The many-faced cry: Tone and tempo
in the pre-school
This article focuses on crying amongst the youngest children
in preschool. The study is based on an critical ethnographic study,
doing participating observations among children one and two years
of age, and talks with the practitioners. How preschool practitioners
compose and enact care through a bodily logic that includes different
tones and rhythms are more complex than their talk about crying.
Working with Foucaults material aspect of the subject and Deleuzes
discussion about what a body may do, the article analyzes the complexity
and visualization of crying. When practitioners talk about crying,
smiling or clean faces they appear to be taking up particular dualistic
verbal approaches. These can be read as taken for granted ways of
thinking and talking, reflecting discourses of care intertwining
age, gender and 'whiteness'. From this angle the article analyze how
concepts have material consequences, as we know our world through concepts.
Research among the youngest children may make visible the not yet known
in our thoughts analyzing processes of materialization. These processes melt
the material and discursive together and create practices of care
in a preschool context.
