Two Conversations with Experts

At the end of an interview with a young activist in his home just outside Yogyakarta, a city in central Java, I watched as he drew a diagram to illustrate his network of professional connections. Like all young educational activists I had interviewed in Yogya, his energy and enthusiasm were palpable. And like the others, he had cut his teeth working with a local NGO, in his case one that dealt with street children, before joining the national office of Save the Children, an international NGO, in Surabaya. His work and the changes in it seemed to index new forms of professional and middle-class mobility post-Suharto (1966–98) and the sense of democratic potential in the era of reform or Reformasi.

His Venn diagram was added to the one from a young principal of a private preschool and daycare, the founder of an early childhood care and development resource center, and a young activist with a local NGO devoted to environmental education and reform.Footnote ¹ Like the others, he charted connections new and established, novel and known, from the government's education departments to new publishers, private preschools and daycares to nonprofits, and from personal connections to government-mandated community programs. And in doing so, he made visible the network within which he worked on issues of childhood in Indonesia.

I was conducting fieldwork in Yogyakarta in 2007, a decade after the end of Suharto's New Order regime. Much had changed as the era of reform had arrived in Indonesia on the heels of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, leading to an explosion of nongovernmental organizations, democratization initiatives, and the neoliberal restructuring of the economy. A new attention to childhood, especially early childhood, had arrived as well. So, as this young man thoughtfully drew out the connections in his working life, he was considering a landscape considerably changed. And his optimism was catching. The Ministry of National Education was filled with radicals, he said, and there was great potential for positive change.

This new energy reminded me of another conversation, this one in the wide alley of the densely populated, lower-class neighborhood or kampung where I have conducted fieldwork since 1992. Not as poor as downtown kampung, this neighborhood near the Sultan's Palace housed the lower classes that are the unremarked center of gravity in Indonesia now inching toward middle-class status. As I walked toward my old house and the family next door who were my most consistent support in research and local life, I was hailed from the doorstep of another neighbor's house. Bu Leti had caught sight of me, and as usual my presence in the kampung had to be discussed.Footnote ² As she approached the street, I saw that, like me, she had aged in the decades since we first met. Her eyes were gauzed by cataracts, and her stature was not quite as erect. Yet in all other ways, she was as she had been: the kind but stern teacher down the street whose fortunes were slightly better than her near neighbors but whose life was deeply intertwined with theirs in innumerable acts of cooperation and joint neighborhood management.

She had heard of my new interest in early childhood programs, and, as it happened, she was running one out of her house. These government-sponsored programs had been mandated to deliver early childhood education to poorer communities through the volunteered labor of locals, typically women like Bu Leti. This work drew on old patterns of female labor mobilized through an ideology of community self-support that had been used in Suharto's national modernization projects. Her own professional expertise as a retired teacher was as important as her experience in local community work. Her demeanor was not that of an exuberant social activist, but rather she expressed the weary acceptance of a community stalwart asked to take on yet another government program for the support of her neighbors.

It was hard not to be struck by the bookending of these forms of expertise in post–New Order Indonesia. The first marked the democratic optimism of the era and the possibilities for middle-class professionalization (Jones Reference Jones2010; Rudnyckyj Reference Rudnyckyj2010). The second marked a return to gendered forms of social reproduction associated with neither middle-class status nor professional opportunity but with older forms of development and the invisible care labor of lower-class women as local community workers.

These stories of expertise, one new and one old, marked a particular time when Indonesians generally were considering what was old, what was new, what was working, and what was not. I felt this keenly, as my own work on childhood had begun as a reconsideration of Hildred Geertz's Reference Geertz1961 work on the Javanese family. She had considered family form and practices, including childrearing, in the decade after Independence in 1947, and now, I was looking at some of the same issues in the decade after democratization in the twenty-first century. I too was interested in what was old, what was new, what was working, and what was not for families, communities, and children. And clearly what was new were these local programs offered for Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini or Early Childhood Education (hereafter PAUD), such as the one offered by Bu Leti.Footnote ³

The networks drawn for me illustrated the relations of care being assembled that cut across old modes of delivery even as they reinforced longstanding forms dependent on women's roles in community-based national development. These emerging connections between intergovernmental dictates, subcontracted expertise, franchised education enterprise, and newly democratic Indonesia are susceptible to being described as a global assemblage (Collier and Ong Reference Collier, Ong, Ong and Collier2005). It is the contrast between the expertise emerging with this assemblage and the reproduction of nonexpert expertise in lower-class communities of Yogyakarta that inspires this inquiry into the limits of assemblage.

