Jayne Osgood
Biographic Data
| ID | 337236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jayne Osgood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jayne |
| FAMILY NAME | Osgood |
| SIGNATURE | OSGOOD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Middlesex University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9424-8602 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Beyond critique towards creativity
As a profession, contemporary Early Childhood Education (ECE) has for a long time been subject to ongoing regulation, standardisation, requirements for predefined educational programmes and increased credentialisation.These developments have been accompanied by an intense commercialisation of early childhood pedagogy alongside international trends towards evidence-based research, which narrowly shapes professionalism through universal and standar…
Re-imagining education in times of planetary crises
Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play
This book deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play and explores play in the broadest sense. It deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play where the focus is on what play enables children’s bodies and brains to do and become. This book includes contributions from academics and practitioners based in Australia, Canada, Finland, South Africa, the USA and the UK and explores play in the broadest sense, making space…
Beyond Anthropocentric Boundaries, Childing as an Embodied Kind of Praxis
This intra-view explores the idea of “childing” as an embodied, relational kind of praxis that challenges colonial and anthropocentric frameworks in education. The authors discuss how childing disrupts linear notions of time, hierarchies of knowledge, and conventional adult-child binaries by focusing on sensibilities and relationalities. Grounded in critical posthumanist theories and thinking with Indigenous perspectives, childing invites disrupt…
Tunnelling Through the Anthropocene
For Donna Haraway, staying with the trouble requires making oddkin, that is, humans, non-humans and more-than-humans require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations. “We become-with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2015, p.4). Working with this insistence for staying with the trouble and the unexpected, and welcoming collaboration and combination, we recount the processes involved in the curation and creation of a picturebook (…
Enacting Arachnean ethics
Transdisciplinary ecopedagogies
Gender Un/Bound
This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education. This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised si…
Unlikely Qualities of Writing Qualitatively
In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional life frequently meld, with porous boundaries, our writing practices appear to talk back rhetoricall…
Nest/ing
This thing that we do’
In this paper, we dwell amongst what was agitated from enacting Neimanis' (2012) hydrofeminism in an 'aqueous-body–writing–reading' experiment that unfolded in discrete but entangled locations (London and Cape Town) to actively disrupt and reformulate ideas about what it is to do scholarly work. We consider how we might dislodge anthropocentric ways of knowing, being and doing through our swimming–writing–reading. Aligned with emergent hydrofemin…
Childing
This paper dwells upon what was agitated in a research methods workshop that invited postgraduate researchers to take seriously materiality, movement, bodies and affect – as a starting place to explore how ecopedagogies might become both more capacious and creative. We explored ways to contemplate how generating knowledge – about education and worldly relationalities to environments – might be pursued in less familiar ways. The workshop began wit…
Grappling with the miseducation of Montessori
This article demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, ‘child’ in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori’s contemporary reputation as a ‘middle-class phenomenon’ by returning to the earliest Montessori schools as a justice-oriented project for working-class children and families. Grappling with the contradictions and inconsistencies of Montessori thought, this article…
Coda
That’s enough!’ (But it wasn’t)
Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becomin…
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
Crafting granular stories with child-like embodied, affective and sensory encounters that attune to the world's differential becoming
In this paper we explore what decentring the child in posthumanism does to our research practices, to our conceptualisations of and relationalities to the child. Crucially, we explore the imperative for other ways to encounter the child - that pursue a decolonising and de/recentralising agenda. We pursue tentacular lines of enquiry through a series of interwoven stories - some more familiar than others. It is by queering old narratives that new a…
Anthropocene Childhoods
This open access book brings together the disciplines of childhood studies, literary studies, and the environmental humanities to focus on the figure of the child as it appears in popular culture and theory. Drawing on theoretical works by Clare Colebrook, Naomi Klein, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour the book offers creative readings of sci-fi novels, short stories and films including Frankenstein, The Road, Handmaid's Tale, The Girl with All the …
Introduction
This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...]
