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

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

by Ursina Jaeger

Rutgers University Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-9788-3699-0

Paper: 978-1-9788-3698-3

eISBN: 978-1-9788-3700-3 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-1-9788-3701-0 (PDF)

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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

Reviews

"A rich, layered ethnographic account of childhood, migration and education in a Swiss neighbourhood. . . . Children as Social Butterflies documents children's lives and rethinks how we conceptualise their social worlds. Thoughtful, insightful and theoretically rich, this book deserves close reading and critical engagement."

— Children & Society

"This monograph offers a pleasant reading experience by balancing artfully written ethnographic interludes with theoretical insights. Jaeger excels at providing a nuanced account of how children navigate social belonging in ways that touch upon highly political topics such as migration and schooling, while avoiding the traps of simplistic explanations and stereotypes. . . . An excellent read."

— Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology

"Children as Social Butterflies contributes significantly to the anthropology of education, childhood studies, and migration studies. . . . The book offers important insights for a wide range of readers. Scholars conducting qualitative and ethnographic research will find it a compelling example of how long-term fieldwork can generate social theory grounded in everyday practice."

— Anthropology & Education Quarterly

"This book offers an unusual, rich, and nuanced analysis of children's social dynamics within and beyond a Swiss kindergarten. Delving deep into the intricate interactions among children, parents, and teachers, the author unveils the complex everyday processes shaping perceptions of sameness and difference, hierarchies, and opportunities without reducing these to simple causalities based on class, gender, ethnicity, or religion. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand children's entry into society—and what society can do to facilitate the path for as many as possible." — Eva Gulløv, co-author of Children of the Welfare State: Civilising Practices in Schools, Childcare and Families

"A wonderful child-centered anthropological celebration of human diversity, Jaeger’s study of social differentiation in a Swiss kindergarten demonstrates how young children create social belonging by navigating among several multireferential social orders—in kindergarten, afterschool day care, the neighborhood, and on trips 'home' to their parents’ country of origin."— Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, author of Mothers on the Move: Reproducing Belonging between Africa and Europe