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Ursina Jaeger, "Children as Social Butterflies: Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten" (Rutgers UP 2025)
01:06:45
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. And today I'm talking with Osina Jaeger about her new book, Children as Social Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten, which was published with Rutgers University Press. Welcome, Ozina.
- [00:24]
B
Hello, Kai. Hi everybody. Thanks for having me.
- [00:28]
A
So can you maybe start off with telling us what was the story behind the book? How came that you wrote a book on belonging and navigating identities in a kindergarten?
- [00:48]
B
That is of course a question one could answer in very different terms and give very different layers or different stories. I try to give insights into some of that. One is I got a job and at a research project that was hosted at the Zurich University of Teachers Education. It was three years funding of a team ethnographic project that looked into teachers practices of differentiations in different Swiss kindergartens. And I was chosen to be the PhD student and scientific collaborator in this project that would cover, so to say, one of those kindergartens. And I did that for three years. But the story, of course, is always a lot more complex when you look at it in different ways. I think I was always an ethnographer, kind of even. How could I say that even before I know things on methodology or research or academia. So I think I always loved to immerse myself in the life of people and figure out how people would render meaningfully lives and circumstances. So this is what I did already before I joined that project in different countries and in different studies. I studied social anthropology and international development and a bit of global history in Vienna and Oslo, and was a teacher for some times later on in primary school. And I think that project on ethnographically studying kindergarten teachers and the children merged different interests and different versions of the way I would like to somehow be in the world, or what I like doing. As I said, I got one field, so it was given to me in this team ethnographic project and I could look it up in Google Maps and had already a field, so to say a kindergarten in a diversified and at least for Swiss, in Swiss terms, poor and stigmatized neighborhood that I came to call Mullecon throughout this book. And I started doing participant observation in that kindergarten and very soon realized that what I found intriguing and what I found interesting is what those children bring each day at class and how they would react and transform and change the way they got addressed and differentiated by the teacher, but also by the pedagogical order. So I started to leave the kindergarten together with those children, wherever I got access. So I went with them to after school, still state institutions, daycare institutions, I went with them to their families, to the football pitch, to ballet classes, to the shopping mall, and twice abroad, and was more and more interested in how the children would navigate across different sociospatial orders. And that is what I then tried to write up in the book, which was a book that it was an enterprise that took almost 10 years from first entering that kindergarten, entering the field, to then having it published in the shape it is now with Rutgers University Press.
- [05:26]
A
Yeah, thank you. And you already mentioned you did quite extensive field work. So you, you mentioned the different sites you, you've went with the children. Can you, can you tell us a bit more about the extent the, the amount of time you spend with, with the children and what did you then actually do there when you observed them?
- [05:57]
B
That is not so easy to answer, Kurtis. I mean, I could say I stopped writing field notes after like three years that no further field notes and no further situations were. I did not write something down. But it would be too big a thing to say that I did three years of fieldwork. When I started in the kindergarten, I was in the kindergarten in that very same kindergarten with the very same 20 children's, consisting of two cohorts of the so called butterflies and the so called caterpillars, the younger and the older cohorts. We might talk about that a little later in this talk. I was there not every day, but nearly every day at the beginning, closely looking how the new cohort of the so called caterpillars would be socialized and woven into the social order in kindergarten and how they would be adapted to being a kindergarten child. Kindergarten, just a short thing, is part of the compulsory schooling in the canton of Zurich where I did this fieldwork. So they enter school and the schooling institution when they enter kindergarten. By the age of four, after like four months, I started leaving the kindergarten together with the children and go to daycare institutions and to families wherever I got access to. So now the ethnographic pathways, I do conceptualize those ways through the neighborhood and beyond as ethnographic pathways that opened up while accompanying the children through their everyday life. Those ethnographic pathways were very unequally intense and deep, or whichever metaphor one might use in this case, as I got very easily access to some families. So I was allowed to follow some children quite extensively throughout several years. And with some other children I try to also get glimpses or more into their out of school lives. This ended up by just trying to get insights, trying to get the conversation with Parents with siblings, with the children outside of school, and it never worked. So I have sometimes those two years of trying to get into a conversation that would be out of school, institutional wise. But as I said, with some children and accordingly their families, it was possible to share quite a decent amount of time together up to then, after leaving kindergarten, up to two years of meetings in different locations. Yeah, for so. And then at some point I had to say, now, now this is. I have to come to an end. I have to now leave the field as well.
