Early Childhood Subjectivities, Inequities, and Imaginitive Play

Abstract

This chapter provides a review of scholarship which considers play as a site where children’s subjectivities are lived and negotiated. Focusing on research about young children in early childhood settings in advanced capitalist Scandinavian and Anglophone countries, the chapter highlights the connection between class, race, gender, and generational subjectivities made in and through play and their relationship to broader social inequities. Key premises of this scholarship are discussed including the recognition that play is not a natural, imitative, or trivial act, but a site and means by which children, even the very young, make subjectivities, socio-spatial relations, and social orders. The chapter also explores the geographies of play subjectivities, attending to the generationing of play spaces, the significance of boundaries and territories for socio-spatial relations, and play’s embodied and inter-corporeal characteristics. Debates within the literature are discussed including the extent to which play can be viewed as a decisive site of children’s agency as opposed to a highly constrained site of action and the degree to which play reproduces relations of domination or can be understood as emancipatory.