“ The walls say stop before people do ”: Belonging and legitimacy in culturally diverse early childhood education settings in Italy—A critical ethnographic inquiry

Abstract

Inclusion has become a central principle within early childhood education (ECE), yet critical scholarship increasingly questions whether participation alone is sufficient to understand children’s and families’ experiences within educational institutions. Drawing on critical ethnography, this article explores how experiences of inclusion, exclusion, recognition, and belonging are produced and negotiated in two culturally diverse early childhood education settings in Northern Italy. Fieldwork was conducted over 6 months and involved participant observation, ethnographic fieldnotes, and semi-structured interviews with 78 participants, including educators, school staff, and parents with migration histories. The findings suggest that participants rarely framed their experiences through the language of inclusion. Instead, they spoke about being able to enter, remain, participate, be recognized, and feel part of institutional life. Three interconnected themes were identified: the material production of community through architecture and spatial organization; the symbolic production of recognition through visibility and representation; and the negotiation of belonging through everyday encounters and relationships. Together, these findings indicate that belonging is not simply an individual feeling or relational outcome but an institutional accomplishment shaped by material, symbolic, and relational arrangements. The article argues that belonging rests upon a more fundamental and unevenly distributed condition: legitimacy. By examining how educational institutions organize recognition and membership, the study shifts attention from inclusion as an educational objective to the broader social and political processes through which some presences become expected and legitimate while others remain conditional. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this shift for debates on childhood, migration, belonging, and educational justice.