Justice for whom and according to whom? (Re)considering equity, inclusion and belonging in early care and education

For this special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, we wondered what it would mean, and ultimately what it might yield, to invite scholars in the field of early care and education to engage critically in conceptualizations of justice—for example, restorative justice (Zehr, 2015) or transformative justice (Winn and Winn, 2021)—and to imagine, explore, and critically (re)consider equity, inclusion, and belonging in early childhood. Our interest in this special issue reflects current dominant conceptualizations of justice that seek to protect privileges and safeguard entitlements (National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2020) for White, heteronormative, cisgender, and ableist communities at the continued expense and harm of those who are intersectionally marginalized. Countering such dominant conceptualizations of (in)justice, we share the work of colleagues and peers who critically theorize justice and consider: “Justice for whom and according to whom?” (Souto-Manning, 2014). The matter of “Justice for whom and according to whom?” is highlighted in two of this issue’s articles—Soojin Oh Park’s “Transforming a cemetery into a garden of languages: A justice-oriented, family-centered framework for cultivating early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy” and Adam Davies’ “Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics.” In questioning the universalistic assumptions about early language and literacy development that dominate early childhood settings, Park explores counterstories of Asian American parents and the practices in which they engage to resist linguistic erasure and cultivate their children’s early bilingualism and biliteracy. Based on the stories of 10 Chinese and Korean immigrant, multiracial, and multilingual families, Park shares the vision of immigrant parents as gardeners—planters, pollinators, and pruners of bilingualism and biliteracy in their children, and challengers of monocultural and monolingual definitions of school readiness and success. Davies shares their own experiences, framed through the theoretical lens of mad studies (LeFrançois et al., 2013), which centralizes the voices and perspectives of people who experience psychiatric classification and violence, through autobiographical poetic writing. Davies challenges developmental and psychological perspectives of normative development and the role early childhood teacher training programs have in reproducing harmful ableist theories of learning and development that negatively impact intersectionally minoritized early childhood education faculty, teachers, and children and families. This special issue also seeks to enact a “sociology of potentiality” (Povinelli, 2011: 16), including works that move from ideologies, methodologies, and pedagogies of expectability (what is expected based on the history of the field and the concepts of equity, inclusion, and belonging) towards ideologies, methodologies, and pedagogies of potentiality (the visioning, cultivation, Editorial