Pets that Have ‘Something Inside
In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hoht…
Conferencing Otherwise
This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This 'what if' and 'what else' thinking has manifested in ex…
Young children’s experiences of music and soundings in museum spaces
This article considers the value and role of early years music and sound activities in museum spaces – in relation to children themselves, as well as to their families and wider communities. The article reviews literature around early years music and sound activities; early childhood and the museum; and the use of music and sound in museum spaces – reflecting on reconceptualisation’s of the child within museum spaces and in relation to music and …
Opening Pandora’s Box
In pursuit of quality
This paper aims to critique policy discourses around the pursuit of quality in early years education. Taking England as a focal point, it problematizes the use of the term ‘quality’ and attempts to standardise its meaning; highlighting the disconnect that exists between policy and practice. The paper combines discourse analysis of a small number of key government documents with a series of interviews with early years stakeholders in order to iden…
Governing through trust
This article seeks to further understandings of contemporary patterns of parental government. It explores the politicisation of family life by examining a pilot programme tasked with enhancing parental engagement in education amongst ‘hard‐to‐reach’ families within the white British community of a large inner‐London borough. Focusing on the programme's signature device—the deployment of community‐based ‘link workers’ to bridge home and school—‘go…
Reconstructing professionalism in Ecec
This paper is concerned to present professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a sociocultural construction. In particular the article is concerned with how professional identities are inflected by autobiography and the spaces and opportunities that exist for the construction of alternative professional identities. Drawing on a recent empirical study with nursery workers in London a critical appraisal of hegemonic discourses i…
Making sense of the glass ceiling in schools
There is extensive evidence of a ‘glass ceiling’ for women across the labour market. Though schools have widely been described as ‘feminized’ work environments, the under‐representation of women at school management level is well established. Based on a study of women teachers’ careers and promotion in the English school sector (in early years, primary and secondary schools), this paper draws on a critical discourse analysis of 44 individual inte…
Who cares? The classed nature of childcare
In this paper I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the recent recruitment drive the Sure Start Unit has waged on Government web pages to encourage greater access to, and uptake of, careers in childcare. I argue that the messages inherent within the Sure Start Unit’s rhetoric are laden with classed notions about who should enter the childcare workforce. The simplistic and unproblematic presentation of several key issues are deconstructed a…
Childcare workforce reform in England and ‘the early years professional’
This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of ‘the nursery worker’ within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position. It is argued that following a decade of unprecedented policy attention and reform, the cultivation and continued…
Conferencing Otherwise
This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This 'what if' and 'what else' thinking has manifested in ex…
Putting posthumanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood
This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorizing can be translated into posthumanist methodology th…
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
Time to Get Down to Business
In this article theories of the gendered nature of new managerialism are drawn upon to examine the economic rationale behind educational reform (Trow, 1994) and the marketization and economization (Ozga, 2000) of early years education and childcare services. The author concentrates on the policy attention that the early years and childcare sector has attracted from the New Labour Government since 1998, and the implications of this attention. Thro…
Crafting granular stories with child-like embodied, affective and sensory encounters that attune to the world's differential becoming
In this paper we explore what decentring the child in posthumanism does to our research practices, to our conceptualisations of and relationalities to the child. Crucially, we explore the imperative for other ways to encounter the child - that pursue a decolonising and de/recentralising agenda. We pursue tentacular lines of enquiry through a series of interwoven stories - some more familiar than others. It is by queering old narratives that new a…
Gendered identities and work placement
Students' post‐compulsory pathways and occupational aspirations in the UK have been shown to differ considerably according to gender, social class and ethnicity. School‐based work experience provides many pupils with their first significant encounters with the world of work, and is positioned as providing diverse experiences in this regard. Yet gender‐stereotypical patterns manifesting in pupils' occupational aspirations have been found to be rep…
Anthropocene Childhoods
This open access book brings together the disciplines of childhood studies, literary studies, and the environmental humanities to focus on the figure of the child as it appears in popular culture and theory. Drawing on theoretical works by Clare Colebrook, Naomi Klein, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour the book offers creative readings of sci-fi novels, short stories and films including Frankenstein, The Road, Handmaid's Tale, The Girl with All the …
Hard to Reach’ or Nomadic Resistance? Families ‘Choosing’ Not to Participate in Early Childhood Services
