Apparatuses lacking care: Re-thinking persistent school absence through new materialist conceptualisations

In the Nordic countries, persistent school absence has become an incomprehensible and increasingly polit-icised issue, provoking concern among parents, school professionals, policymakers, and researchers alike. When a child has been absent from school for many months, sometimes even years, it often generates a profound sense of powerlessness and frustration among these adults, especially those closest the child. No strategies seem to work: Neither attempts to persuade the child, gradually reintroduce the child to school, tempt the child with rewards, nor pressure the child. Likewise, no demands to change parents’ routines or parenting strategies, no blaming of teachers, and no efforts to rethink the school’s perspectives on children or to critique its economic constraints seem to hold the potential to bring the child back to the classroom. This paper departs from the assumption that to meaningfully and adequately understand and resolve situ-ations of persistent school absence, parents and professionals must approach these situations as compre-hensive apparatuses – that is, as complex and dynamic arrangements of material-discursive agencies that together produce the conditions to which the child responds through school absence. This approach derives from several new materialist and poststructuralist thinkers, such as Foucault (1979), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Barad (2007) all of whom conceptualize phenomena as inherently complex and multiply configured. Co-thinking these concepts with Butler’s (1993) notion of subject for-mation, offers an analytical framework sensitive to the lived effects of being persistently absent from school. Based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with twelve children with persistent school absence, fo-cusing in particular on a 15-year-old girl, Maria, the paper analyses how multiple material-discursive agencies within these children’s school life apparatuses intertwine in ways that 1) produce an unbearable school life characterised by repeating processes working to eliminate care, and 2) position these children as subjects who have misunderstood their situation. Despite the sincere and dedicated efforts of adults, parents and school professionals alike, the apparatus constrains their ability to enact changes that could transform the non-caring conditions that produce school absence. Finally, the paper argues that generating care for the children – and thereby supporting their school at-tendance – involves caring practices for the comprehensive apparatus. References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). In B. Massumi (Ed.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-phrenia. Trans.). University of Minnesota. Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality. New York, NY: Viking