Re-imagining Gender in the Early Childhood Workforce

This book draws on feminist theorisations and more-than-human approaches to re-imagine gender in the early childhood workforce. Sid Mohandas presents new research carried out in a Montessori nursery in the UK looking the workforce’s interactions with everyday “objects” in the nursery such as tea, cameras and snot. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s situated feminist practice Mohandas reveals the many gendered and more-than-gendered forces, including those of race, caste and class at play in the relations, stories and worlds within the nursery setting. Debates, policies and practices around gender in the early childhood workforce have predominantly focused on the under-representation of men and the recuperative outcomes promised through the inclusion of men. This book is concerned with the ways a gendered workforce can be re-imagined when the boundaries of research are stretched beyond mere human inclusion and attention is paid to ordinary and unassuming relationships that encompass everyday experiences in the nursery. By employing feminist theorisations that foreground materiality, affect, discourse, place and temporalities, the book demonstrates ways in which gender can be understood differently in the early childhood workforce.