Honouring Black Refusals through a Black Feminist Lens: The Lived Experiences and Counterstories of Black Mothers of Children in Childcare


Rachel Berman, Toronto Metropolitan University; Aruschga Mohantharajah, Toronto Metropolitan University; Janelle Brady, Toronto Metropolitan University; Georgiana Mathurin, Toronto Metropolitan University

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Canada as elsewhere, is a highly gendered field. This includes both the educators teaching in pre-service ECEC programs along with the undervalued and underpaid practitioners who work directly with children and families. This is also a field that remains dominated by Euro-Western psychological developmentalist approaches, approaches that take up and reinforce biological determinist discourses of gender and negate context and politics (Burman,1994; Davies, Karmiris and Berman, 2022). Reconceptualist ECEC scholarship, which began in the late 1980s and remains on the margins of the field, critiques the dominant paradigm of developmentalism in ECEC and makes use of ideas from various frameworks more in keeping with sociological thinking, such as Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory (Berman and Abawi, 2019). In particular, feminist reconceptualist scholars have taken up frameworks such as the feminist ethics of care (Richardson and Langford, 2022), and feminist post-structuralism, post-humanism, and new materialism in efforts to re-think gender in ECEC (Osgoode and Robinson, 2017). A small number of ECEC scholars have also begun to engage with Black feminist thought, inspired in particular by the foundational work of feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 2008). Black feminisms can challenge dominant ways of knowing and being in pre-service ECEC institutions and in work with Black children and families (Brady, 2022; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017; Pérez, 2017; Pérez et al., 2016). They can also challenge wider systems of oppression (Pérez, 2017). This is especially crucial given the dominant colour-blind approach (claims not to see race or racism) (Berman et al, 2017) and the anti-Black racism that exists in ECEC in Canada (Kissi and Ewan, 2023). Indeed, Pérez (2017) argues that Black feminist thought is “essential to the field” of ECEC (p.49). Black feminisms have three key tenets: self-definition articulated and defined by Black women (Collins, 2008; Sojourner Truth, 1851); the concept of intersectionality, i.e., analysis of power at the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, migration status, ability, etc. (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989); and elements of othermothering, i.e., community-based care moving beyond the individual nuclear family (Collins, 2008; hooks, 2015; Wane, 2000). This proposed presentation is part of a larger study, Honouring Black Refusals, which seeks to gather the lived experiences and counterstories of Black ECEs, Black Elders, and Black Mothers. In this presentation, we think with Black Feminisms as we discuss the ways five Black-identified mothers in a focus group held in the GTA in the spring of 2023 framed their experiences and their child’s experiences in their child care setting. Some overarching themes include: 1) the mothers’ refusal of the pathologization of themselves and/or their children in ECEC settings; 2) the mothers’ descriptions of the othermothering of racialized ECEs in connection to their children; and 3) the system navigation strategies the mothers undertook when they/their children/other children faced anti-Black racism, along with ableism, misogynoir, and/or discrimination based on migration status. Some recommendations based on the mothers’ observations and ideas for change will be made.

This paper will be presented at the following session: