Fantasies and Situated Knowledges. The "Child" and the "Mother" in Debates about the Swiss Kindergarten (DOMUS Seminar)

DOMUS Seminar Series 2023 - 2024

Dr Andrea De Vincenti, University of Teacher Education in Zurich, Switzerland

This paper discusses the potential of a feminist approach to the history of education. To do so it examines the categories “child” and “mother” in debates about the Swiss Kindergarten during the 1970s. It investigates and assesses how these categories were fabricated by a meshwork of various knowledges, and what powerful ‘work’ they did to stabilise and perpetuate a strongly gendered social order. The source base of this research are professional journals, grey literature and published writings and speeches of kindergarten teachers and teacher educators. 

Biography

Andrea De Vincenti is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Teacher Education in Zurich, Switzerland. She is a trained historian and wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Bern about knowledges and practices of schooling at the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. Today her main research topics are the history of teacher training and schooling in the 20th century, women's, gender and feminist history, knowledge history, the history of sex education and curriculum history.

This event is free and open to the public, staff and students.

Registration is essential to receive the link to ZOOM. The online link opens at 17.00 for conversation and technical run through and the formal seminar will start at 17.30.