‘Hang on, she just used that word like it’s totally easy’: Encountering ordinary racial affects in early childhood education and care

Abstract

At a time when racism remains prevalent in educational spaces, this paper addresses what else we can know about the ways in which race and racism manifest and are experienced in practice. This paper draws on continual mobilisations of affect and new materialist theory to examine the conditions of emergence through which race and racism are experienced within ordinary, yet affective, encounters. I propose that drawing attention to how race surfaces in affective encounters may allow us to develop more critical interventions that challenge racisms in process.