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Orphans of Our Common Worlds
Author(s) -
Lindgren Therese,
Sjöstrand Öhrfelt Magdalena
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
educational theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1741-5446
pISSN - 0013-2004
DOI - 10.1111/edth.12369
Subject(s) - sociology , early childhood education , intervention (counseling) , early childhood , field (mathematics) , cultural capital , social capital , gender studies , social science , pedagogy , developmental psychology , psychology , mathematics , psychiatry , pure mathematics
In this article, Therese Lindgren and Magdalena Sjöstrand Öhrfelt compare two discourses that have been influential in the field of early education: the social‐economic and the posthumanist. Studying how the young educable child is articulated in these seemingly contradictory discourses, Lindgren and Sjöstrand Öhrfelt have found that the discourses not only overlap, but, to some extent, they also reinforce each other. Both discourses depict the future as precarious, and along with identifying deficiencies of our time, they seek to justify the need for early intervention in terms of education. The young child is portrayed, on the one hand, as not‐yet‐realized human capital and, on the other, as a site for change and new beginnings. That is, the child figures as the key to a better and more sustainable world. In both discourses, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is depicted as an emancipating project, detaching the child from the child's social and cultural contexts and historical past, making the young educable child an “orphan.”