In the following, the global and local linkages in early childhood programming in Yogyakarta are traced as they were through fieldwork.Footnote ⁴ Beginning from attention to child-centered, play-based trauma healing programs after the 2006 earthquake, this consideration moves to the NGOs and activists in the post-Suharto era working on democratic and integrated education. The relationship between nongovernmental programs and private preschool and daycare programs driven by middle-class desire is illustrated through the circulation of a particular technology: centers and circle time. The spread of this pedagogy through subcontracted workshops and packaged educational materials highlights both global education enterprise and the gaps in the professionalization of local early childhood educators. The more recent growth in government-mandated PAUD programs for low-income communities demonstrates the intensification of the relationship between community development and the child in the meshing of optimal brain development with the Millennium Development Goals. And ultimately, it identifies the rooting of this global assemblage in the durable relations of women's community work.

ECCD in Indonesia: Assembling a New Child

The young child again has become the site for intense development work in its double senses: development initiatives aimed at the Global South and programs to aid the physiological and psychosocial development of healthy children (Burman Reference Burman2008).Footnote ⁵ In Indonesia, this attention to the golden age (zaman emas) from zero to eight years of age represented a rejigging of development from a narrow biomedical focus on child health to concern with the integration of the very young child's development along several dimensions.

This local attention to the young child was a reflection of the global emphasis on early childhood care and development (hereafter ECCD), an initiative associated with the United Nations and the World Bank (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence Reference Dahlberg, Moss and Pence1999). The use of the terms “care” and “development” in addition to “education” describes the comprehensive, integrated approach to child development advocated in these initiatives:

Aspects of ECCD as a global assemblage that has emerged in Yogyakarta are described in the sections to follow.

Community Experts

In October 2007, my research colleague Nita and I accompanied a young and dynamic trainer, Mbak Susi (Sister Susi), to a workshop she was delivering in Boyolali, a mountain town to the northeast of Yogyakarta. Mbak Susi worked for the Resource Center, the Yogya-based NGO devoted to early childhood education mentioned earlier. She had invited us to join her for this training workshop that was part of the provincial PAUD initiative. As we waited for the women to arrive at this meeting hall high on the side of a mountain, Nita huddled in her chair and complained continuously about the cold. The room began to fill with women, young and middle aged, and with flies, because the rainy season had just begun.

The atmosphere of the training was quite familiar. After all, I had spent my original field research attending countless meetings of the national housewives association, PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahateraan Keluarga, or the Family Welfare Movement, as it is often translated). This organization of adult, married women as “volunteered” community welfare workers was a central aspect of Suharto's New Order governing of the population, and a potent form of governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller Reference Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991; Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991; Lemke Reference Lemke2001). PKK meetings worked as rites of modernization (Peacock Reference Peacock1986) that reproduced an ethic of community self-help in the name of national development.

The many meetings I had followed in Bu Leti's neighborhood during my original research were like the thousands of others that took place monthly in neighborhoods and villages throughout Indonesia since the 1970s. After the meeting was called to order, the assembled women would be asked to pray according to their own religious preference. The PKK March might be sung. Beginning with the words, “come on, people of Indonesia, let's develop now,” the song evoked the New Order's successful institutionalization of development at the heart of neighborhood governance and everyday community life and the myriad ways this was accomplished. Then the business of the meeting would be conducted, including reporting of finances and local needs, sharing of new directives from the central government, and of course, running of the all-important arisan, or rotating credit lottery. In my experience, such meetings could range from the staid to the bawdy, but they were essentially formulaic restatements of women's appropriate domestic roles as social managers and guardians of community health and prosperity (Suryakusuma Reference Suryakusuma and Sears1996; Wieringa Reference Wieringa1993).

