News

Dr. Valerie Adams-Bass was featured in a news article “Children Left Behind: Rutgers-Camden researcher explains how pandemic worsened racial achievement gap”

When it comes to the pandemic’s impact on academic achievement, no children are immune. But just as COVID-19 itself has hit underserved demographics the hardest, minority students in poorly equipped schools experienced the steepest slides in the national test-score decline. According to a new federal study, math and reading scores fell across the board for… continue reading

Dr. Daniel Cook weighs in on “Banned Books in America: Westfield Public Schools Makes the List”

WESTFIELD, NJ — Westfield Public Schools is one of three New Jersey schools that have officially banned certain books from their school libraries. PEN America, a New York-based literary and free expression nonprofit advocacy group, released its 2022 report of banned books on Monday, Sept. 19. The organization highlights how challenges to books have become… continue reading

Dr. Sarada Balagopalan pubished an article in Children’s Geographies, “Introduction: Modernity, Schooling and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion”

ABSTRACT This Introduction sets up a binary framing between the ‘marginal child’ and the ‘subaltern student’ to help contextualize this Special Issue’s efforts to frame educational exclusions in India within a longer history of modernity, childhood and the democratization of schooling. Broadly speaking, the ‘marginal child’ refers to discourses that focus on the ‘victimhood’ of… continue reading

PhD Student Palak Vashist recently published an article in the Living Histories Journal, “Age as a Historical Category of Analysis: A Study of Bombay Textile Mills in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century”

Abstract This work utilises archival methods to examine the processes of identification authorized by the colonial state to establish the certification routine for children employed in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, this project will investigate how colonial administrative and bureaucratic policies, along with the legal regulation… continue reading

PhD Student Smruthi Bala Kannan published an article in Children’s Geographies journal, “Clean bodies in school: spatial-material discourses of children’s school uniforms and hygiene in Tamil Nadu, India”

  Abstract: Schoolchildren’s embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to ‘clean up’ and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child’s clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil… continue reading