- [10:05]
A
And when you say you followed the children, I mean, I've read the book and I know what you mean by that. But maybe that might sound surprising to some listeners, like, what a weird thing to do to follow the children throughout their different social contexts, different parts of their life. Can you tell us a bit more what did you do and with which question in mind? What interests did you bring to this way of doing research?
- [10:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand I tried to figure out, or the aim was to describe the everyday life of those children of the kindergarten class in that neighborhood. I came to call Mullekon, aiming to contribute to a discussion on how children navigate belonging across different social spaces. So this is to try to accompany them not only in pedagogical institutions, but also in. Because this is what we know that there is a fair amount of good literature on how children are addressed and how hierarchies in pedagogical orders take place. But we do not know so much when it comes to social belonging and when we take the children's perspective seriously on what happens. To attributed and pedagogically institutionalized forms of social belongings once children go to another place. So by accompanying children throughout different sociospatial orders, the aim was to describe as carefully and as in much detail as possible how children do this, what it makes to their way of. How could I say that? Of making use of various categories of social belonging and different configurations of social belonging. So this was both an intellectual enterprise. How can we describe social belonging that is not only ordered and dominated by pedagogical orders and state defined manners of who one is and how one should belong to a certain group, or what it means to be part of a certain group, but also how children themselves render meaningfully the options and the ways that they are making sense of their lives? So when I accompanied them, following would be one word, and there is another of shadowing, which I'm not using, which is also in the ethnographically, in the methodological discussion, there are certain Metaphors that do something to the way one is with the children, right? So if you accompany them, you at least have the. There's a certain sense of participation and being with and not just behind or trying to catch up with them, but spending time with children in different socio spatial orders. An interesting thing in that, now that you ask me, is that while being in school this was very easy to just accompany the children. So the social order of school allows an ethnographer to sit in the circle once they have a pedagogical sequence and clap their hands and sing the good morning song. So the institution is prepared for basically just random adults to be part. So once the teacher allows somebody to participate, you can, I'd say, adapt quite a free floating position within a class, define in discussion, in negotiation with the children, the ways and modes of participation. So sometimes you can join in a game or you can make a snowball fight and have a position that is, I say, or I'd guess slightly more. How could I say that in English, closer to a fun position. So you do not have to scold the children and you do not have to take care of the social order in class, but could very much adapt to the needs and the speed and the energy of the children, which helps a lot to build up a relation that can help once you are in other social fields with the children. So when you leave kindergarten together with children, this relation is already established and it refers a lot on the pedagogical order. It is not that children would think of you as a teacher. I was quite surprised how quickly children were able to distinguish between teachers and myself. So for instance, when they did something, they knew it was not allowed, but they knew that I saw it. They were quite quickly also at ease with that, knowing that I would not go to the teacher and say, hey, have you seen this? And that child that whatever, not tidy up the way he or she was supposed to do it. But nevertheless, the relationship was already established in a certain way and intellectually. But also when it comes to positionality, it was very interesting to see how this established relation changes when you to make a huge jump when you spend time at the beach in Ghana with a child where I got the huge chance and privilege to accompany when the child was visiting parts of their family in Ghana. And the question how you then which parts of the relationship you established in school would transgress the borders to or the to would transgress to the other social order? In which way would whom of us be vulnerable in each context? But also what does the family do and the family order being both in Switzerland and in the neighborhood in very wealthy Zurich. So already having the relationship in the neighborhood or in other parts of a very wealthy, rich city or abroad, this was analytically very meaningful. In order to see how do children use the relationship with that ethnographer that is somehow with them for a reasonable amount of time, but also what kind of research is possible in which field? So what I found interesting when it comes to doing research with the parents is that I often experience the parents of those children as way more vulnerable than the children. And this did something with the way I would portray and I would go along within my fieldwork, because I don't know whether this comes clearly the way I might try to give an example of this. When children are so much more or less children that do speak other languages than the school language at home are so much more worked on kind of institutionally than parents that migrated to Switzerland when they were already older. So the working market and the Swiss migration regime is such that there is not a lot of free courses to learn the language. Or it's not a very welcoming migration regime to say so. But there's a huge discourse, very problematizing, but a huge discourse on integrating children into Swiss society. And of course, every child spends a very decent amount of time in schooling institutions. And those children that are addressed and imagined as not yet belonging in a way that Swiss mainstream society think of as who we are supposed to be. If there's children do not yet belong to that group, There's a huge repertoire, a huge. How could I say that a lot of action takes place in order to make those children become part of. Of society. Whereas