The Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University—Camden, New Jersey, USA, http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/ is excited to welcome three new full-time faculty members to the program, beginning in Fall 2015, who will build upon and extend an already vibrant program in the interdisciplinary study of childhood and children’s lives http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/2014/03/24/new-faculty-members/.
· Sarada Balagopalan, PhD International Education, Department of Teaching and Learning, New York University. Dr. Balagopalan joins the department as Associate Professor from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. Her work on postcolonial childhoods foregrounds the tension between children’s work and schooling as a key site where discourses of colonial modernity, the ‘developmental’ nation-state, late capitalism and current transnational efforts around children’s rights play out. One of the founding editors of contemporary Education Dialogue, Dr. Balagopalan has published widely on pedagogy, ethnography, globalisation and feminism. Her book,Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India(Palgrave), is forthcoming in 2014.
· Meredith Bak, PhD in Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Bak examines the relationship between children and new media from the nineteenth century to the present. She is at work on a book manuscript examining the role of pre-cinematic visual media in cultivating children as modern media spectators, Her work has been published in Early Popular Visual Culture and is forthcoming in Theory of Science. She joins the department as Assistant Professor from Franklin & Marshall College. Before completing her PhD, Dr. Bak worked in museum education and as a teaching artist in New York City public schools.
· Kate Cairns, PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto. Dr. Cairns joins the department as an Assistant Professor after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the interplay between discursive constructions of youth and childhood and young people’s subjectivity formation focusing on the way that children and youth are constructed as the promise of collective futures. Combining insights from education, feminist theory, cultural studies, and cultural geography, Dr. Cairns has published widely on schooling, arts education, food and consumption in venues such as Ethnography and Education, Journal of Consumer Culture, Gender and Education.