The embodiment of the PKK ideal of women supporting their husbands, their community, and their nation was accomplished through their performance of these monthly rituals, a particularly telling example that localizes state rule not just through the control of women's bodies and their roles in the family, but also in the organization and experience of community life (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1996; Rose Reference Rose1996). Women's unpaid labor in social welfare activities, organized largely through PKK, were all part of the routine administration of local communities: from weighing babies at the monthly integrated health post (Posyandu) to looking after the poor and ill in their neighborhood to accepting and promulgating the national birth control campaign along with other government directives.

Elsewhere I have argued that the great benefit of these community-based programs in poor kampung and rural village alike was the organization of a large army of reserve labor, one that supported the precarious and very low-waged labor needed in Indonesia's surplus labor economy. Women's work organized under an ethic of community self-help and appropriate domesticity not only constrained women to a private sphere but also ensured the social reproduction of this highly fluid, low-waged workforce. This use of the community as a modality of government is not new in Indonesia. A potent form of governmentality, the community form has been harnessed by regime after regime to deliver social welfare for little or no cost (see, e.g., Antlöv Reference Antlöv2003; Boomgaard Reference Boomgaard1991; Breman Reference Breman1980, Reference Breman1988; Kemp Reference Kemp1988; Li Reference Li2007a, Reference Li2007b; Rigg Reference Rigg1994; J. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1992; Warouw Reference Warouw2006). In the case of PKK, the community form had been used to conscript women's care labor to serve their neighbors and to subsidize unemployed and underemployed men and youth.

The sense of the familiar at this meeting in Boyolali was unexpected, given that this meeting for women on home-based early childhood education was taking place nearly a decade after the fall of Suharto and the advent of the era of reform. In the heady first days of Reformasi, there were calls for an end to the most oppressive New Order forms of intervention, including some of the programs associated with neighborhood and village governance (Antlöv Reference Antlöv2003; Tickamyer and Kusujiarti Reference Tickamyer and Kusujiarti2012). Yet, they persist, and it is through the offices of PKK and the Posyandu health post that many of the new early childhood programs are being offered, although the work of PKK typically goes unremarked (e.g., World Bank 2006).

The uncanny sense of familiarity in this Boyolali meeting, its setting, its participants, and its tone was abruptly subverted as Mbak Susi asked the women to stand and sing together a well-known song about development. The women were instructed to sing the line, “maju, maju,” which means “advance, advance” in the sense of advance through modernization and development, only to have Mbak Susi then add: “jump back, jump back,” and then “squat down, squat down.” I was not the only one thrown by these instructions as the women looked at one another with laughter and confusion, not quite knowing whether to obey or not. Mbak Susi encouraged them on, and with much joking and laughing they did indeed jump back and squat down. Embodied Javanese culture continues to value refined bodily comportment and to recognize status by relative height. In Bu Leti's kampung, my old neighborhood, neighbors still sat on mats in front rooms for community meetings, whether religious or civil, and those who arrived later ducked down in front of those already seated, or in more exaggerated form, dropped to their knees to cross the room. Women might now wear pants, something unheard of in 1992, but they still sat decorously and in single-sex groups when men were in attendance. So, while to sit on the floor on one's knees or cross-legged in a modest way was not unusual, to jump back and squat down was.

This was not the last instance of subversion in the four hours of the workshop. Mbak Susi continually disrupted my expectations, and those of the women, in an effort to perform ice-breaker exercises and to encourage the women to speak up and take part freely in the workshop, even to develop a critique of what they saw and heard. Mbak Susi was working against years of New Order inculcation and Javanese enculturation in this, and it is more than a little ironic that this was all done in the service of new approaches to education. That is to say, Mbak Susi was contracted to teach these women about the importance of play and creativity in early childhood for the full and healthy psychosocial development of young children. Yet, the women themselves were the product of years of a national education system that emphasized submission to hierarchy and rote memorization. They were more than happy to write down everything that appeared on the PowerPoint presentation given by Mbak Susi introducing the theories of child development from Piaget, Erikson, and Vygotsky, but when asked their opinion or to provide critique, they were silent. Mbak Susi took them through a series of exercises to make them freer and more engaged, and this resonated with another rite of modernization and governmentality: the routines of the NGO sector with its many trainings (Hoesterey Reference Hoesterey2012; Jones Reference Jones2010; Rudnyckyj Reference Rudnyckyj2010; Welker Reference Welker2012).

