In Denmark, almost all children under the age of three attend full-day nurseries – an institutional arrangement that reflects both collective trust in welfare institutions and a deep societal dependency on them. Yet this extensive institutionalization contains a paradox. While early childhood policy emphasizes learning, development, and participation, everyday life unfolds under conditions of staff shortages, administrative control, and the erosion of professional expertise. The very institutions that promise equality and care also come to produce new forms of inequality, vulnerability, and exclusion.

My PhD project explores these tensions through ethnographic studies of young children’s everyday lives in Danish nurseries. Drawing on critical psychology and practice research, I examine how children participate in settings shaped by institutional arrangements that both enable and constrain their possibilities for action and their ways of entering shared practices. Rather than understanding inequality as a background variable – typically linked to children’s socio-economic circumstances – I approach it as situated: something produced and negotiated in the micro-practices of care, attention, and organization, as well as in the children’s own engagements with one another. The study adopts an analytical child’s perspective to develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental institutional practices and the conditions of participation that shape nursery life.

In “dark times,” where early childhood care is increasingly framed by efficiency, standardization, and measurement, theorizing participation becomes a political act. Focusing on the subtle, situated forms of inequality emerging in everyday institutional life is simultaneously to ask what it means for young children to live, learn, and connect with one another in a world marked by institutional pressure. The presentation suggests that theorizing situated inequality requires remaining close to the lived, embodied practices of children and professionals.