010). A feminist ethic of care begins with a relational ontology and this has, in more recent explorations of care, been expanded to include post human and more than human thinking (e.g. Åsberg and Braidotti, 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

An enduring and widely cited definition of care is from Tronto and Fisher, as noted here in Tronto (2010),

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. The world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web. (p. 160)

The work of feminists such as Tronto (1993) and Sevenhuijsen (1998) built the case that the care work done in formal or institutional settings, such as early childhood education and care, is not simply a reproduction or substitution of the care work done in homes. Tronto (1993) resisted the idea that care should be ‘family-like’, arguing instead that institutional care is not family-care. Tronto (1993) suggested that care is relational, noting three axes of institutional care as purpose, power, and particularity. In other words, asking what is the purpose of the institution, what power relationships exist within the institution, and what is the particularity of the institution – where human relationships are understood to be diverse and plural and therefore particular to the specific context.

Sevenhuijsen (1998) also argued for care to be understood as inherent in a socio-political context of democratic citizenship. Her work encouraged us to think of caring institutions as microcosms of our wider socio-political contexts, suggesting that new vocabularies are necessary for understanding social engagement and relationships of care. As with Tronto (1993), Sevenhuijsen re-asserts the need to resist the feminisation of care, instead focusing on care as fundamental to human interdependency. With the more recent work of researchers in the sociology of science, for example, Jerak-Zuiderent (2015), Mol (2008), and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), an ongoing development of understandings of care can be seen. These researchers move into a post human theoretical space, exploring the idea of care as relational within the human and more-than-human areas of techno science and nature cultures.

For Mol (2008), in her ethnography of diabetes clinics, care is in tension between logic, tinkering, and choice – a constant and messy engagement in processes of trial and error. This process emerges as entangled in the specificities of the professional knowledge of medical staff, their knowledge of patient’s lives and experiences and in relationship with the ways patients engage with their disease, the treatments, and the medical staff. Jerak-Zuiderent (2015) also undertook an ethnography of health care, in this case aged care. Jerak-Zuiderent’s research focused on the issue of accountability in relation to care, exploring how caring can be accomplished, and become accountable, in the day-to-day work of institutional care contexts. Jerak-Zuiderent, Mol and Puig de la Bellacasa all note the messiness of care. Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) research is, in part, an exploration of the human and non-human web of soil and permaculture. As she points out care is ‘. . .unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 7).

When thinking through care in early childhood education and care, there are many threads that could be picked up: care as the invisible and taken-for-granted work of all teachers, but especially those who teach in early years settings. Care as an assumed good. Care as benign. Care as power or care as judgement. Care as marginalised in efforts to gain professional and political recognition. Care is a word that can mean everything and nothing, in a similar way to over-used words such as ‘globalisation’ or ‘sustainability’. In this paper, I pick up three of the many possible zigzagging threads of care and early childhood education, (a) care as power, (b) care as commodity and (c) care as judgement.

A thread: Care as power

Power, like care, is situated, enacted, relational and networked. Across many of the writers exploring an ethic of care is a common theme of care in relation to power, to messiness and specificity, with associated challenges to the normative connection with a feminine ideal of ‘good’ care. The perceived connection between care and ‘good’ is widely contested, with Mol (2008) for example, asking us to ‘disentagle “care” from an all too immediate association with kindness, dedication and generosity’ (p. 5). It has long been argued that care illuminates relationships of power and privilege (e.g. Hochschild, 2000; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1993). Considering who undertakes routine care work, who can afford to pay another to do this work, and the level of non and/or under payment for this work highlights the ways in which paid and unpaid care work is devalued and often precarious, while concurrently being enacted through power relationships. Sevenhuijsen (1998) pointed out that,

People with power are more often in a position to receive or demand care than to provide it, and, conversely, people with less social power find themselves more often on the ‘underside’ of care; that is, in situations in which they provide care without much power over the conditions and the means, and often in positions of invisibility and voicelessness. (p. 24)

Engaging with the power and privilege of care also enable us to explore the marginalisation of non-dominant conceptualisations of care. It also enables a feminist ethic of care that positions care as a political act of resistance (Mountz et al., 2015). As Hobart and Kneese (2020), argue ‘. . .radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not (p. 2)’. In this way thinking with care can be a way forward in difficult times, but as we proceed we must ensure that care is not always conflated with a necessary or normalised ‘good’, as a happiness, kindness or love.

