Lingering time, shifting ground: The micro-politics of transition in early childhood worlds postqualitative encounters across early childhood settings in the UAE and UK

Transitions into Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) have historically been narrated through developmental milestones of school readiness, positioning children as subjects to be prepared for institutional life. Such framings stabilise the child as an individual learner and the setting as a neutral space for adaptation. Yet these moments are far from neutral. They are affective, relational, and deeply political events shaped by cultural scripts, institutional rhythms, and the micro-politics of care. This paper explores the entangled experiences of parents, practitioners, and managers across ECCE settings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the United Kingdom (UK), exploring how transitions are enacted, felt, and governed in distinct sociocultural and policy contexts. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews analysed diffractively through postqualitative and posthuman perspectives, we trace how transitions materialise through intra-actions among humans, materials, and temporalities. Data are read not for themes, but for intensities, sticky moments, repetitions, and ruptures that illuminate the affective infrastructures of early childhood life, such as handover rituals, parental emotions, and practitioner improvisations that configure belonging and separation. Comparing two contrasting policy contexts reveals both shared practices of gradual entry, family engagement, and attunement to children’s needs, alongside culturally situate divergences in how care is operationalised, measured, and understood. Transitions emerge as more-than-developmental events: they are charged sites where attachment, identity, and institutional expectations converge. We offer implications-as-provocations for ECCE practice and policy by reframing transitions as more-than-developmental events where attachment, identity and institutional expectations meet. A diffractive analysis underpins concrete recommendations – staffed ‘lingering time’, ethical narrative documentation, and threshold design standards – that reconceive arrival as a relational threshold rather than a procedural start/end point.