Mbak Susi had been contracted to deliver a training on the principles of early childhood care and development to these women who would, in turn, be training parents in their home hamlets on how to incorporate these principles into the home. Like the contrasting expertise in the opening example, this workshop highlighted how knowledge was being authorized at this particular moment but also its relation to the reassembly of particular sets of social relations. Mbak Susi was a professional expert on early childhood, one whose services as a trainer were contracted through a nonprofit organization developed for research and advocacy for young children that had been initially financed by Plan, AusAid, and the World Bank. She was young, middle-class, and university-educated. She herself noted that although married, she did not yet have children. Her audience was made up of lower-class women, likely all mothers and likely not educated past high school, who had been sent to learn about early childhood education in order to introduce these programs to their communities. Their unpaid or poorly paid labor was mobilized through the same modality used before the era of reform: PKK. This call on their nonexpert expertise as state-sponsored citizen-mothers drew upon an existing frame and the presumption of a particular social form: the egalitarian, self-sustaining, and cooperative community.

The grounding of these women's expertise in their naturalized roles as housewives and mothers within local communities illustrates the tension between a global assemblage and a particular local social form. The territorializing of early childhood programs illustrates how a restless transnational expertise takes root, reaffirming particular relationships and subjectivities. The connection between these forms of expertise—one professionalizing and keyed to the transnational form that is ECCD, and one that is keyed to local social welfare in neighborhoods and villages—is captured in changes and continuities in the local integrated health post or Posyandu that has long delivered health support in villages and urban neighborhoods throughout Indonesia. The Posyandu is in essence an older global assemblage, whose origins reflect earlier women in development initiatives, health promotion, and community self-reliance (Razavi and Miller Reference Razavi and Miller1995). With its emphasis on reducing child and maternal mortality, the Posyandu was a key program of Suharto's modernizing New Order governmentality (Köllmann and Van Veggel Reference Köllmann, Veggel and Boomgaard1996; Leimena Reference Leimena1989).

There is no better illustration of the shifts in the Posyandu due to early childhood programming than the changes in the health card used for children under five. The original trifold health card was used to record the height and weight of babies to track biomedical measures of growth. The new, much expanded booklet includes instructions on how to stimulate appropriate development in utero as well as play-based interaction for the infant, with a specific emphasis on brain development. A technopolitics of brain development has arrived in Indonesia, fueled by the growth of brain science in the developed North and the so-called century of the brain (Farah and Wolpe Reference Farah and Wolpe2004). And it is congruent with the global push to consider the very young child, as attention is given to optimal brain development in children from birth and in utero as measurable outcomes.

Like many other development initiatives, ECCD has been reconfigured by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) established in 2000, with their attention to a bigger basket of indicators in the Human Development Index. This new indexing is elaborated in UNESCO's Education for All Index, which includes early childhood care and education, following on the goals of the 2000 Dakar Framework for action, an important impetus for PAUD programs in Indonesia. The link between the MDGs, brain development, and the PAUD programs in Yogyakarta was made explicit in interviews. According to a local child psychologist:

Optimal brain development, like centers and circle time, is yet another technopolitical dimension of the assemblage of early childhood care and development. But this new technical expertise is being put into practice by the experts of PKK.

I Feel Burdened

In interviews at PAUD programs, my research colleague Nita asked how local programs were begun. Most PAUD programs were an offshoot of PKK activities, but some were begun by enterprising individuals influenced by private playgroups; others were the pet project of a local leader or of concerned parents. One particular example gives some sense of the new possibilities as well as the stubborn durability in “underlying social conditions.”

This PAUD program was found just south of Yogyakarta. It had fifty-five middle-class and lower-class students, thirty active, between eighteen months and four and one-half years of age. Students paid 1,500 Indonesian rupiah (Rp) per session, and monthly fees were Rp 10,000 per month (that is, 14 cents per session or 94 cents for the month). As Nita described in her notes, this PAUD program was run by the Posdaya (an abbreviation for Family Empowerment Post), although “it also has a relation with the PKK and some integrated services in sectors of education, health and economy.” Nita interviewed three PAUD teachers together. She began by asking how this PAUD was established.

Nita later asked about educational toys and how this PAUD program had gotten them. She was told that it was through the Posyandu and specifically because of the 2006 earthquake.

