Early childhood education (ECE) constitutes a central site in the production of modern childhood. Research shows that the physical environments in ECE shape conditions for children’s everyday lives. These environments are not neutral but rather shaped by dominant childhood discourses and broader societal and scientific rationalities. While previous studies have traced the emergence of new spatial and material arrangements, critical analyses of the discourses legitimizing ECE environments and the forms of governing they enable remain scarce. Against this backdrop, the present dissertation takes its point of departure the need to analyse the discursive practice of the ECE environment.

The analysis focuses on how the ECE environment constitutes a form of governance and how this can be understood in relation to the construction of childhood. The dissertation’s analytical framework draws on Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and genealogy. Governmentality offers a lens for analysing power, while genealogy illuminates the discontinuous processes through which forms of thought and practise have taken shape. From this perspective, the discursive constructions of the ECE environment, as well as of childhood, are understood as decisive in shaping how ECE is organized, in practice and in theory.

The dissertation comprises an introductory chapter and three peer-reviewed articles. The empirical material consists of: policy texts, the journal Förskolan, and scholarly articles. The selection of varied text genres aims to make visible discursive practices that recur across texts produced by different actors and for different purposes. These recurring patterns are analysed as expressions of a systematised logic within discourses on the ECE environment.

The results show how certain forms of subjectivity and freedom are rendered desirable while others are marginalized or confined to specific spatial-discursive domains. This has implications for how children’s room for action is understood and produced. The dissertation thus illuminates how governance operates through science, policy and everyday discourse, jointly shaping what is perceived as possible and legitimate. It further offers a conceptual resource for future studies of how space organizes power and knowledge by situating the concept heterotopia within a governmentality framework. This approach highlights the dynamic interplay between spatiality and the ongoing production and reconfiguration of power relations. In sum, the dissertation provides an expanded foundation for continued research into ECE environments in the governing of childhood.

This article examines early childhood educational space as a technology of government through Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. Drawing on this concept, the analysis juxtaposes and interrogates different perspectives on space, thereby advancing its conceptualization as an object of critical inquiry. The analysis is based on nine contemporary research articles focusing on children and processes of subjectification in early childhood education. These studies are examined as empirical cases in which knowledge and power are produced, negotiated, and contested. The analysis shows that the preschool functions as a site of overlapping yet distinct spatial arrangements. Such a heterotopic configuration enables multiple—and at times contradictory—processes of subjectification, through which children are simultaneously constituted as autonomous agents and regulated learners. Thus, mobilizing the concept of heterotopia makes it possible to analyze constructions of space not merely as context but as a dynamic site that actively participates in the reproduction and transformation of power relations in early childhood education.

This article problematizes the ideals and norms surrounding the organization of environments for children. It investigates the understanding of the arrangement and organization of Early Childhood Education (ECE) environments, aiming to offer an alternative perspective on taken-for-granted assumptions about ideal environments for children. Using Foucault's conceptualization of discourse and power, the article examines how discursive practices shape and reshape norms and ideals of what constitutes a 'good' physical environment in ECE. Based on 145 texts published between 1969 and 2021 in an influential Swedish preschool teacher journal, the study analyzes systematic discourses on preschool environments. Key findings concern the environment's role in the governing of children. The discursive construction of ideal environments emphasizes a 'toy-free' setting with minimal framing and instruction, pointing to a discursive shift in the desired type of freedom for children: from the freedom to become a part of culture, to the freedom to change culture.

This article examines how environmental design is set in motion as a technique of government in Swedish policy texts issued to advise those who build and plan preschools. Drawing on Foucauldian research on governmentality and Carol Bacchis 'What's the problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach, five Swedish government policies on how to build and design preschools are examined from a critical perspective. The WPR analysis helps identify how policies produce problems in certain ways and in this case shows how the preschool environment features in policies in accordance with a certain logic. The study shows that the environment is meant to function as a mediator for disciplinary power, to shape children's behaviors in desirable ways without coercion. The article also highlights certain silences in the material, the most prominent of these being the lack of discussion about adapting preschool environments to different needs without labeling children as disabled.