A thread: Care as commodity

Neoliberal markets commodify all that lives, all aspects of our lives are tied up in markets and genuinely getting ‘off-grid’ is very difficult. Markets require competition and scarcity in order to increase demand. Capitalist, neoliberal market economies and societies are built on consumption and producing more and more in order to consume more and more, which also requires more and more people to do the consuming. Markets are enshrined with a citizen who is an autonomous and rational individual, who also presents publicly as not requiring care, but in reality requires invisible care often done by a woman. In this market environment of scarcity and competition, an ideal of care for children can be packaged and commodified. In such an equation, children become family assets, an asset to be monitored, educated and cared for. In the UK context, Vincent and Ball (2001) described this as a peculiar market in love. In Australia, for-profit early childhood settings have been dominant since the early 1990s; making it possible for an early childhood education and care company to market themselves as ‘providing high quality education and care of your precious assets since 1994’ (www.tillyschildcare.com.au).

Trying to untangle this peculiar market in love, raises the complexities of our relations and affects. We are all entangled in this together, we create these conditions, or as Haraway (2016) suggests, we are sympoietic ‘making with’, or as Braidotti (2016, 2020) often expresses it, we are in this together but we are not one. The market’s entanglements require working citizens to replicate and expand. And this market also requires those who need care, in this case children, to be in a private and/or institutionalised setting so that the adults can work and contribute to the maintenance of the economy. As was highlighted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown across Australia, early childhood education and care is intimately tied to working mothers. While those considered essential workers, such as nurses or grocery store staff, were required to report to work, early childhood educators were also required to care for their children. In and of themselves though, early childhood educators where rarely referred to as ‘essential’ and indeed, the Federal Government’s financial support package was withdrawn from the early childhood education sector many months before it was withdrawn from other sectors, exposing a lack of respect and recognition for the contribution of early childhood educators in Australia’s social and economic fabric.

A thread: Care as judgement

As I have stayed with this troubling word ‘care’, it has become clear that it can be used without much ‘care’ or thought, and it can be opaque and obscure. It is easily assumed as understood, as natural or straightforward and not worthy or in need of definition or debate. The ease with which care can used potentially renders the word empty and meaningless. In this way, care can become assumed and valourised as a ‘good’ in ECEC in much the same way as ideas such as play has been. Care can then be assumed to be a natural and ‘good’ aspect of what an early childhood educator does each day as a taken for granted part of their practice. But it is dangerous to assume we understand these words without thought and reflection. Toshalis (2012), explores how care functions in the work of a small group of preservice teachers, arguing that unexamined care is dangerous. He suggests that, ‘. . .we must recognize the seductiveness of the rhetoric of care – how well it explains and excuses, how powerfully it deflects and blames’ (Toshalis, 2012: 30).

Thinking with this thread of care as judgement is reminiscent of the well-known Foucaultian point that not everything is bad, but everything is dangerous (Foucault, 1983). While care remains taken for granted as necessarily a ‘good’, care can also become weaponized in order to oppress or judge. Below is a quote from a research interview I conducted some years ago, exploring relationships between parents and early childhood educators. It is this earlier research project that started me thinking about care, as references to care were made consistently across my discussions with both parents and educators. This quote from an interview with an early childhood education site director has stayed with me,

. . .I personally think, okay it’s really going out on a limb here, some of these children are in care too long. . .the parent who knocks off work at 3 o’clock and doesn’t pick their child up until quarter to six. We’re actually starting to get a bit tougher on it. And we did do a lot of talking about it before we decided. And it was fairly unanimous amongst the staff that it was, it was unacceptable. We’ve actually started to say to some parents, ‘we’re mindful that you don’t work on a Tuesday. And you’ve got your child in care, that’s fine, but they are not to stay here until quarter to six. We want them picked up at four thirty’. And we can do it now, I suppose, because we are full. We can be a little harder about it.

