Early Childhood Interventions

Critical Perspectives on a Global Movement
Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-0-19-897644-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Early Childhood Interventions offers the first book-length critical account of Global Early Childhood Development (Global ECD) interventions in the Majority World. Bringing together leading scholars across anthropology, psychology, developmental science, sociology, and social work, it asks a simple question with high-stakes consequences: whose evidence counts when “optimal” parenting is packaged as a universal recipe for national prosperity?

Global ECD has moved rapidly from a set of technical programs to a powerful 'common sense understanding' of child development, crystallized in initiatives such as the WHO-UNICEF-World Bank Nurturing Care Framework, which links everyday caregiving to brain development, human capital, and long-term economic growth. Yet the volume shows how the evidence base invoked as “best available” is often narrow and uneven: anchored in urban, middle-class Euro-American research, filtered through selective reviews, and exported as a benchmark against which Majority World families are measured, too often producing deficit diagnoses rather than understanding.

Across richly grounded chapters, contributors trace how Global ECD travels, what it renders visible and invisible, and what it does to families, institutions, and policy worlds. The book also offers practical tools for building a broader, more globally representative, context-attuned science, one that treats difference not as failure, but as a starting point for better research and more just interventions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Scheidecker, Gabriel

Mezzenzana, Francesca

Siagian, Clara

Über Autor(innen)

Francesca Mezzenzana is an anthropologist working in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Europe. She has a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is currently the Principal Investigator of a Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Grant, based at the Rachel Carson Center, that explores children's understanding of the natural world in different cultural settings. Francesca is particularly interested in indigenous practices of learning, child moral socialisation, and human-nonhuman relationships. Her research was awarded funding by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Research Council, the Musée du quai Branly, and the National Geographic Society.

Gabriel Scheidecker is an anthropologist whose research focuses on childhood, parenting, and family politics in Madagascar, Vietnam, and among migrant families in Germany. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. He leads the SNSF Starting Grant “Saving Brains?”, which conducts ethnographic research on the global movement around Early Childhood Development interventions.

Clara Siagian is a postdoctoral researcher at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London (UCL), working at the intersection of people, place, and politics with special interests in young people living in Global South cities. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University where she investigated the political experience of evicted residents living in Jakarta's social housing. She also led several research projects on topics such as child marriage, climate injustice, and violence in schools. Her scholarships have been published in high impact journals such as Cities, Children's Geographies, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.