“Necesidades Especiales: Intimate Interventions, Early Education and the New Majority”

Department of Education
, 202

Dario Valles, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Race & Ethnicity at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs and Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America (CSREA), will present “Necesidades Especiales: Intimate Interventions, Early Education and the New Majority” as part of the Education Department Spring 2019 Speaker Series.

Early education for children plays a critical role in narrowing the US racial achievement gap according to mounting evidence. Central, Mexican-American migrant and Black family childcare providers labor at the front lines of preparing for success an emerging majority-minority generation. Drawing from more than three years of ethnography among early educators in California, Valles elucidates home-based caregivers’ everyday practices to mitigate intersecting inequalities that children with necesidades especiales (special needs) and Black and Latinx youth more broadly experience, drawing the analytic gaze towards providers’ cross-cultural intimate interventions as an inclusive early education model designated for the new racial majority.