The emotional power of educational branding: exploring parental decision-making in South Australia’s preschool choices

While some research has focused on the implications of choice discourses in childcare settings, insufficient attention has been paid to how parental figures of preschoolers are activated and summoned through contradictory discourses that position them as both rational and emotional. Through a qualitative analysis of twenty parent questionnaires, this paper captures the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion flowing from these processes, and the transformation of the preschool sector in South Australia. Using an affective-discursive analytical approach, the research highlights how language, discourse and imagery are powerful tools that engage peoples’ feelings and emotions within a broader classed, raced, and gendered social environment. Its contribution to knowledge, therefore, rests in its effort to broaden our understandings of the meanings and practices of parents choosing a pre-school for their child, by adding affect theory to what otherwise might be ‘only’ a discursive analysis of the wider macro-economic and political trends linked to neoliberalism.