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Generationing Educational and Caring Spaces for Young Children: Case of Preschool Bathroom

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Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations

Part of the book series: Geographies of Children and Young People ((GCYP,volume 5))

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Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how Foucauldian thinking can be used to understand the ways in which educational and care spaces are constituted through mechanisms of “generationing” by “putting into action” various historically contingent knowledges and discourses about “childhood” and children and how those are spatialized into material arrangements. Mechanisms of “generationing” operate in children’s places but the differences they re/produce between “childhood” and “adulthood” are often taken for granted. This chapter aims to trouble the taken-for-granted “generational view” of children’s places and show how children’s places are not simply given or happen or being created on uncharted territories. To do this, the chapter provides a brief review of “relational space” and the inseparability of knowledge/power/space in Foucault’s theorizing. It then retools Alanen’s concept of “generationing” as a set of mechanisms of power. The case of an Australian preschool bathroom provides an illustration of the various mechanisms through which “generationing” of spaces and material arrangements takes place and its power effects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SPARG, The University of Tampere, Finland and The University of Newcastle, University Drive, 2308, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Zsuzsa Millei

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  1. Zsuzsa Millei
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Correspondence to Zsuzsa Millei .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

    Samantha Punch

  2. The School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Robert M. Vanderbeck

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Millei, Z. (2018). Generationing Educational and Caring Spaces for Young Children: Case of Preschool Bathroom. In: Punch, S., Vanderbeck, R. (eds) Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-026-1_25

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