this is not done in such a way with the parents. But parents, or a lot of the parents with whom I worked nevertheless are a lot of time under, I think the term that is most adequate to describe that living in the shadow of the state. This is a term that Paimella, Feldman, Sauvsberg sharpened for the discussion in migration studies that parents are often felt that I would be checking if they would educate and care for their children in a proper way. By proper, I mean the references to the. The Swiss society. And that I would be that state agent knocking at their door, trying to figure out whether they would do that right, Imagining that it would refer to, for instance, legalization, naturalization processes, the negotiation they at times had with social welfare. The question whether families will get a bigger apartment. And having me entering those spaces, those intimate spaces of the families and hanging around with them Destabilized a lot also because I was not able to speak all those languages. So what happened is in the families was that parents that at time would not feel comfortable speaking German or Swiss German switched to German or Swiss German within their own homes. This was not so much a thing for the children, but it was a lot a thing for parents. Trying to show me, especially in the beginning when I started to accompany children also at home and to share time with families that I felt that parents were trying to show me that they were good parents, but had to show me or felt that they had to show me that in German, which is extremely difficult destabilizing and making it more difficult. So I had to adapt the way I was around the children because in the schooling institutions it was very easy to just spend time with the children and not care so much about the other adults presence because they were in a very powerful position. I'd say so. But this changed a lot when I spent time with the children out of school. To come back for one second to that metaphor, that figure of the living in the shadow of the state. This is meant that a shadow can be protective at times. So there would be people from the state helping parents and families in difficult situations, trying to find another apartment or so. But it would also be a shadow meaning a constant threat of having to prove that. Now I speak to what they anticipate having to prove that one earns for instance the help of different state institutions and then one does justice to that what is required of them. So having that ambiguous relation to the state also did a lot to my research and to the way that I would be spending time with the children. Changing, destabilizing, but I would say enriching the intellectual enterprise that eventually the book came to be. Maybe so far my day kicks off
- [26:19]
C
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- [27:10]
A
Yeah, thank you. I find, like, the book is full of ongoing reflections about the relationship between the ethnographer and people that were researched. But maybe let's come back to that a bit later. Also you said that. No, let's come back to that later. First, I would like to ask you more about the core topic, because your question, as you said, was how do children navigate belonging? And what I also found very interesting in your book is what categories do they use to navigate belonging? Because belonging is belonging to what? Yeah, okay. And I found it quite surprising and interesting that some of the categories that we as adults would maybe first think of in, for example, a diverse field like nationality or the color of the skin. I understood it that these categories were not so important like other categories. You already mentioned the category caterpillar and butterfly to name the different cohorts, or not really age groups, because you described that children of different ages can be in each of these groups, but. They name how long you already belong to the institution. If I understood it right, maybe you can describe a bit more like what was your findings, so to say, in regard to these categories to which children navigated their belonging.
- [29:34]
B
So I think one of the core finding was that those categories are not at all stable, but that children would use different categories of social belonging, first of all, differently, that one might use it later on in life when there is already a lot put onto those categories. So a lot of hierarchization, a lot of status, a lot of societal and political references that would make certain categories more wanted than others. So this is still. This works differently. But nevertheless there is a. I could time and again take part when children would use different categories to negotiate friendship, to find their way in a group, to exclude other children, to get acknowledgements or praise. But it worked at least differently than I expected. And what I found the most interesting or one of the empirical conclusions or finding is that those different frames of reference upon which children draw categories of social belonging kept referring to each other in a very contingent way. So it was very much situationally negotiated how children would draw on those categories. I do understand to just say some words about that. Of course, there is a lot of good literature on social belonging that deals with those huge categories, so to say, race, gender, class, etc. But in the way I was spending time with the children, I borrow more from figures that understand belonging as a way of expressing relatedness. This also comes to. How could I say that in English? Sometimes my it would be easier to. For the listeners, it would be easier to say that in German. But I do my very best to do it. And in the book I got a lot of help also from native English speakers to make the. The text a text that works in English, or at least I hope so. It borrows from social scientists that conceptualize belonging more in a way to capture the sense of attachment that people articulate, so to say, when they describe with whom they get along and what kind of person they might be. So having that, and having started at my empirical research in the kindergarten, this categorization, the pedagogical categorization of children being butterflies or caterpillars was kind of an analytical entry point or an avenue based upon which the whole field that I was then exploring and that opened up by leaving on those different ethnographic pathways. Those categories were some kind of my focal. Analytically my focal reference point when it came to the way how I analyzed how the children would draw on different categories. Now, the thing is, in kindergarten, the kindergarten teachers heavily rely upon this social differentiation more than any other I could imagine. So it has a very, very much a pedagogical aim or objective to distinguish between children that are supposed to already be good kindergarten children, that are already that supposed to know how to hold a pair of scissors, that are supposed to know how certain songs would work, that are supposed to know how the rules of class, and to follow the metaphor, which is quite telling of butterflies, they're supposed to fly out to primary school very soon, whereas the caterpillars still, in the pedagogical logic, can still eat a lot, and must still eat a lot in order to then eventually turn into a proper kindergarten child. And then eventually, a year later turning into a butterfly, having that miraculous metamorphosis and later on fly to school. I had the chance of studying this process of how children are turned into and addressed and transformed into butterflies and caterpillars twice. Because I spent two years in that kindergarten so I could watch and be part when the cohort that was first that enters the kindergarten the same day as I did on their very first day of class in kindergarten. This was also my very first day as an ethnographer in that kindergarten class. And I had to have the chance to see them becoming caterpillars, meaning the small ones, those that do not yet know and not yet belong, so to say, fully to kindergarten class, that would need role models in the form of the butterflies that socially would guide them how to be and how to transform, how to Become and be a kindergarten child. And I could see the butterflies all of a sudden. Now you have to imagine that they spent a whole school year of kindergarten being caterpillars. And then from one day to the other, the older cohort left, and they're now the big ones. And I had the chance to see what it does to the cohort of the social, of the butterflies, of all of a sudden becoming the big ones, and what it does to their way of being in class and negotiating their social position within the peer group. And I could see what it does to former caterpillars after this year, having that position that was like, for that whole year, processed as now, those are kind of the right kindergarten children, because they know already. So they know already. This was the very, pedagogically speaking, the thing that made it also possible for the teachers to have kind of a dual frame of evaluation that they could scold one child for not holding a pair of scissors right, while telling the other, this is okay, you're still a caterpillar. You do not have to know yet you're here to learn. What the children did with those categories was something completely different than the pedagogical order was meant to be. It was very much a way of. Again, I come back to how I understand belonging, a way of expressing relatedness, especially amongst those who have power in class, which were the butterflies. So children that would not, in the first year as caterpillars would not play at all together when turning into the second year after the summer break, when coming to this very same kindergarten with all the things they know already with their cohort of the formerly caterpillars, and would all of a sudden turn into the big ones. They would use it as a bond for friendship. They would use it as a way of excluding others and of gaining status, which was not at all meant by the kindergarten teachers. Now, why are those categories so interesting? For me, what I found very, very. If I would have only done an ethnography in the kindergarten class, I would have said, these are very, very important categories that shape the processes of subjectivations from the kids, and they would have a very strong impact upon the way they would be classified and ordered. Now, what I found interesting, or the ethnography is always a good teacher, I'd say, and leaving the class and leaving this pedagogical order, this category loses completely its effectiveness, so to say. So when children would go to daycare afterwards, they would often be spending the afternoons together with children that were at times twice as old as Them So they would be in groups of children up to 6th grade of primary school. So around 12 year old kids. And the question whether you'd be a butterfly or a caterpillar in kindergarten didn't matter at all because you would be one of the small children within that group at daycare, which also had, at least from what my ethnography would allow me to think of, would have an impact on how children would use that space. So not being the older, the wiser, the good version of a kindergarten child as a butterfly, if that category loses its impact because other people would not refer to that as something rendered meaningfully, children would also cry more being allowing themselves to be cuddled by others. And I think fallback is the wrong term. But to display and perform different ways of being in the world that are not so much influenced by this strong focus on being a butterfly and what it means to be a butterfly. And the second thing. So one is spatially. So what happens to such a category of expressing relatedness with all its. How could I say that? With all the expectations upon how you should feel and how you should perform what happens to that spatially once you leave the frame of reference within this category is effective in a certain way. And the other is also temporally. So having spent not only time in different. On different research sites with different frames of references, but also within the social order of class, it I could, or I hope that I could show how the categorization of being part of the cohort of the butterflies and the caterpillars also dissolved. Or was that the tension on whether the question, these important questions, to which question to which of those two groups you'd belong would cease of being so important after a while. Because children would bring other forms of belonging into class. Would for instance come as the three boys that always spend the afternoons in the same daycare center. They would come with references from daycare that would not have something to do with that category of butterflies and caterpillars or children would come up with other like friendships that developed after time. So this categorization slowly, slowly became less important. Yet to be re engaged and gaining again power when the new class started after school after the summer break.
- [44:41]
A
So the picture I get while listening to you and also reading the book is that it is kind of a multi reference situation. So depending on where the children are and when they are at these places, they use really and with whom. Yeah. So is it. What do you mean by with whom? Like the other children or the kindergarten teacher or.
- [45:17]
B
Yeah, yeah. And whether they spend there at the football pitch having the mother present or not. Or.
- [45:27]
A
Yeah, parents also. Yeah, maybe the parents don't even know what. What's going on with caterpillars and butterflies. Did all of them get the metaphor? Do you think that they. After a short while, did all the parents know how important this category was for their children? Or was it so far apart from their family life that it never entered non. Non state organized pedagogical setting? It's a really detailed question that just came up.
- [46:10]
B
Yeah, no, no, it's. It's at least from what I was able to. To see, to observe. I never saw the category travel outside, like in a open way to other social fields that the children would spend time. And I do not think that it was an issue that it was dealt with at least not extensively at home. They would. I mean, there is a timetable and you would have. You'd know that the butterfly children, they would be prepared for a more school foolish way of life. Twice in the afternoon. So twice in the afternoon. I do not want to go too much into detail into the schedule of Swiss kindergarten, but usually you have in the mornings the whole class is together, and then in the afternoon, twice you'd have the butterflies only and they would do things like counting to 10 or stuff that would help children to adapt to a school order. The kindergarten is still very much on play. You would know as a parent that your child belongs to the group of the caterpillar and would have afternoon classes. But the social implications of the category and also the expectations that come along dealt with in the pedagogical order. I do not think that this ever left the kindergarten in a way that was important to other places. Which is interesting, right? That some categories only have, but have a very strong effect upon social order in one side of your life and then just disappears to be in another.
- [48:23]
A
Then I also found interesting that of course children kind of make up their own categories which are really meaningful for them that are not at all. I wanted to say connected, but maybe they are connected, but they are at least on a very different level than the categories we often think as relevant. For example, I remember one scene you describe in the book that it was really important for one child that another child is her friend. So I am the friend of a popular child. And that was a very important category for that situation. Or I also remember that, like,
- [49:20]
B
who.
- [49:20]
A
Who maybe has a certain backpack from a certain famous children pop cultural figure or something like. Like. And who has. Who doesn't have any contact with that Figure and these kind of categories seem situationally often more important than these big categories. We adults or at least we social researchers tend to think in that was not a question, that was an impression you can comment on.
- [50:05]
B
Yeah, but then Kai again I think that often if you look at the way every humankind expresses relatedness, it's also trying to get the fame of people that are famous or whatever. So this is I'd say at least a thing that is not unfamiliar to a lot of of practices of human differentiations and what people counting children. This is another thing I try to sharpen in the book what it does if childhood scholars conceptualize children as ontologically different than adults or it's an ambiguous thing and it's an interesting and tricky question how to work with children's accounts and children's perspectives as not ontologically different than adults. Yet frames of references and the way one is being and becoming. There are differences that have to be addressed. Now listening to your comment, I mean you always also the children and I think I could very often see very competent social actors exactly knowing how they would become more popular for instance in class or upon which social category they should draw on in order to. Find a way within a given situation that would make them feel comfortable or make them become friends with somebody. But you need to have in order to distinguish, you need to have a pre concept of what kind of. Of nuances of differences and of which difference can be meaningfully processed and evolved. Which was very interesting to follow.
- [52:37]
A
Yeah, I realized my comment had two sides like one side for sure the children adult distinction but then also big and heavy categories that often you cannot do much about it versus more bottom up situational categories that are co created within a certain group for a specific time. So my guess would be this pop cultural figure, whether you know her or not is very or could be very very relevant for a short amount of time and maybe even the most relevant thing to distinguish yourself within the kindergarten group. But then a few weeks later it would be totally irrelevant again. So
- [53:41]
B
yeah, and one of one of those. But I think I'm not sure whether I have thought of it enough in the book. I do try to say that I mean one thing is that there is a danger of trivializing societal hierarchies that are real. Right. I mean you do have in that kindergarten being located in a neighborhood that is stigmatized and poor by Swiss standards. This has a huge impact upon who is visiting that kindergarten. So there's none of the children came from a family that had A huge social status within Swiss society. And quite all of them were suffering from a harsh Swiss migration regime, facing racism, having struggled with poverty within the Swiss frame of reference. And you would have a school that is. Or I at least had also the chance to meet teachers that would try to work hard, to seek and to allow to open opportunities for those children, which meant also the way they dealt that was that they would try to neutralize quite a lot of out of school categories that were of a huge importance out of school, such as the color of the skin. So you'd have children that would. If you walk with them through the neighborhood and through their everyday life, you'd have situations where, I mean, not all of a sudden, but still, if you would like naively walking with them, but all of a sudden, the skin color would be something that you would notice as being. Or a lot of people with similar skin color would meet somewhere, as in the Baptist African Church, for instance. Or you'd have. That certain languages would be important or not important at all, muted even in certain situations that you would have situations where speaking Albanian would be the most natural and just the thing you do, while as in other contexts, you would be blamed or scold, or where it could be that you would be stigmatized for speaking a certain language, for instance, at the welfare office or. So when you interact with state institutions and having all those very difficult and harsh expectations up on the way, how you belong and where you belong, and what it would mean to find a way through your life within this very, very dominant frame of reference, I.e. the Swiss Society, but then having all those other openings and other sides where this would not be the dominant mode of reference. No, I don't. I don't know how to make a full stop or a point on that, but what I'm trying to say is that within the pedagogical order, even though being so pedagogically guided, there was a lot of space to negotiate for the children, especially because. And this is a bit contradictory, right? Because you'd have such a strong guiding force of what is right and what is wrong and what a good pupil means. But this is in the discourse that is openly discussed within the class. This is not based upon, for instance, race, class and gender. So you'd have. In the kindergarten that I was present, you would not have. I mean, imagine that B. I think it would be huge scandal. But in out of school this is done, but it's not like done in a meaning or it's not pronounced that way, but you'd never have the situation, or I'd never had a situation where the teachers would say, now all the children that are black, please go to the left and all the others to the. You never have a situation where skin color, race would. Would be openly discussed as a meaningful category of social differentiation within class. And you would. Teachers would hardly refer on gender as being a meaningful category. And you would not speak about poverty or they would not. So they would be sensitive to, for instance, ask questions about the weekend that would not lead to children that could not afford certain things to deal with that. So they would neutralize, so to say, quite a lot of things that are very meaningful outside that pedagogical order. And they, of course, are also very meaningful inside the pedagogical order, but they're not openly guiding the infrastructure of possible ways of relating to the pedagogical order. And this does a lot with how children can evolve and come up with categories. So this is quite meaningful, I'd say, the way those huge categories are negotiated and not negotiated in class and what this neutralization does to the way that children could walk through their everyday life.
- [60:57]
A
Yeah, that is, I think, the core, the core of your book. And if some of our listeners are interested, I can wholeheartedly recommend reading it. It's really elegantly written, it's full of sharp observations, also at times funny, and also a very reflective approach to always also think about the own positionality and relation to the research fields while doing or in the case of the book, presenting the research. It's open access, so you can check it out. And to bring our podcast to an end, I would like to ask you what are you working on right now, Ozina?
- [62:06]
B
I mean, this is a topic you cannot just leave, I'd say so I'm still thinking of childhood studies and migration related topics, but I do it now taking different perspectives. One is I do an ethnography of families that do not want to school their children anymore in Swiss or German schools and migrated to different countries which they think would leave them do their own things. So they have migration, childhood and belonging in quite other social situations, a family state critical or critical of the state. And I do a small study in the canton where I'm living and wherever I'm working at the moment, the canton of Turgau on obligatory Mandatory German classes for three year olds. There was a huge political issue and then studying through the language policy together with some friends and colleagues. So that is what is occupying me now. Fun to do so as well.
- [63:23]
A
Sounds really interesting. Perhaps we can do another podcast on
- [63:27]
B
that in about 10 years time.
- [63:30]
A
Yeah, after 10 years we can meet again. Thank you very much for joining us, Osina, and thank you very much for listening.
- [63:39]
B
Thank you. Have a nice day.