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.