Modes of hesitation: avoidance, ambivalence, and ambiguity in middle-school

This paper wonders about children’s practices of hesitation in their educational lives and explores how hesitation can be read as an affirmative critique of the ways children’s educational life is organized for them. The paper departs from a study of children who started attending afterschool clubs, as they began middle school. A beginning where choice-based pedagogies accelerated processes of responsibilization and individualization for the children. The paper empirically unfolds the practices of hesitation the children performed during this beginning and conceptualizes hesitation as the wavering between attachment and detachment. To develop on this understanding of hesitation, the paper draws on Ben Andersons (2022) conceptualization of scenes of attachment, and the idea of detachment as ambivalently entangled with attachment. The article suggests, that paying attention to children’s practices of hesitation, affords exploring how children navigate the organizings of their educational lives. From this, the paper unfolds how hesitation can be read as an affirmative critique of the governance suggestive of educational organizings, hereby proposing new perspectives for childhood studies.