A feeling of racialized and gendered differentiation

Research topic/aim:
It is widely recognized that race and gender are emotionally charged concepts (Davis & MacNaughton, 2009, p. 2; Krøjer, 2003) in politics, culture and even in pedagogics, not least in a Nordic daycare context characterized by colour- and genderblind universalism and exceptionalism (Padovan-Özdemir, 2023). Also, tokenism of equality and inclusion (Hamilton & Padovan-Özdemir, 2020; Heikkinen, 2016) impedes the development of professional literacy of sexism and racism. Characteristic of this research field is its preoccupation with race and gender as discursively and performatively constructed social phenomena, accordingly, making the emotionality of racialized and gendered differentiation absent and undertheorized. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to advance theorizations of how gendered and racial differentiations are felt and structurally embodied.

Theoretical framework:
Theoretically, we are inspired by and draw on decolonial feminist affect theory (Guilmette, 2020). This entails a poststructural understanding of childhood and social inequalities being constituted within social, cultural and historical  discourses and perpetuated through everyday practices (Robinson & Jones-Diaz, 2006, p. 16). It also acknowledges the intersectional complexities of inequality regimes (MacNaughton et al., 2009; Puroila et al., 2021), to which we add and explore the emotional dimension. Accordingly, we subscribe to a de-universalization of subject positions and a decolonization of affects to
promote a relational and structural understanding of emotions (Guilmette, 2020, pp. 313–314) and how they are invested in inequality regimes (Acker, 2006).

Methodological design:
We conduct a secondary analysis (Heaton, 2008) of observations from two Danish daycare research projects (Krøjer, in prep.; Padovan-Özdemir & Hamilton, 2022) which focused on gender, race and other social categories, respectively. These qualitative data sets are relevant to include and combine as they display empirical evidence of complex entanglements of embodiment, emotionality, and differentiation. Thus, our secondary analytical methodology unfolds by asking new research questions about unresolved empirical matters that have emerged in the two datasets (St. Pierre, 2019) and utilizing the
combination of datasets to strengthen the empirical foundation for theoretical conceptualization (Beck, 2019) of how feelings of gendered and racialized differentiation embodies a structure of inequality in daycare everyday life. Accordingly, we bring forth what is emergent in the empirical material.
Asking new research questions to datasets generated on other terms requires ethical considerations (Chatfield, 2020). First, our secondary analysis is ethically responsible, because the projects generating the empirical datasets focused on the same themes of diversity and inequality as does our secondary analysis. Second, both authors were involved in the production of the observation data, thus, knowledgeable of the context of the observations. Third, the re-use of the datasets lies within the timeframe of five years of storing consented to by the research participants.

Expected conclusions/findings:
This paper develops a theoretical conceptualization of the emotionality of differentiation with the objective of advancing studies and literacies of race and gender inequality in daycare.
 
Relevance to Nordic educational research:
Accordingly, this paper’s contribution to the Nordic field of early childhood education studies is found in the empirical display of how the combination of gendered and racialized inequality are emotionally invested and upheld in pedagogical practices and how these social dynamics can be understood theoretically