The Possibilities of Critical Participatory Action Research: Unpacking Neoliberal Demands in Early Childhood Services

• In Event: Critical Qualitative Research as Instrument for the Reconceptualization of Contemporary Early Education Issues

Abstract

This presentation will explore how critical, politically provocative, participatory action research can help reveal the complex ways in which neoliberal discourses are deployed in Canadian early childhood services; as well as how participatory action research can be useful in shifting the terrain of forces that shape neoliberal capitalism’s interests.

Today, according to Deleuze (1990), we live in a society of control. While disciplinary societies, as Foucault (1977) defined them, are characterized by enclosures or molds; societies of control treat control as modulation, “like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (Deleuze, 1990, p.4). Hardt and Negri (2000) suggest that the processes of deterritorializing and decentering define societies of control. These societies are enmeshed in the landscape of early childhood services in Canada through the current demands of neoliberalism: efficiency, productivity, competition and privatization (Ruffolo, 2009). This model of early childhood education shapes, constrains, and territorializes discourses of the early childhood educator subject.

Following the work of Michelle Fine and her colleagues (2004) on participatory methodologies, this presentation will discuss how participatory action research practices, that are politically-informed and critically-conceptualized, can begin to uncover, break down and re-align the limits and segmentarities that form educator subjectivities captured by the demands of neoliberalism. The presentation will employ examples from an ongoing participatory action research project with early childhood educators in the context of British Columbia, Canada.

Author

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria