Lunch time at the child care centre: Neoliberal assemblages in early childhood education

Abstract

In this article we interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. We consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations and policies, and everyday food routines. We attend to the embodied intensities, desires and affects that accompany these neoliberal formations. In particular, we are interested in making visible entanglements between particular situated neoliberal assemblages and racialization and neocolonialism. In our analysis, we consider how eating and food routines, situated within Inuit early childhood education, come to matter as instances of neoliberal encounters that merge with other discursive and material forces to create particular, situated and at times contradictory neoliberal assemblages that have colonizing and racializing effects on the capacities of certain bodies in certain spaces.