Understanding Early Childhood Development in Emergencies: An Inhabited Institutionalist Analysis of Humanitarian Programming for Young Children and Caregivers

It is estimated that 35 million displaced people are children, with 340,000 children born into displacement every year. In response, a body of early childhood and humanitarian experts have coalesced to form the professional field of early childhood development in emergencies (ECDiE). In practice these experts implement humanitarian parenting programs that consist of home-visits and community-center seminars where refugee parents are educated about child development benchmarks and encouraged to recognize the risks that arise from poor parenting practices.  As a nascent humanitarian niche, the universe of ECDiE experts is relatively small and I plan to leverage this condition of narrow technocratic capture to employ a multi-sited, ethnographic case study that explores how group interactions within and between experts inform ECDiE policy, programming, and the way refugee parents are told to raise their children.