Re-imagining Gender in the Early Childhood Workforce

This book draws on feminist and more-than-human approaches to re-imagine gender in the early childhood workforce. Debates, policies and practices around gender in the early childhood workforce have predominantly focused on the under-representation of men and the recuperative outcomes promised through the inclusion of men. Mohandas’ research is, however, concerned with the ways a gendered workforce can be re-imagined when the boundaries of research are stretched beyond mere human inclusion and attention is paid to ordinary objects and unassuming relations that constitute everyday life in the nursery. Through an attunement to the atmospheric, a gendered workforce is re-conceptualised as gendered forces that work across bodies (human and nonhuman), spaces, places and temporalities. Through vignettes from the nursery, Mohandas makes visible how each encounter is composed of gendered and more-than-gendered (i.e. racialised, classed and casted) forces, relations, stories and worlds. By employing feminist theorisations that foreground materiality, affect, discourse, place and temporalities, the book offers new ways to deepen conversations and practices around gender in the early childhood workforce.