Lingering time, shifting ground

The micro-politics of transition in early childhood worlds postqualitative encounters across early childhood settings in the UAE and UK

Bibliographic Data

ID21728285
AuthorsLindsay Schofield (0000-0001-6753-4988, Florida Gulf Coast University, corresponding author), Jordan Boyd (United Arab Emirates University), Nesreen Nowfal (0000-0001-6895-9347, United Arab Emirates University), Charla Chailland (Florida Gulf Coast University), Susan Atkinson (0000-0002-4882-8777, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU)), Susan J Atkinson (0000-0003-1863-2164, United Arab Emirates University), Rachel Takriti (0000-0002-7920-3198, United Arab Emirates University)
Year2026
Publication date2026-01-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolicy Futures in Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-2103 • E-ISSN: 1478-2103
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14782103251411724
OpenAlexW7123336183
LanguageEN
References cited30

Transitions into Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) have historically been narrated through developmental milestones of school readiness, positioning children as subjects to be prepared for institutional life. Such framings stabilise the child as an individual learner and the setting as a neutral space for adaptation. Yet these moments are far from neutral. They are affective, relational, and deeply political events shaped by cultural scripts, institutional rhythms, and the micro-politics of care. This paper explores the entangled experiences of parents, practitioners, and managers across ECCE settings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the United Kingdom (UK), exploring how transitions are enacted, felt, and governed in distinct sociocultural and policy contexts. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews analysed diffractively through postqualitative and posthuman perspectives, we trace how transitions materialise through intra-actions among humans, materials, and temporalities. Data are read not for themes, but for intensities, sticky moments, repetitions, and ruptures that illuminate the affective infrastructures of early childhood life, such as handover rituals, parental emotions, and practitioner improvisations that configure belonging and separation. Comparing two contrasting policy contexts reveals both shared practices of gradual entry, family engagement, and attunement to children’s needs, alongside culturally situate divergences in how care is operationalised, measured, and understood. Transitions emerge as more-than-developmental events: they are charged sites where attachment, identity, and institutional expectations converge. We offer implications-as-provocations for ECCE practice and policy by reframing transitions as more-than-developmental events where attachment, identity and institutional expectations meet. A diffractive analysis underpins concrete recommendations – staffed ‘lingering time’, ethical narrative documentation, and threshold design standards – that reconceive arrival as a relational threshold rather than a procedural start/end point

Attunement · Cognitive reframing · Early childhood · Early childhood education · Grandparent · Narrative · Narrative inquiry · Politics · Posthuman · Sociocultural evolution · Children's Rights and Participation · Early Childhood Education and Development · Innovative Education and Learning Practices

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