Childhood Studies Meets Migration Studies. The Potential of Ethnographic Research for Practices of Differentiation for Intersectional Analysis

In this contribution, childhood studies and migration studies—as institutionalized in the German-speaking context—are considered to have in common the question of the production of difference within the childcare and education system. In their understandings of difference, not only do they take into account dynamics of the welfare state, but also the intersection of difference and inequality. After a brief introduction to both research fields and an outline of their assumptions in relation on one hand to the generational and on the other to the ethnically-encoded or racialized difference respectively, ethnography is presented as a research strategy that serves as a means to reconstruct practices of differentiation in educational fields. Thus, a summary is provided of the key findings of longitudinal ethnography into practices of differentiation in daycare centers and primary schools. Against this background, the indications gleaned from this argumentation for the question of intersectional analysis are then discussed in the context of research on childhood and migration.