Spotlight of Panel
The conference will culminate with the convening of a Spotlight Panel comprised of scholar-experts from various fields who will address how notions of multiple childhoods and normativity inform their work and may inform social thought and practice. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Sarada Balagopalan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India; Dr. Robin Bernstein, Harvard University, USA; Dr. Marcia Bunge, Valparaiso University, USA and Dr. Roger Hart, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA.Profile of Panelists
Sarada Balagopalan | Robin Bernstein | Marcia J. Bunge | Roger HartSarada Balagopalan
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
Sarada Balagopalan’s work is an attempt to critically theorise the category of Childhood by relating it to discourses of modernity, late capitalism and current transnational efforts to secure “rights” for children. Her doctorate from New York University was an ethnographic study on the literacy experiences of street children in Calcutta, and Sarada’s research utilizes the historically mediated specificity of childhood and children’s experiences in different social contexts to interrogate present efforts to naturalise a particular bourgeois construction of childhood as the ideal. This work on the politics of childhood also informs her broader intellectual interests in education. She is particularly interested in issues of pedagogy and its reliance on universal constructs of childhood, and their effects on the construction of identities amongst first-generation school goers and their communities.
Sarada has been deeply involved in translating these research interests into pedagogic and curricular interventions and has worked with Eklavya for several years on their social studies textbooks and school-based programmes. Currently she acts as the Chief Advisor for NCERT’s middle-school “Social and Political Life” textbooks. Sarada also co-edits Contemporary Education Dialogue, bi-annual inter-disciplinary journal on education in South Asia.
Robin BernsteinHarvard University
I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. performance and theatre during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My interests include formations of race, age, gender, and sexuality, and my research integrates the study of theatrical, visual, material, and literary culture.
A graduate of Yale's doctoral program in American Studies, I am an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature at Harvard University. My books include Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (forthcoming, New York University Press) and the anthologies Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and Generation Q (Alyson). I put my scholarly interests in gender, ethnicity, and childhood into creative practice when I published a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!. I am currently in residence in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, where I hold a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship. During my year at Austin, I will write a book titled Hand Knife Photograph: The Erotics of Impossible Gender.
Marcia J. BungeValparaiso University
Marcia Bunge is the Dickmeyer Professor of Christian Education. She received her BA in English and music from St. Olaf College and her PhD in religion and literature from the University of Chicago. She taught at Gustavus Adolphus College, Luther College, and Luther Seminary before joining the CC faculty. Bunge has edited and contributed to Against Pure Reason: Writings on History, Language, and Religion (1993), and The Child in Christian Thought (2001). Bunge's most recently co-edited books are The Child in the Bible (2008) and Children and Childhood in World Religions: Primary Texts and Sources (2009). From 2003-07 she served on the National Task Force on Education for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Bunge directs “The Child in Religion and Ethics” project and serves on the international board of the Child Theology Movement and on the steering committees of the “Childhood Studies and Religion Consultation” of the American Academy of Religion and “Children in the Biblical World” section of the Society of Biblical Literature. She regularly lectures at leading universities and conferences in the United States and abroad.
Roger HartThe Graduate Center, City University of New York
His work focuses on the development of theory and research on children’s relationship to the physical environment. He has been particularly concerned with the application of research to the planning and design of children’s environments and to environmental education. In recent years, he has been more broadly concerned with developing theory, research and programs which foster the greater participation of young people in articulating their perspectives and concerns as a way of better fulfilling their rights.