When asked about what training they had received, the following exchange took place:

Later, Nita asked about how the teachers were paid.

While one of these PAUD teachers also worked as a professional teacher, the other two worked as seamstresses out their homes. They confessed to using their own funds to help run the PAUD.

These women described many of the common aspects in the roll-out of PAUD. Local communities were frequently interested in these new programs even before the government organized them. Their appearance was facilitated by earthquake relief. Training and pay were not always available. The organization of PAUD programs does not always begin with PKK, but it remains a crucial part of the networked social welfare delivery that is occurring. And ultimately, women do this because that is what one does for one's community: offer up one's labor (and one's own money) to improve it.

The possibilities for professionalization of local women delivering PAUD programming has emerged as a point of tension, one that indexes the dynamism of a global assemblage of ECCD that authorizes particular forms of knowledge while requiring its local rooting in communities through a kind of reterritorialization. Research work by Sri Marpinjun (Reference Marpinjun2012), an educational activist involved with the Resource Center mentioned earlier, details the struggles of PAUD workers to get appropriate pay for their work and the sporadic progress in offering avenues for local women to gain professional credentials. In my own interviews at local PAUD programs, there was little awareness of the professional opportunities available. In fact, although professional kindergarten teachers were involved with running several of the PAUD programs visited by Nita, many of them were doing it for no pay because of community pressure.

In interview notes, Nita described the context for one such teacher: “Because of her active role within a local PKK, she was chosen to teach the local PAUD. When she was first chosen, she was unwilling to take the role due to her busy activities as a teacher, but she couldn't decline being elected by other members of the PKK. She wants someone to take the role, but no one is available so far.” Another teacher with this program compared her work as a kindergarten teacher with that of teaching in a PAUD program: “In the kindergarten, I'm paid in a clear system…. In the PAUD, I'm working voluntarily, so if parents [are] complaining, for example, [about] my way of teaching, I feel burdened.” A teacher in another program expects her payment “in heaven.” And recall Bu Leti, the retired teacher and longtime PKK worker and community volunteer who was now heading the PAUD program in my old neighborhood.

Women's appropriate domestic roles as helpmeet and community social worker were clearly defined in New Order social welfare programs such as PKK and Dharma Wanita (Women's Duty) (Newberry Reference Newberry2006; N. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1994; Suryakusuma Reference Suryakusuma and Sears1996; Wieringa Reference Wieringa1993). But this domestication of women's work was simultaneously linked to a much longer history of imagining the rural village as communal, egalitarian, and based on modes of self-management, as noted above. This was underscored through the New Order's endless recuperation of traditional Javanese forms of culture (Pemberton Reference Pemberton1997). The Suharto regime enshrined appropriate female labor as that located in the home and aimed at domestic management of the home and larger community as a kind of moral regulation. That this “naturalization” required overt suppression by the state has been documented (Wieringa Reference Wieringa2003).

What appears as women's timeless role is an ongoing achievement, and we see in the cases described here the continuation and reproduction of this naturalization under conditions of neoliberalism and democratization. Although women's kodrat (sacrifice) and correct conduct is defined in many places, its use to harness their labor has been particularly crucial in accomplishing the control and management of communities. Previous work showed that women in many cases resented this state-sponsored role, yet they typically acquiesced to its demands. And that is what is highlighted here: women, including professional women, still feel this pressure to support their communities, and this inevitably links them to a naturalized version of women's appropriate work, one that simultaneously gives them little ground to claim wages. In other words, while the opportunity to open daycare and preschool programs has provided entrepreneurial opportunities for some women, the rooting of this work in longstanding forms of community labor has restricted their options. Adding the work of early child care to women's “volunteered” labor draws on valorized notions of appropriate women's work as housewives and mothers that has been so marked in programs like PKK. But it is equally the case that this work ran along old channels of community support based on an ethic of shared responsibility that fell largely to these lower-class women.

So, the labor of these women to deliver PAUD programs is mobilized again through longstanding sentiments of community, what I identified as a structure of feeling in the 1990s (Newberry Reference Newberry2006). The proliferation of PAUD programs has drawn not only on this affect but on existing administrative structures that organize the labor of neighborhood women. The tension between forms of expertise takes us back to the contrast between Bu Leti and the young educational activist we began with. Young educated activists, like Mbak Susi, are benefiting from the introduction of new forms of authority, new forms of governance, and the new political and economic realities that emerged to make it possible. Yet, their work is grounded and rooted through the work of local women in their own communities, like Bu Leti, whose authority comes from a very different source.

