Becoming Socially Invisible: Exploring children’s participation in the light of pedagogues precarious working conditions

Within recent years, pedagogical work with children in marginalized residential areas has received greater political attention within Danish daycare institutions. Drawing on ethnografical fieldwork observations with children and interview material with pedagogues from a recent research project in four different Danish daycare institutions located within marginalized residential areas in Copenhagen, this paper points out how some children become socially invisible when pedagogues’ precarious working conditions make it difficult for them to pay proper pedagogical attention. In some cases, this situation reinforces difficulties in the children’s everyday lives and as a result, some children are left to take care of themselves and find their own ways of managing a complex everyday life.