Blank Slates: Boundary-work and Neoliberalism in New Haven Childcare Policy [electronic resource].

9781124807072

1 online resource (222 p.)

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Blank Slates is an ethnographic representation of early childhood advocates', educators' and caregivers' responses to the encroachment of neoliberal strategies and ideology into early care and education. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in New Haven, Connecticut between 2005 and 2009, I represent how members of the early childhood community deployed boundary-work and ambivalence as cultural responses to the neoliberal turn in childcare. Childcare has shifted from being one part of a comprehensive plan to eradicate poverty and support working families to a narrowly focused initiative to raise student achievement. Using ethnographic methods and archival research, I represent what happened to a city and its families as federal and local policymakers stopped framing childcare as a family good and began using it as a tool used primarily for a child's academic benefit. Blank Slates contributes to the growing literature on neoliberalism in the public sector by providing an ethnographic representation of a community of early childhood advocates, educators and caregivers that finds itself adjusting to shifts in state and local policies regarding poor children, and the people and institutions that care for them.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

October 03, 2012

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2011.

Yale University.