Empowering children by critiquing norms and structures
ADVISORY BOARD
We are a global network of researchers and advocates who develop childist theory, collaborate on research projects, organize events, generate media, consult with organizations, and catalyze social change.
We are run by an international Advisory Board of experts and collaborate with universities and organizations across the world. Our institutional base is at Rutgers University Camden, US.
John Wall
Director
John Wall is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden, US. He is a theoretical ethicist whose work investigates poststructuralism, ethical theory, historical constructions of childhoods, children's rights, and children's suffrage. He particularly examines how children's lived experiences challenge and transform ethical, social, and political norms across societies. He is also co-director of the Children's Voting Colloquium. Website here.
Tanu Biswas
Advisory Board
Tanu Biswas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at University of Bayreuth, Germany. She is an interdisciplinary philosopher of education, particularly interested in exploring the philosophical richness that children and childhood have to offer adults. She currently researches children's civil disobedience for climate justice as a call for rethinking pedagogical relationships. Website here.
Kate Cairns
Advisory Board
Kate Cairns is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University Camden, US. Her work brings a feminist perspective to the politics of childhood and explores how young people are positioned as the promise or threat of collective futures. She has investigated these dynamics across diverse sites, including neoliberal education reform, maternal foodwork, and youth urban agriculture. Website here.
Anandini Dar
Advisory Board
Anandini Dar is Assistant Professor in the School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She researches childhood and youth, geographies, migration and diasporas, feminist pedagogy, ethnography and research methods for young subjects. She is a founding member of the Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC). Website here.
Kriste Lindenmeyer
Advisory Board
Kriste Lindenmeyer is University Professor Emeritus of History, and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at Rutgers University Camden, US. Her scholarship, including in numerous books, focuses on the American history of public policy, diversity, and childhood and youth. She was a founder of the Society for the History of Children and Youth and serves on several academic and foundation boards. Website here.
Fikile Nxumalo
Advisory Board
Fikile Nxumalo is on the faculty in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. Her scholarship focuses on reconceptualizing place-based and environmental education within current times of ecological precarity and is rooted in perspectives from Indigenous knowledges, Black feminist geographies, and critical posthumanist theories. Website here.
Sarada Balagopalan
Advisory Board
Sarada Balagopalan is Associate Professor Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden, US. Broadly focused on postcolonial childhoods, her inter-disciplinary research engages marginal children’s experiences with compulsory schooling, labor, gendered school-spaces, children’s rights discourses and pedagogies of citizenship, as well as productively drawing upon children’s lives to decenter hegemonic assumptions around childhood. Website here.
Erica Burman
Advisory Board
Erica Burman is Professor of Education, Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester, UK. She is a feminist and childhood researcher, supervisor and consultant working around questions of ‘race’, gender and class inequalities, particularly in relation to mental health and psychological issues and intersections of state and interpersonal violence. She is also a qualified Group Analyst. Website here.
Daniel Cook
Advisory Board
Daniel Cook is Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University Camden, US. His work focuses on moral configurations of childhood and the child vis-à-vis commercial and economic cultural fields. In particular, he explores the various ways in which tensions between “the child” and “the market” play themselves out in various sites of children’s consumer culture, such as advertising, food, rituals, clothing and media. Website here.
Jonathan Josefsson
Advisory Board
Jonathan Josefsson is Research Fellow in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests concern primarily children and child studies, migration politics, political philosophy and ethics. Website here.
Karin Murris
Advisory Board
Karin Murris is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Emerita Professor of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a teacher educator and grounded in academic philosophy and a postqualitative research paradigm with interests in childhood studies, democratic postdevelopmental pedagogies and school ethics. Website here.
Bengt Sandin
Advisory Board
Bengt Sandin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Child Studies, at Linköping University, Sweden. He studies the history of childhoods, education, justice systems, and children's citizenship and founded the world's first doctoral program in Child Studies. Website here.
Lauren Silver
Advisory Board
Lauren J. Silver is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden, US, and an Affiliate Scholar of the Center for Urban Research and Education. She is a critical ethnographer whose work lies at the intersection of the sociology and anthropology of youth, feminist methodologies, and analyses of urban systems. Website here.
Anna Sparrman
Advisory Board
Anna Sparrman is Professor in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Child Studies, at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research combines theories of visual culture with children, consumption, child culture and sexuality, and addresses how norms and values are enacted between children, adults, and the material world in children's everyday life practices. Website here.
Nathan Walker
Advisory Board
Nathan C. Walker is an instructor at Rutgers University Camden, US, executive director of 1791 Delegates, and manager of The Foundation for Religious Literacy. His scholarship is on First Amendment law, human rights, and children's rights. Website here.
Hanne Warming
Advisory Board
Hanne Warming is Professor of Sociology and Childhood, and Head of the Research Group ‘Social dynamics and change’ at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is a sociologist in the fields of childhood studies and social work research, as well as policy and practice. Her research fields of expertise include childhood and youth, social work, lived citizenship, social interaction, methodology and ethics in researching childhood research. Website here.