Children as Social Butterflies: Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten

Children as Social Butterflies examines how kindergarten children experience, negotiate, and claim belonging in a diverse and stigmatized Swiss neighborhood. Schools as formative instances of social belonging are particularly important where children with different migration histories are educated together. Childhood scholar Ursina Jaeger followed individual children in a kindergarten class from day one of their school enrollment and accompanied them to extracurricular activities, to ballet classes, to their children’s rooms, to the social welfare office, or on family visits abroad. Based on data from several years of this child-centered and multisited research, Children as Social Butterflies offers a vivid ethnography with unique insights into the everyday lives of young children in a diverse neighborhood. The book provides an analytical language informed by theories of social differentiation to grasp complex configurations of social belonging and shows the full potential of ethnographic research with young children. Jaeger thus offers a dynamic reading of migration, schooling, and childhood that is strongly informed by the experience of working with young children. The book provides educators, childhood scholars, and parents alike with suggestions for dealing with (migration-related) social differentiation.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition, published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

URSINA JAEGER is a senior researcher at the Thurgau University of Teacher Education in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.