In an analysis of training courses in feminine comportment offered in Yogyakarta in the post-Suharto era, Jones (Reference Jones2010) considers the gendered aspects of the “rule of experts” as local women pursue seminars to support their self-confidence as a way to succeed, often professionally. Underlining again the contemporary focus on training, Jones's analysis questions the universal application of expertise in contrast to the specifics of its use. Her use of gender to consider the silences produced through expertise as “the transnational circulation of knowledge delimiting social and political problems” (271) supports the analysis offered here. As she notes, the depoliticization of political problems as technical is especially relevant when considering the naturalized labor of women in a community. Attention to the practices of reassembling and authorizing knowledge (Li Reference Li2007a) helps explain how the rerooting of the community and women's work within it are part of the process of holding an assemblage together.

A Durable Assemblage?

The intensification of development through early childhood education and an emphasis on the integrated and comprehensive development of the child from zero to eight registers the global push beginning with the Convention on the Rights on the Child through the Dakar Framework, the MDGs, and the World Bank's support for ECCD. An emergent assemblage unfolds to connect this focus on early childhood to democratizing Indonesia, where child-centered and play-based approaches to trauma healing allowed for the proliferation of this approach in the playgroups, preschools, and daycare centers that appeared. The earthquake was part of a changing social and political landscape in the era of democratization and reform that opened pathways for early childhood programming and its extension to the lower classes, a crisis that enabled the deepening neoliberalization of government post-Suharto.

At the same time, optimism and hope for democratic change through educational reform post-Suharto were matched and bolstered by middle-class dreams of academic achievement, as parents sought to ensure middle-class status by consuming Western-style educational opportunities. These local conditions converged with global educational enterprise in packaged educational inputs, such as the BCCT approach, which were extended through local uptake of centers and circle time as public programs for the poor were rolled out. Local trainers supplied the BCCT model to community cadres in trainings throughout the region. Early childhood educators were organized, and this new expertise was professionalized. ECCD as a global form, riding on the technopolitics of BCCT and optimal brain development, unfurled as an assemblage of ideas, practices, and protocols that achieved a particular form in post-Suharto, democratic, and decentralized Indonesia. Many of these linkages were revealed in the Venn diagrams drawn by activists, educators, and clinicians centrally involved in early childhood programming in Yogyakarta. Yet, new forms of expertise emerging around early childhood actually highlight their dissonance with care labor delivered by older forms of expertise. Bu Leti's work with PAUD early childhood programs showed that the rerooting of women's volunteered labor through the community form is the result of not only restless, global contingency but also durable practices of rule and neighborhood relations.

The public programs for poor communities were achieved through a looping back (Hacking Reference Hacking, Sperber, Premack and Premack1995) to reinforce the naturalized, unfree care labor of women through the ideology of community, an analysis based on long-term ethnographic research in one community. The production of new childhoods in Indonesia again require women's labor for social reproduction within their communities. The contingency so often emphasized through the use of the concept of assemblage should not overshadow the durability of some modes of development, their rootedness in communities of design and practice, and the retrenchment of some subjectivities in the production of others.

This recursive rooting of development in women's work within the community illustrates what Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010, 105) describe as “technocratic forms of muscle memory.” In this case, it is the community again revivified to contain and constrain the work of women as they are called upon to help new experts produce new childhoods. As early childhood programs are rooted in a community mode of delivery, they are revealed to be contextually genetic rather than merely contingent (Peck et al. Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010) and to blur again lines between inside and outside of the state and the family. Reconstructing the state (Polanyi Reference Polanyi1944, cited in Peck et al. Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010) as they simultaneously illustrate cross-scalar policy learning, the experience of these programs from the accounts of new child experts in Indonesia are juxtaposed with the work of older experts: wives and mothers in poor communities.

In the foregoing, early childhood programming was used to illustrate “the gyrations and mutations of actually existing neoliberalism” (Peck et al. Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010, 105) to suggest that durability, recursively produced, is as important as contingency and instability in global assemblages.