Welcome to the 12th
Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference
on Research, Theory and Practice:

"Troubling Identities"
 

May 24th - 28th, 2004
at Oslo University College, Oslo, Norway

This interdisciplinary conference is a forum for teachers, researchers, advocates and practitioners pursuing alternative perspectives in early childhood education and early childhood studies. It is an opportunity for those interested in expanding the boundaries/borders of the field to participate in conversations about emerging issues, contradictions, and possibilities related to theory, research, policy, and praxis.

The theme of "troubling identities" recognizes that identity functions in the lives of communities, institutions, and individuals to create both possibilities and limits for social and cultural recognition, self-representation, action, relations and ways of being.

"Troubling identities" has many possible meanings. Troubling may be something we do, as in to trouble dominant discourse or it may be a description, as in things we find to be troubling. Issues addressed may include troubling notions of identities that are constructed as troubled in social and cultural discourse, troubling our own or others’ uses of identities, or positive possibilities conceptualized across multiple identities. We welcome proposals that address identity as it is deployed at the international level with issues such as immigration, language issues and globalization of capital and culture impacting on the lives of children, their families, and the early childhood community. We also welcome proposals that look at identity locally, across diversity, and intra-personally related to a range of on-going issues in the fields of early childhood education and early childhood studies.