Assistant Professor

hknight@brocku.ca

Dr. Hunter Knight is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. She holds a PhD in Social Justice Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research draws from childhood studies, education, and anticolonial theory to examine how everyday understandings of childhood are rooted in colonial logics. She is interested in the ways that common-sense negotiations of childhood necessarily engage with the racism, ableism, and prejudice that inform its production as a part of dominant Western understandings of the human. In doing so, her research works to unearth the avenues through which systemic injustices and everyday violence against racialized and disabled children are made to seem unquestionable, unavoidable, and even expected.

Her work examines these connections in historical documents, ethnographic research, and policy. Previously, she has explored policy and curricula documents written by Egerton Ryerson and done ethnographic research with Waldorf teachers and teacher educators. Her current research on seclusion rooms in schools explores the racist and ableist logics, rooted in colloquial understandings of childhood, that shape language around seclusion in policy, news media, and social media. This work is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant with co-investigator Dr. Nickie Coomer.