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 the sociology of childhood, disability studies, anticolonial theory, and abolitionist critique to examine how exclusionary discipline in schools is shaped and justified by common-sense understandings of childhood.
Her work includes investigations of laws, policies, media, historical documents, and ethnographic research. Her forthcoming book, Childhood Revered? Coloniality and Exclusion in Waldorf Education (University of Minnesota Press, fall 2027), examines how the coloniality of childhood appears in Waldorf schooling. Childhood Revered? argues that a desire to “protect childhood” led even social justice educators towards rationalizing the exclusions of disabled and racialized children, those children who are most often excluded from dominant understandings of what “childhood” is. Her current research, on seclusion rooms in schools, examines how the prejudices embedded in common sense understandings of childhood shape justifications for carceral practices for young children in schools. Grounded in an abolitionist praxis, this research is oriented towards transformations of exclusionary disciplinary practices in schools guided by those children who are subjected to them.
Teaching
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CYS 2221: International Children’s Rights
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CYS 2214: Introduction to Advocacy
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CYS 3312: Research Methods for Life Worlds and Cultures
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CYS 3370: A Right to Play
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CYS 4403: Senior Thesis
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CYS 4414: Situating Child-Centred Practice
Research
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Current projects
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Principal Investigator, “Towards safer childhoods: Former students’ experiences in schools and visions for alternatives,” SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant
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Principal Investigator, “Challenging seclusion rooms in schools: Children’s views of carceral logics,” King’s Research Grant
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Principal Investigator, “Carcerality, colonialism, and cognition: Analyzing the cultural cognitive structures that uphold the logics of seclusion in schools,” SSHRC Insight Development Grant
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External involvement
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Sociology of Childhood and Youth Research Cluster, Canadian Sociological Association: Co-chair
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Editorial Board, Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research: Member
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Childhood, Law, and Policy Network: Member
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School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Western University: Teaching/Advisory Member
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Selected Publications
Knight, H. (In press, publication fall 2027). Childhood Revered? Coloniality and Exclusion in Waldorf Schools. University of Minnesota Press.
Knight, H., Coomer, N., and Martin, T. (forthcoming). Violent innocence: The discursive production of dangerous children in justifications for seclusion rooms. Teacher’s College Record.
Knight, H. (forthcoming). Childhood and families: Histories and contemporary realities of childhood and its uses. In Canadian Families Today. 5th Edition. Oxford.
Knight, H. (forthcoming). Imagining institutions of Man: Constructions of the human in the foundations of Ontario public schooling curriculum. In Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Curriculum Studies. Routledge.
Pomerantz, S., & Knight, H. (2025). Editorial: Can’t trace time: The temporal politics of childhood. Childhood, 32(3), 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682251355401
Knight, H. (2024). Histories of childhood and Man: Implications for childhood studies. Childhood, 32(3), 389–406. 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