Reproduction of inequality in peripheralised education and care landscapes

This article examines processes of peripheralisation in early childhood education and care settings in urban and rural areas of eastern Germany. The social upheavals that came in the wake of German reunification and the shift to a post-socialist society have not only had a material socioeconomic impact on these regions in general but also a cultural impact on early childhood education and care institutions specifically. Those impacts have been shaped by collective experiences with socialism and neoliberal transformation. The empirical data on which the analysis in this article is based come from group discussions with childcare workers that were conducted as part of the NeOBi project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this article, these discussions are analysed through a critical geopolitical and post-socialist lens to make the ‘power geometries’ of social change visible. By combining praxeological and spatial-analytical perspectives, it is possible to reconstruct how material conditions, demographic structures and the education and care curriculum are (re)presented in childcare workers’ perspectives. The article sets out methodological approaches and empirical results that can be used in the study of social change in ECEC settings and shows how social inequalities are produced spatially and historically.