Dr. Hunter Knight

Assistant Professor

Phone:
Email: Hknight6@uwo.ca

Hunter Knight is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Childhood and Youth Studies. She
received 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 common-sense negotiations of childhood shape systemic
violence and everyday injustices against racialized and disabled children.

Her work examines these connections in historical documents, policy, and ethnographic research.
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 of childhood that shape language
around seclusion in policy, news media, and social media.

Teaching

• CYS 2214: Introduction to Advocacy
• CYS 3312: Research Methodologies for Life Worlds and Cultures
• CYS 3370: A Right to Play
• CYS 4414: Situating Child-Centred Practice

Research

Childhood studies; theories of childhood and youth; coloniality of childhood; early childhood;
race and childhood; disability and childhood; colonialism and education; critical special
education; anticolonial theory.

Selected Publications

Knight, H. & Pomerantz, S. (Forthcoming). Time after time: A Childhood Studies without linear
temporality. Childhood. [Special issue: Childhood and temporality].

Knight, H. (2024). Histories of childhood and Man: Implications for childhood studies.
Childhood, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682241306839

Knight, H. (2022). Where children naturally belong: Colonialism, space, and pedagogy in
Waldorf kindergartens. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2022.2140697

Knight, H. (2019). Centering the problem child: Temporality, colonialism, and theories of the
child. Global Studies of Childhood, 9(1), 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043620618825005

Knight, H. (2019). Imagining institutions of Man: Constructions of the human in the foundations
of Ontario public schooling curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 90–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1552071