Narrativas sobre el desarrollo en la primera infancia. Usos estratégicos y procesos de institucionalización en Argentina

In Argentina and the region, there is a process of expansion of policies and initiatives around early childhood development as an axis of social protection. This process involves the complex intersection of narratives associated with social investment and human capital, neurosciences, and children?s rights. Through an ethnographic perspective, this article examines the political and strategic uses deployed by actors and institutions that participate in the production of these policies and that are positioned in various ways and anchored in different trajectories and knowledge. The disputed nature of these uses and the contradictory processes of institutionalization restore the political character of these narratives that appeal to seemingly neutral languages. Early childhood, then, is demarcated, rather than as a mere object of technical intervention, as a node of political and epistemic disputes.