Advancing Gender and Racial Justice in Early Childhood Education: Persistent Challenges and Promises

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium critically interrogates how ostensibly neutral discourses propagated through developmental logic, organize early childhood policies and practices in North America, and reproduce harm to those whose bodies are racialized, hypersexualized, or even read as less than human. Drawing on critical childhood perspectives, poststructural feminism, queer and critical race theories, the authors excavate the detrimental effects of childhood ideologies that continue to be used by adults in both the larger socio-cultural debates and in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. As the rhetoric of a blissful childhood is being weaponized, we envision early childhood policies and practices that honor the brilliance of girls, trans, queer, Black, and other disfranchised identities.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education

Chair

• Carolina Snaider, University of Texas at Austin

Papers

• A Critical Race Media Discourse Analysis of the Kissing Case of 1958: Implications for Understanding Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Black Boyhood Play - Nathaniel Bryan, University of Texas at Austin

• The Harms of Childhood Innocence: Whiteness in Trans Policies and Early Childhood Pedagogies - Carolina Snaider, University of Texas at Austin

• The early normalization of violence against girls: What does kindergarten have to do with it? - Jessica Prioletta, Bishop's University

• Troubling gender binaries in early childhood education: Disrupting epistemic injustice through non-binary autobiographic writing - Adam W.J. Davies, University of Guelph

Discussant

• Brian L. Wright, University of Memphis