Engaging with early childhood educators' encounters with race: an exploration of the discursive, material and affective dimensions of whiteness and processes of racialization.
Date
2012-08-29
Authors
Di Tomasso, Lara
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Abstract
There is a lack of critical Canadian scholarship addressing questions of racialization in early childhood education, and yet questions of identity and diversity are at the center of education with young children. Substantive engagement with issues surrounding processes of racialization in early childhood education is often stunted by assertions of childhood innocence, discourses that normalize whiteness, or responses entrenched in multicultural discourse. Using early childhood educators' engagements with racialization and whiteness as starting points, this research employs feminist poststructural, postcolonial and sociomaterial theories to reveal and engage with how whiteness and processes of racialization are negotiated in politically, socially, geographically and temporally located spaces. An exploration of the forces of discourse, affect and materiality in shaping and silencing race opens up new spaces for challenging whiteness and processes of racialization in early childhood education and beyond.
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Keywords
Early childhood education, Racialization, Whiteness, Multiculturalism, Canada