Taking seeming disinterest in early years music-making as its focal point, this article explores the Deleuzian notion of (affect)ive assemblages to consider the relationships between formal early childhood services, the familial home environment of the ‘hard to reach,’ and the use of populist musical resources. In drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theorisations of performance, subjectivity, language and meaning, the authors illustrate ho…
Nest/ing
Childing
This paper dwells upon what was agitated in a research methods workshop that invited postgraduate researchers to take seriously materiality, movement, bodies and affect – as a starting place to explore how ecopedagogies might become both more capacious and creative. We explored ways to contemplate how generating knowledge – about education and worldly relationalities to environments – might be pursued in less familiar ways. The workshop began wit…
Pets that Have ‘Something Inside
In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hoht…
Governing through trust
This article seeks to further understandings of contemporary patterns of parental government. It explores the politicisation of family life by examining a pilot programme tasked with enhancing parental engagement in education amongst ‘hard‐to‐reach’ families within the white British community of a large inner‐London borough. Focusing on the programme's signature device—the deployment of community‐based ‘link workers’ to bridge home and school—‘go…
Worthwhile work? Childcare, feminist ethics and cooperative research practices
Interdisciplinary research collaborations are often encouraged within higher education while the practicalities of such collaborations are glossed over. This project specifically addresses the praxis of research collaborations, exploring how feminist academics within different countries and disciplines came together to explore their mutual concern about the perceived worth and well-being of early childhood practitioners. Engaging in a formal meth…
Equal Opportunities Policies in English Schools
The under‐representation of women in promoted posts is one particular pattern of occupational segregation by gender across post‐industrial societies. This phenomenon also characterizes those professions which have been described as ‘women‐friendly’, such as teaching. The development of national and European legislation and recommendations on equal opportunities reflects this concern to address the gender imbalance among the workforce. But do scho…
This thing that we do’
In this paper, we dwell amongst what was agitated from enacting Neimanis' (2012) hydrofeminism in an 'aqueous-body–writing–reading' experiment that unfolded in discrete but entangled locations (London and Cape Town) to actively disrupt and reformulate ideas about what it is to do scholarly work. We consider how we might dislodge anthropocentric ways of knowing, being and doing through our swimming–writing–reading. Aligned with emergent hydrofemin…
That’s enough!’ (But it wasn’t)
Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becomin…
Introduction
This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...]
Young children’s experiences of music and soundings in museum spaces
This article considers the value and role of early years music and sound activities in museum spaces – in relation to children themselves, as well as to their families and wider communities. The article reviews literature around early years music and sound activities; early childhood and the museum; and the use of music and sound in museum spaces – reflecting on reconceptualisation’s of the child within museum spaces and in relation to music and …
Time to Get Down to Business
In this article theories of the gendered nature of new managerialism are drawn upon to examine the economic rationale behind educational reform (Trow, 1994) and the marketization and economization (Ozga, 2000) of early years education and childcare services. The author concentrates on the policy attention that the early years and childcare sector has attracted from the New Labour Government since 1998, and the implications of this attention. Thro…
Who cares? The classed nature of childcare
In this paper I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the recent recruitment drive the Sure Start Unit has waged on Government web pages to encourage greater access to, and uptake of, careers in childcare. I argue that the messages inherent within the Sure Start Unit’s rhetoric are laden with classed notions about who should enter the childcare workforce. The simplistic and unproblematic presentation of several key issues are deconstructed a…
Deconstructing Professionalism in Early Childhood Education
The aim of this article is to problematise the dominant construction of ‘professionalism’ as created and promoted by the United Kingdom Government through policy. Like other professionals working in education, early years practitioners are subjected to a disempowering, regulatory gaze in the name of higher standards. The preoccupation with satisfying dominant and externally imposed constructions of professionalism leaves little time to engage in …
Gendered identities and work placement
Students' post‐compulsory pathways and occupational aspirations in the UK have been shown to differ considerably according to gender, social class and ethnicity. School‐based work experience provides many pupils with their first significant encounters with the world of work, and is positioned as providing diverse experiences in this regard. Yet gender‐stereotypical patterns manifesting in pupils' occupational aspirations have been found to be rep…
Making sense of the glass ceiling in schools
There is extensive evidence of a ‘glass ceiling’ for women across the labour market. Though schools have widely been described as ‘feminized’ work environments, the under‐representation of women at school management level is well established. Based on a study of women teachers’ careers and promotion in the English school sector (in early years, primary and secondary schools), this paper draws on a critical discourse analysis of 44 individual inte…
Equal Opportunities Policies in English Schools
The under‐representation of women in promoted posts is one particular pattern of occupational segregation by gender across post‐industrial societies. This phenomenon also characterizes those professions which have been described as ‘women‐friendly’, such as teaching. The development of national and European legislation and recommendations on equal opportunities reflects this concern to address the gender imbalance among the workforce. But do scho…
