MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: Across global contexts, early childhood education remains profoundly gendered. The absence of men in this domain of work is striking. Men’s absence is often reduced to questions of individual preference or their disposition towards children and care. Such explanations however are analytically limited. They obscure the deeper structural, cultural and historical conditions that organise early childhood education as a feminised space and regulate who can legitimately inhabit it. When men do enter this space, they encounter a field structured by suspicion, surveillance and the policing of gendered and sexual norms. Their presence provokes questions about how masculinity is both privileged and constrained. In this conference we are interested in how masculinity is constituted, regulated and contested within early childhood education. How are men to be understood in early childhood education? Under what conditions is masculinity made, contested and reconfigured in early childhood settings? This conference brings together scholars, practitioners and policymakers to engage with these questions in relation to the South African context and beyond. By situating men in early childhood education within broader debates on masculinities, gender and childhood, this conference seeks to advance more critical and theoretically grounded conversations about the future of the field. This conference is grounded in critical, feminist and decolonial traditions that refuse simplistic explanations of gender difference. Instead, the conference opens up the space to contribute to understanding masculinity as relational, contingent and entangled with gender, sexuality, race, class and historical formations. At a time when anti-gender and anti-feminist movements are gaining traction including through the manosphere, the conference confronts the ongoing inequalities that render early childhood education as a no-go area for men. University of KwaZulu-Natal http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ UKZN Facebook page   / ukzn1   UKZN Twitter   / ukzn   UKZN Online Newsletter http://www.ukzn.ac.za/media-publicati...