Friendly Guns: Power, Play, and Choice in Preschool
Abstract
This paper examines the power relations that emerged during an eight-week study of an afterschool program in a Montessori preschool. Drawing from a theoretical assemblage that engages Foucault’s theory of biopower and Bennett’s conceptualization of thing power, I analyze the intra-actions between the human and more-than-human and consider how children’s bodies were disciplined to do and be certain things during a time of day when children could choose their play activities. A critical discourse analysis of ethnographic data details the ways in which certain intra-actions
normalized some children’s ways of knowing, being, doing, and playing while marginalizing others. I conclude by attending to the potential of children’s relationships with popular culture in early childhood classrooms.
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Copyright (c) 2020 Kortney Sherbine
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