Childcare workforce reform in England and ‘the early years professional’
This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of ‘the nursery worker’ within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position. It is argued that following a decade of unprecedented policy attention and reform, the cultivation and continued…
Reconstructing professionalism in Ecec
This paper is concerned to present professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a sociocultural construction. In particular the article is concerned with how professional identities are inflected by autobiography and the spaces and opportunities that exist for the construction of alternative professional identities. Drawing on a recent empirical study with nursery workers in London a critical appraisal of hegemonic discourses i…
Narratives from the Nursery
This accessible and timely book builds upon and contributes to ongoing debates surrounding professionalism in the early years workforce. In a sector where policy is rapidly changing, Jayne Osgood challenges existing assumptions concerning professional identities and questions what broader lessons might be learnt about race, ethnicity, social class
Hard to Reach’ or Nomadic Resistance? Families ‘Choosing’ Not to Participate in Early Childhood Services
Taking seeming disinterest in early years music-making as its focal point, this article explores the Deleuzian notion of (affect)ive assemblages to consider the relationships between formal early childhood services, the familial home environment of the ‘hard to reach,’ and the use of populist musical resources. In drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theorisations of performance, subjectivity, language and meaning, the authors illustrate ho…
Eu(rope)
The aim of this paper is to (re)(e)value(ate) current micro- and macropolicies and politics that shape – and are shaped by – conceptualisations of and, in consequence, practices towards young children in a range of institutions/figurations. The ‘geopolitical’ location for our investigation is Europe, understood as conceptual space(s) as well as (geographical) territory. Whilst we begin by focusing attention on events within an English context, we…
Putting posthumanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood
This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorizing can be translated into posthumanist methodology th…
Worthwhile work? Childcare, feminist ethics and cooperative research practices
Interdisciplinary research collaborations are often encouraged within higher education while the practicalities of such collaborations are glossed over. This project specifically addresses the praxis of research collaborations, exploring how feminist academics within different countries and disciplines came together to explore their mutual concern about the perceived worth and well-being of early childhood practitioners. Engaging in a formal meth…
Opening Pandora’s Box
In pursuit of quality
This paper aims to critique policy discourses around the pursuit of quality in early years education. Taking England as a focal point, it problematizes the use of the term ‘quality’ and attempts to standardise its meaning; highlighting the disconnect that exists between policy and practice. The paper combines discourse analysis of a small number of key government documents with a series of interviews with early years stakeholders in order to iden…
Governing through trust
This article seeks to further understandings of contemporary patterns of parental government. It explores the politicisation of family life by examining a pilot programme tasked with enhancing parental engagement in education amongst ‘hard‐to‐reach’ families within the white British community of a large inner‐London borough. Focusing on the programme's signature device—the deployment of community‐based ‘link workers’ to bridge home and school—‘go…
Young children’s experiences of music and soundings in museum spaces
This article considers the value and role of early years music and sound activities in museum spaces – in relation to children themselves, as well as to their families and wider communities. The article reviews literature around early years music and sound activities; early childhood and the museum; and the use of music and sound in museum spaces – reflecting on reconceptualisation’s of the child within museum spaces and in relation to music and …
Introduction
This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...]
Pets that Have ‘Something Inside
In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hoht…
Conferencing Otherwise
This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This 'what if' and 'what else' thinking has manifested in ex…
Grappling with the miseducation of Montessori
This article demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, ‘child’ in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori’s contemporary reputation as a ‘middle-class phenomenon’ by returning to the earliest Montessori schools as a justice-oriented project for working-class children and families. Grappling with the contradictions and inconsistencies of Montessori thought, this article…
Coda
That’s enough!’ (But it wasn’t)
Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becomin…
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
Crafting granular stories with child-like embodied, affective and sensory encounters that attune to the world's differential becoming
In this paper we explore what decentring the child in posthumanism does to our research practices, to our conceptualisations of and relationalities to the child. Crucially, we explore the imperative for other ways to encounter the child - that pursue a decolonising and de/recentralising agenda. We pursue tentacular lines of enquiry through a series of interwoven stories - some more familiar than others. It is by queering old narratives that new a…
Sociology (25 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (14 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Pedagogy (11 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)