At the time of this research, early childhood education and care places were scarce in the area, and as the director indicated, ‘..because we are full. We can be a little harder about it’. As the provider of a scarce commodity in the early childhood education market, the director is powerfully positioned to make judgements about the choices families are making for their children’s care and education. The child is judged by the early childhood educators to be in the early childhood setting for too long, and this judgement functions to position the director, and her colleagues, as caring more for the child than the mother. This is then juxtaposed with the poor care, a deficit of care, provided by the parent/mother. The implication is that the mother/s in question do not care enough, are lazy or taking advantage of the educators, and that they are not providing adequate or appropriate care. Further, this is framed within the rhetoric of paid work as the only acceptable reason for having a child in an ECEC setting, a framing that is a reflection of the dominant debate in Australia.

This is one illustration of the paradoxical way care can be thought about in ECEC, that apparent care for the child is used to judge and control parents’ behaviours. As Toshalis (2012) suggested, care here is being used to deflect and to blame. This is one example of how relationships of care are entangled and enacted with within relationships of power, in this case enabling the reproduction of dominant discourses of ‘good mothering’ or ‘good care’ and the role of early childhood education within this relationship.

Exploring the threads: A limited cartography of care

In early childhood education, attention to the place of care in our work needs to be political, pushing back against the broader ‘neoliberal cascade’ in education (Connell, 2013). In this cascade, care is diminished and the focus is upon individuals who are autonomous and rational citizen/workers rather than on education as an encounter between interconnected, fragile and complex humans. Like Mol’s (2008) diabetes clinics, care in early childhood education is a tinkering, a constant shuffle and dance and interplay of teachers, children and families as they adjust, play and tinker to support children’s learning. In early childhood this is often subtle work, recognizing children’s cues and seeking constant feedback from the children. This is especially the case for pre-verbal children. Thinking with care in early childhood education could entail exploring the significant levels of professional knowledge, decision-making and ongoing reflection that already exist for the building and sustenance of caring relationships with colleagues, families and children. It also entails facing up to the challenge that care has the potential to function negatively, and within this acknowledge the ways in which care can operate as a form of oppression.

Aslanian (2018) reflects on the loss of a language of care in a recent review of Norwegian early childhood teacher education accreditation. This reflection provides us with an example of our entanglement with neo-liberal agendas. On the one hand, to gain political and professional recognition we must actively emphasise our educational credentials; often actively and strategically making use of economic cost/benefit analyses or neuroscience to scientifically ‘prove’ that the early years matter, and matter critically, in order to make our case for qualifications, funding and fair working conditions (Gibbons, 2007). However, the silencing of care in this equation leaves us personally and professionally diminished. In its most positive forms, early childhood education and care enables a community of people who learn together to understand, engage with and participate in the human and non-human world around them, to care for their patch on the planet, to care about learning and be excited by the possibilities learning offers in the life of every child and every educator.

It is at this moment of evanescence that the idea of care becomes thinkable, in other words it is through the silencing and disappearing of a language of care in early childhood that we also grasp for its return. It is, therefore, in this moment of its potential disappearing that care has again become thinkable and possible, providing an opportunity to critically re-engage with the place of care in early childhood education. Thinking about the place of care in early childhood education has seen a recent regrowth. In terms of care and our work in early childhood education, now is a moment to ask that most Foucaultian of questions, how did we come to be as we are today?

Conclusion

As Zygmunt et al. (2018) suggest, care can be a powerful force in disrupting the way in which schooling is done in and to historically marginalised communities. A language of care is important for this work; and understanding care as complex, as political, as relational also means that we have to acknowledge that oppressions can accompany care. I argue, following Sevenhuijsen (1998), Tronto (2010) and Mol (2008), that a language of care is necessary in early childhood education. Given the centrality of care to our work and relationships, having a language to express and examine this care seems essential. Care is a subtle and complex part of our work and to engage carefully with this aspect of our work in deep and reflective ways requires critical and subtle thought. Care matters. As I have explored in this paper, care is threaded through relationships of power, care is political, it is gendered, classed and potentially can be oppressive – it is all of these things. But if we are to live well in this world, then responsive, thoughtful and ethically engaged care is necessary.