This interdisciplinary volume aims to deepen and enrich the reader's understanding of children's lives in the Global South. At a time when provision for Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is expanding across the globe, this book highlights issues around early childhood development as well as exploring the importance of including local traditions, culture and knowledge in developing professional practices in the sector. A range of international contributors, including key scholars in the field of early childhood, draw on topics identified for discussion at the Early Childhood in Developing World Contexts International Conference, held at University College Cork, Ireland, in 2011. Much of the exciting research being undertaken in this area remains unrecognized, and the volume aims to communicate some of the important debates currently taking place. The essays are organized into three broad themes: children's lives and livelihoods; early years policy and practice; and language and culture.

This book examines approaches and responses to working with the asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant communities in Ireland. Through their experiences, analyses and activist accounts, contributors name direct provision as a system that facilitates the marginalization and dehumanizing of people. In making visible some of the undocumented challenges to direct provision, the co-operation and engagement between local and migrant communities, and the very real and moving experiences of living in such conditions, this publication forms a part of the ongoing challenge to direct provision. It calls for a reconsideration of the infallibility of the reductionist-dominant narrative that reduces responsibility to care and protect human life, to narrow economic considerations, and calls on the State to recognize its duty of care in its fullest conceptualization. While analysing through the lens of care, the reductionist and repressive State policies and practices are revealed. Most emphasis is placed on the reactions and resilience of the asylum-seeking community, through their numerous acts of resistance, supported by a significant cohort of friends and activists within and outwith the direct provision system.