An autoethnographic study of post-apartheid South African policy for young children: Hope for a convivial society

Abstract

This study concerns the potential of early childhood policy to construct flourishing sociabilities and to bring about liberatory change for children, their families and communities in post-apartheid South Africa. The thesis combines a decolonial project with a poststructuralist policy analysis and reflexivity as genealogy with autoethnography as a call to action. The autoethnography draws on my experience in South African early childhood policy and practice over several decades, as well as public policy documents and my personal archive of reports, correspondence and notes from that period. The thesis develops a series of arguments. First, that the South African government constructs early childhood services narrowly as preparing young children for school and work in a capitalist society on the assumption that this can change their economic circumstances. Second, the stated intention of policies to address poverty and inequality, has been thwarted by the uncritical acceptance of taken-for-granted global discourses, such as narrow notions of evidence, western child development, understanding the child as return on investment and referencing urban middle-class contexts and values. Third, continual colonial thinking has constructed knowledge and power hierarchies and has silenced debate and diverse constructions of childhood and society that might inspire radically different futures. As a call to action, I flag appreciative dialogical strategies that have attempted to resist the government problematisations. To employ reflexivity as genealogy, I deconstruct my own problem proposals in autobiographical vignettes. I identify the tensions between my liberatory intentions and the requirements of post-structuralist deconstruction as the most difficult challenge throughout my study. I identify as a wayfarer on this research journey and briefly introduce some of the exciting post-humanist and new materialist theoretical strands that have sustained and nurtured me on the latter part of the journey and that offer potentials for opening up a territory for future wayfaring that might lead to a plethora of alternatives energising pluriversal politics, and many possibilities for flourishing sociabilities (including more-thanhuman sociabilities), in which all enjoy harmonious lives of meaning and dignity. Keywords: early childhood, autoethnography, policy analysis, knowledge and power hierarchies, decoloniality, South Africa