Leena Alanen, Professor of Early Childhood Education, Department of Education, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. She is an editor of the journal Childhood, with a particular interest in childhood, generational order and the welfare state, children’s rights, and intergenerational relations in families, day care settings and schools.

Caitlin Cahill, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and founding faculty member of the New Community College Initiative of the City University of New York.  A community-based urban studies and youth studies scholar, Caitlin’s research focuses upon young people and global restructuring, gentrification, educational access, immigration, participatory action research, and social justice.  Of relevance to this conference is the work she has done with the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective, a social justice think tank based in Salt Lake City, Utah and in particular her work focusing on undocumented students’ access to higher education.

Dan Cook, Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden. His research focuses on the rise of children as consumers in the United States, presently and historically. In particular, he explores the various ways in which the tensions between “the child” and “the market” play themselves out in various sites of children’s consumer culture, such as advertising, food, rituals, clothing and media. He is the author of The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Duke University Press, 2004).

Colette Daiute, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has done research on children’s social conflicts, conflict resolution, children’s development in war and post-war contexts, children’s rights, literacy development, writing, and uses of interactive technology.  She is especially interested in children’s participation in social and intellectual practices as influenced by political and economic factors.  She is author of Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Dympna Devine, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University College Dublin. She is Director of the structured PhD program and Post-Graduate Studies in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning. She lectures in the sociology of education, with a specialist interest in childhood studies and children’s well-being. She focuses in particular on children’s participation/citizenship, identities, and belonging in and through the education system. Her recent book, Immigration and Schooling in Ireland: Making a Difference? (Manchester University Press, 2010) provides a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in this area. Her work is informed by a critical social justice perspective and a commitment to education as a key site in the promotion of social and learner identities.

Eleanor Duckworth, Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is internationally known for her teaching/approach, Critical Exploration in the Classroom, which seeks to bring a Freirean approach to any classroom, valuing the learners’ experience and insights. She is author of The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning, third edition [Spanish translation, Madrid, 1988; Portuguese translation, Lisbon, 1991; Korean translation, Seoul, 2000; Chinese translation, Shanghai, 2006.] (2006); Tell Me More: Listening to Learners Explain (2001) and Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other (1997).

Jannette Elwood, Professor of Education in the School of Education at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests are around the theory and practice of educational assessment and testing, especially the social context and impact of assessment and testing in schools, assessment and qualifications policy and practice as they impact on children and young people and assessment and testing and their interaction with gender. She is a founding member and Fellow of the Association for Educational Assessment-Europe and the 2011 Conference Chair. She is an executive editor of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice (Taylor & Francis). Recent publications include: Elwood. J. and Lundy L. (2010) Revisioning assessment through a children’s rights approach: implications for policy, process and practice, Research Papers in Education, 25, 3, 335 -353.

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
 Her research focuses how youth think about and contest injustice in schools, communities and prison, using the method0logy of Participatory Action Research (PAR). She has authored numerous publications, including Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion (Routledge, 2008) and Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education (Teachers College Press, 2004). She is a founding member of the Participatory Action Research Collective at the Graduate Center, and director of Center for Human Environments at the GC, a co-sponsor for this event.

Madeline Fox is a doctoral candidate in the Social-Personality Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Polling for Justice project. Her participatory research focuses on youth experiences of every day criminalization, dignity, mutual implication and conditions for provoking political solidarity with adult audiences. She co-edited the volume Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims.

Roger Hart, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been a leading figure in the development of theory and research on children’s relationship to the physical environment, and on the application of this research to the planning and design of children’s environments and to environmental education. He is broadly concerned with developing theory, research and programs that foster the participation of young people in articulating their perspectives and concerns as a way of better fulfilling their rights.  He is Director of the Children’s Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center.

Allison James, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. She is Director of the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth, and a pioneer of theoretical and methodological approaches to research with children with a special interest in the sociology/anthropology of childhood. Allison is Editor of the journal Children and Society, Co-Editor of European Childhoods: Cultures, Politics and Childhood in the European Union (Palgrave), and Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices (Routledge).

Cindi Katz, Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; and the consequences of global economic restructuring on everyday life. She is author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and she continues to work on shifting geographies of late twentieth-century U.S. childhood.

Anne Trine Kjorholt, Associate Professor, Director of Norwegian Centre for Childhood Research (NOSEB), NTNU, Norway. She is chair of the management committee of COST A19 Children’s Welfare. Her research interests focus on childhood as a social and cultural phenomenon, children’s rights, children’s cultures, early childhood education and care, children’s welfare and every day life, time and place. She also server as Director (together with Professor Jens Qvortrup) of two larger research umbrellas, funded by Research Council of Norway: The Modern Child and the Flexible Labour Market: 2003-2008; and Children as New Citizens and the Best Interest of the Child: 2006-2009.

