Aisling Gallagher

At home in preschool care? Childcare policy and the negotiated spaces of educational care

Concerns have been raised across a range of discplinary perspectices about the heightened policy expectations which are being placed on the educational outcomes of preschool services leading to suggestions of over formalisation of the preschool space. In light of these concerns, this paper will explore how new socio-economic expectations around educational care are actually shaping the preschool space. By doing so I will argue that concerns over the formalisation of educational care need to be considered with reference to the different contexts and sectors in which educational care is being provided. In offering a more situated analysis, formalisation processes can be seen as highly contingent, as they are articulated within existing social norms around the care of young children.

The ‘caring entrepreneur’? Childcare policy and private provision in an enterprising age

Childcare has become a recent focus of government intervention. Concerns have been raised about the soaring costs for parents, patchy provision, and the often small and unprofitable nature of the services themselves. This paper will explore how the problem of sustainability in the childcare sector is being addressed through a neoliberal development rationale. Focusing on the Irish childcare sector and the childcare funding programme introduced in 2006, I will illustrate how a particular entrepreneurial subjectivity has been mobilised to remedy the perceived problems of private sector childcare. I refer to this subjectivity as the ‘caring entrepreneur’. After I outline the contours of this subjectivity, the final section of the paper will examine how it is being realised within a rural childcare market, in the process offering a more situated account of what ‘sustainability’ means in place.

The business of care: Marketization and the new geographies of childcare

The aim of this article is to outline a geographical research agenda for studying the marketization of childcare in Western neoliberal contexts. While childcare has been a key site of interrogation for feminist geographers, highlighting the profound inequities of marketized care for many who work in and use childcare, the contours of the childcare market as a situated and constructed economic entity has remained under-examined. I suggest that at a time when more families than ever rely on extra-familial childcare, an appreciation of how childcare markets function is urgently needed.