Børns socialitet. Fortolkning og forhandling af civiliseringsprojektet i børnehaven.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how children as ‘yet-to-become civilised individuals’ develop communities with one another at the daycare facility, and how they re-interpret and assimilate to the daycare facility and its project to ‘civilise’ children through these communities.

With this study, the researcher shows how children at the daycare centre can be viewed as ‘yet-to-become civilised individuals’. However, the researcher assesses that being a ‘yet-to-become civilised individual’ is more than just restrictive for the children. It also enables the children to draw on a wide range of bodily and emotional expressions (e.g. playing with food and using the toilets as a place for playing) which are not socially acceptable for adults. According to the researcher, the children’s overstepping of the borderline between civilised and uncivilised behaviour is an important element in their establishment of different communities. This is seen in that the children take advantage of their special position outside the civilised to transform the daycare facility to their own place. In this way they assimilate to the civilising project at daycare centres, the researcher concludes.

The data material is based on a life-history study from 2006 in which the researcher has carried out a number of interviews with 16 young people who, at that time, lived in Copenhagen and were aged 11 to 22 years. All the young people came from the middle class and had attended a daycare facility in the period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Their memories therefore included experiences which were between five and 20 years old.

Olwig, K.F. (2012). Børns socialitet. Fortolkning og forhandling af civiliseringsprojektet i børnehaven. I: Gilliam, L. & Gulløv, E. (red). Civiliserende institutioner. Om idealer og distinktioner i opdragelse (s. 97-118). Aarhus Universitetsforlag.