Every rose has its thorns: Domesticity and care beyond the dyad in ECEC

Teresa K Aslanian

doi:10.1177/2043610620978508

Abstract

Care is traditionally researched in ECEC as a dyadic, human phenomenon that relies heavily of tropes of females as care providers. The assumption that care is produced in dyadic relationships occludes material care practices that occur beyond the dyad. Drawing on Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s care ethics and Karen Barad’s focus on the agency of materiality, I have sought to explore how care is produced outside of dyadic relations in ECEC and how that care relates to domestic practices and flourishing in ECEC.

Highlights

This article builds on a micro-ethnographic study of how care is produced beyond dyadic human relationships at a Norwegian early childhood education and care (ECEC) center for children under 3 years
To move beyond a dyadic conception of care, I drew on Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) feminist approach to care as a situated, not necessarily dyadic practice (p. 40), and Barad’s (2007) agential realism that emphasizes the intra-relations of human and more-than-human phenomena
Care in society on traditional associations of care with unpaid and untrained labor performed at home; estimating that including time spent on unpaid child-care in American households in calculations of the US gross domestic product (GDP) would increase the GDP by 43%

Summary

Introduction

This article builds on a micro-ethnographic study of how care is produced beyond dyadic human relationships at a Norwegian early childhood education and care (ECEC) center for children under 3 years. Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) extend the conversation about care from a private, dyadic phenomenon, to a politically relevant “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.”. This definition resists the association of care with women’s biological, cultural and historical position, extending the notion of care to include a whole array of activities performed by both men and women. Needs are related to what it takes to keep us alive and intentional caring is only the small part humans can do, while entangled with the non-human environment, and thinking with to promote flourishing and becoming “as well as possible.”

Domesticity and care in ECEC

The Norwegian context

Portraiture methodology beyond the dyad

Making ourselves at home in ECEC

Findings

Author biography