Conference 2023


About Conference

Thank you for attending the International Conference organised by the Unit Childhood Studies in Early Childhood and Primary Education at Goethe University Frankfurt with focus on the key themes difference in childhood and education, as well as their role towards discrimination and inequality.

Social movements, intellectual traditions as well as social and educational research on difference and discrimination have for many years pointed to the importance of specific and intersectional order(s) of difference (such as ethnicity and race, gender, generation, ability and others) for access to social resources and processes of becoming a subject.

Education is one of those resources that is still not accessible in the sense of the postulate of equality. Instead, despite increasing attention to heterogeneity-oriented and anti-discriminatory legal regulations and pedagogical programs, educational inequality clearly persists in the educational systems. Research on difference and discrimination theory locates the mechanisms of the reproduction of educational inequality in processes of classification and, thus, in the production and effectiveness of processes of order formation in educational institutions themselves. Childhood itself is the result of institutionalization processes in education and children are ongoing differentiated within educational institutions not only in processes of generational but as well in ethnicity, race-, gender- and abilityrelated ordering. 

Against this background, the aim of the conference is bringing together academia, researchers, and scholars for three days of cross-border learning and dynamic networking to explore together the field of order(s) of difference in childhood and education.
“Order(s) of Difference in Childhood and Education" represents an interdisciplinary field of study that will be made visible as such in the context of the conference. The theoretical and methodological multiperspectivity thus established will make it possible to describe the contouring of the object from these different perspectives and to explore their contribution to a generalizable understanding of the meaning of order(s) of difference for children and education, as well as their role in discrimination and inequality.

Conference Organisers
Raphael Bak, Prof. Dr. Claudia Machold and Dr. Carmen Yong-Ae Wienand


About Conference


Thank you for attending the International Conference organised by the Unit Childhood Studies in Early Childhood and Primary Education at Goethe University Frankfurt with focus on the key themes difference in childhood and education, as well as their role towards discrimination and inequality.

Social movements, intellectual traditions as well as social and educational research on difference and discrimination have for many years pointed to the importance of specific and intersectional order(s) of difference (such as ethnicity and race, gender, generation, ability and others) for access to social resources and processes of becoming a subject.
Education is one of those resources that is still not accessible in the sense of the postulate of equality. Instead, despite increasing attention to heterogeneity-oriented and anti-discriminatory legal regulations and pedagogical programs, educational inequality clearly persists in the educational systems. Research on difference and discrimination theory locates the mechanisms of the reproduction of educational inequality in processes of classification and, thus, in the production and effectiveness of processes of order formation in educational institutions themselves. Childhood itself is the result of institutionalization processes in education and children are ongoing differentiated within educational institutions not only in processes of generational but as well in ethnicity, race-, gender- and abilityrelated ordering.
Against this background, the aim of the conference is bringing together academia, researchers, and scholars for three days of cross-border learning and dynamic networking to explore together the field of order(s) of difference in childhood and education.
“Order(s) of Difference in Childhood and Education" represents an interdisciplinary field of study that will be made visible as such in the context of the conference. The theoretical and methodological multiperspectivity thus established will make it possible to describe the contouring of the object from these different perspectives and to explore their contribution to a generalizable understanding of the meaning of order(s) of difference for children and education, as well as their role in discrimination and inequality.

Conference Organisers
Raphael Bak, Prof. Dr. Claudia Machold and Dr. Carmen Yong-Ae Wienand