Changing Practices of Care. German – German comparison of everyday care labour with babies and toddler in the long 1970s.

• Applicant: Dr. Max Gawlich
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416562950

A legal claim to day-care in early childhood, preschool education and quality of care are key points of current debates about infant care in private day-care or nurseries. While these discourses appear as new and innovative, historical research shows, they rather update fundamental questions that were already controversially debated in the 1970s. In international and German historiography, the history of childhood receives an increasing amount of attention since the 1990s, the history of early childhood still remains largely underexposed. Identifying this desideratum, the project focusses its attention on infants, their caregivers, their relations and their practices in the 1970s. The project focuses on two research topics: first the German Federal Government’s "Modellprojekt Tagesmütter" between 1974 and 1980 and, secondly, the development of an educational programme and the accompanying research into nurseries at the Institute for the Hygiene in Childhood and Youth of the GDR in the years 1968 to 1985. The research project investigates the hypothesis that the social, economic and cultural change in the 1970s – the creation of new production and consumption conditions – also results in new relations of socialisation, relations in which early childhood was taken care of in a new mode. The few existing historical works on early childhood so far have focused on the institutional setting of day-care, such as the history of the crib. This research project however, the practices of care, i.e. actions and gestures of nursing, play or feeding, are to be examined. The Principal Investigator pursues this interest with the research question: how was the intimate space of childcare changed in the dynamic period of the 1970s in the former GDR and FDR. The project compares both states, which were closely related in their reciprocal demarcation. In addition the concept “practices of care” will be developed in regard to methodological as well as to conceptual questions. The project builds upon a mixed method approach and a body of heterogeneous source material. Based on developments in ethno-methodological studies and on praxeological considerations from anthropology the project studies the visual history of scientific documental as well as press photography, examines the scientific accompanying research by psychologists and social scientists through hermeneutic critical readings of their reports, reconstructs everyday care by praxeographical inquiries, and produces Oral History Interviews with care takers, parents and scientists. The combination of this diverse source materials and research methods makes it possible to study the change in the everyday care in early childhood in the 1970s. Historiographic conceptualizations such as the scientification of the social, structural change and the emergence of post-fordist society can thus be explored in their effects in the immediate social sphere.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants