Abstract

Neoliberalism in Early Education and Care has become pervasive, leading to ‘inadvertent political and social consequences’ (Wood, 2003, cited in, Vintimilla, 2014, p. 80) by influencing the partitioner-child relationship through everyday activities in the classroom and beyond. This paper draws inspiration from Fairchild and Mikuska (2021, p. 1180) and ‘mobilizes (ordinary) affect’ to explore the affect of school readiness using empirical research with 8 early years practitioners working with two-year-old children. Thinking-with Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (2019), being human is to carry, to sustain, and to protect that which is important to us. This paper will story the practitioners personal and professional bags to reveal their fractured identities as enacted through the affect of school readiness. Through collecting and (re)telling these bag stories, a space is opened up for practitioners to consider ‘becoming-with each other’ to amplify and foreground the joyful experiences in practice to challenge neoliberalism ways of being.