Patricia Krueger, is a postdoctoral educational research fellow at The Dominican Studies Institute at City College of the City University of New York (CUNY DSI) where she is developing special educational programs and curricular materials for CUNY students, faculty, and New York City school students and teachers. Her participatory action research documents young people’s experiences with criminal-justice oriented regulations in public schools and the impact these have had on educational opportunities for Black, Latino and immigrant youth.  Her dissertation, “Navigating the Gaze: Young People’s Intimate Knowledge with Surveilled Spaces in School,” outlines student resilience amidst the changing physical landscape of public schools.  She is author of “It’s Not Just a Method! The Epistemic Work of Young People’s Lifeworlds at the School-Prison Nexus” in Race Ethnicity and Education, Volume 13, Issue 3.

Laura Lundy, Professor of Education Law and Children’s Rights in the School of Education, Queen’s University, Belfast and a Barrister at Law. She is the Director of the School of Education’s Research Cluster on Children’s Rights and Participation and the university-wide Research Forum for the Child. She is the author of Education Law Policy and Practice in Northern Ireland and has published widely on education law and children’s rights. She has been a principal investigator or co-researcher in large interdisciplinary research projects funded by the ESRC, public bodies such as the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People and leading charitable foundations such as The Wellcome Trust and Barnardo’s. She was the Chair of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission’s working party on education rights for the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights and is a former Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Northern Ireland.

Wendy Luttrell, Professor of Urban Education and Social Personality-Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work focuses on young people’s self and identity formation and transformation in school settings, particularly how gender, race, class and sexuality systems of inequality take root in young people’s own self-evaluations and actions, including their senses of exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure.  She has authored two award winning books, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling, and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens.

Virginia Morrow, Reader of Childhood Studies, Institute of Education, London, UK. She is an editor of journal Childhood with specialist interests in the history of childhood, ethics and methods of research with children, child labour/children’s work, children’s environments and social capital, and children’s rights and participation.  She has numerous publications, but of special relevance to this conference is her piece, “Ethical dilemmas in research with children and young people about their social environments: Special issue on ethics of research with children” in P Hopkins and N Bell (eds). Children’s Geographies 6, 1, 49-61.

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Associate Professor of Education, University of California, Los Angeles. She is an ethnographer of children’s daily lives and language practices. Through a longitudinal, mixed-methods research project, she has documented the multitude of ways in which children use their knowledge of two languages and cultures to read, write, speak, listen and do things for their immigrant families – what is referred to as “language brokering.” Her recent book is entitled Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture (Rutgers University Pres, 2009)

Diane Reay, Professor of Education, Cambridge University, UK.  She is a sociologist interested in theorizing social class as mediated by gender and ethnicity.  She is author of Class Work: Mothers’ involvement in children’s schooling (London: University College Press, 1998) and numerous other publications. Of relevance to this conference is her study of children’s relationships to space and place in the city, reported in her 2007 article, “Unruly Places: Inner-city Comprehensives, Middle-class imaginaries and Working-class Children,” in the Urban Studies Special Issue of The Geography of Education, 44 (7), 1191-1203.

Urvashi Sahni, founder of the Study Hall Educational Foundation and co-founder of Digital StudyHall. She has worked in India for the past twenty-five years in teacher education, school reform, and curriculum development. Study Hall Educational Foundation operates three K-12 schools in and around Lucknow, India; and Digital StudyHall provides quality educations through digital means in four Indian States. Her schools currently serve about 2,500 rural and urban students. In these endeavors she has collaborated with the Indian government, UNICEF, USAID, UNESCO, and corporations such as EICHER and Microsoft Research, as well as universities such as UC Berkeley, University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Toronto, Canada.

Anna Stetsenko is a Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with joint appointments in Developmental Psychology and Urban Education. Her research interests revolve around issues of self, agency, identity, gender, and social transformation. With a theoretical background in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical activity theory, she currently works to expand it within a Transformative Activist Stance at the intersection of activity theory, critical pedagogy and feminist studies. Recent publications include Personhood: An activist project of historical Becoming through collaborative pursuits of social transformation (2009), Teaching-learning and development as activist projects of historical Becoming: Expanding Vygotsky’s approach to pedagogy (Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2010), and From relational ontology to transformative activist stance: Expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project (Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2008).

Harriet Strandell, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her specialist interests include childhood welfare and new forms of governance, childhood and space, children and culture, children’s work, childhood discourses, social age, children’s after school time, peer relations, and institutional ethnography.

Maria Elena Torre, founding Director of the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research has introduced the concept of “contact zones” to participatory research, asking how we might build a radically inclusive “we” – from which to build knowledge, relationships, and policy that interrupt social injustice. She is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education (Teachers College Press, 2004) and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison.

Pamela Wridt is Co-Director of the The Children’s Environments Research Group (CERG), which provides an important link between university scholarship and the development of design, policy and programs that both improve the quality of environments for children and enhance children’s interaction with them. CERG assists in the design and redesign of children’s environments and strives to encourage programs that foster more dynamic and empowering relationships between children and the environment.