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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Beginning Becoming: The First 1000 Days

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Thomas Balmes’ (Babies. Studio Canal documentaries, 2010) ‘Babies’ (Baby(ies) or Bebes) provides a glimpse into the earliest experiences of four infants from four different localities in the world. Although this movie offers no interpretation of what takes place, the discerning viewer is left in no doubt of the significance of these powerful images about infants and their ways of being, doing and knowing in the earliest phases of life. The provocations of ‘Babies’ offer a useful beginning orienting place for a book – almost 10 years later – that promises to focus on becoming in the first 1000 days across a different set of five countries – this time Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Norway and Russia. These contemporary locales are constituted at a time and place where the earliest lives of infants not only take place at home (on the farm, in the city apartment or in the wild) but also now coincide with early childhood education and care (hereafter ECEC) institutions which mark out a new normality for earliest experience across the globe. As such we posit a new era of becoming for the first 1000 days, one that much more deeply implicated in the public sphere than ever before – in curriculum, in policy and in pedagogy – and rooted in philosophies and theories that orient their status.