Public Defence: Mona-Lisa Angell

Mona-Lisa Angell is defending her dissertation for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

The doctoral work has been carried out at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports, and Educational Science.

You are invited to follow the trial lecture and the public defence.

• Link to full dissertation

Summary

This thesis explores parents’ complex embodied and affective care work related to their children in/through kindergarten. Woven into this, is the question of the relations such labour of care have or may have to early childhood pedagogy. The place where the phenomena parental care and early childhood pedagogy meet in this study, is parent-pedagogue conversations.

The study began with video-observations of such conversations. Doing these observations, awakened a curiosity about why parents’ complex care work is so absent from early childhood pedagogy specialist and research literature when it was so omnipresent and affectively moving in this video data.

Building on three sub-studies, I argue that parents' complex affective and embodied care work related to their child in kindergarten, is no small matter. This care can be a vulnerable, life-sustaining labour with affective and ethical implications for early childhood pedagogy. However, there is a long tradition for silencing and subordinating parental care to early childhood pedagogy.

Sub-study 1 discusses how in research, such silencing and subordination is performed methodologically through language-centred methods. The sub-study also offers a methodological experiment with Seeing/Drawing as a sensory, visual, and affective approach to studying video data. Seeing/drawing allow different fragments of data to come to the fore than language-centred approaches do.

Sub-study 2 explores how the silencing and subordinating is performed in early childhood pedagogy through parent-pedagogue conversations becoming what Sara Ahmed calls affective containers. Such affective containers require extra atmosphere work from parents when their care is silenced and subordinated to pedagogy, and thus positioned as affective strangers.

Silencing and subordination of parental care to early childhood pedagogy is also generated through materials used and produced in relation to parent-pedagogue conversations. These materials push the conversations towards becoming scripted apparatuses of assessment and concern.

Sub-study 3 draws on Karen Barad’s concept of the apparatus to demonstrate how parent-pedagogue conversations are more than just meetings between parents and professionals. They are also meetings with specialist and political materials that does something with/in the conversations.

The sub-study problematizes that these apparatuses turn the critical-analytical gaze of early childhood pedagogy towards individual children and their families, instead of, for instance, the pedagogical work in the kindergarten. Paradoxically, parental care is both overlooked and in constant danger of ending up under the microscope.

Leaning on the call from feminist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti to strive to empower those living along various axes of injustice, I conclude by calling for a rethinking of the limits and unheeded effects of early childhood pedagogy and its increasingly extensive societal role.