Current Students
MITSY (KWANG DAE) CHUNG. (Ph.D., ongoing). Mitsy is an artist, researcher, and early childhood educator. Her research focuses on young children’s drawings and aesthetic art, drawing upon her lived experience of difference and fascination with reconceptualizing early childhood education. Her doctoral study builds on her ongoing research on the potential of artmaking to create inclusive, equitable classroom communities where children and educators, including those who embody difference, may live well together. She uses post-foundational methodologies and diffractive methods.
ADRIANNE BACELAR DE CASTRO. (PhD, ongoing). Adrianne is an educator with 10+ years of experience working in elementary and secondary schools in Brazil. Her MA Thesis, inspired by common worlds pedagogies , embraced the idea of thinking with, rather than mastering, concepts, materials, and other shared worlds. She embraces a collectivist and inclusive of more-than-humans approach to early childhood education. Her research is a humble response toward more livable worlds in the present geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
MALVIKA AGARWAL. (MA, completed, PhD, ongoing). Malvika’s MA thesis was a soundfull inquiry in early childhood education for livable world. Her current research, catalyzed from resisting the burgeoning visual artifacts within the field of early childhood education research, intents to propose alternative sensorial re-imaginings of early childhood assemblages within the climate action discourse. Through posthuman and new-materialist theories, Malvika is currently engaging with ecological sound art as methodology.
NARDA NELSON. (MA, completed; Ph.D., ongoing). Narda is exploring podcasting as method to investigate two central research questions: What does it mean to tell stories of earthly survival in early childhood education? What might these stories do in the field? Her work is underscored by the question of whose perspectives we foreground in the project of reimaging education around the nurturance of future survivable worlds?
TATIANA ZAKHAROVA-GOODMAN. (PhD, ongoing). As a playground designer researching at the intersection of pedagogy and design, Tatiana works to re-imagine relationship-attuned play as worlding and play/ground(ing) as potentialities. Building on her interdisciplinary background, Tatiana theorizes play and outdoor play spaces as contentious, uneven, and always political.
SARA ROCIO RAEESI-GUJANI. (Ph.D., ongoing). Rocio’s research engages with the sacred, yet, ecological distressed lands endowed to children and evoked by Anthropocene calls in early childhood education to (re)invent, (re)create and (re)respond. How might land pedagogy opens up thresholds of possibilities to children and educators to co-create pedagogical ethos assemblages responsive to Indigenous land’s reciprocal relations and ontologies?
AYESHA SARMAD. (Ph.D., ongoing). Ayesha’s research critically engages with the intersections of environmental education and social justice within early childhood pedagogy. With a Master's in Environment and Sustainability and a foundational background in the economics of developing nations, Ayesha's research is grounded in the ethical imperative of creating educational spaces that advance both ecological and social justice. Her praxis is driven by the co-dependence of all world inhabitants, emphasizing the need for education systems that attend to diverse socio-cultural and neurodiverse needs.
CHADYA SIRDAR. (MA, ongoing). Chadya engages in a pedagogy of listening to attune to the stories young children tell through word, movement, sound, and play. Chadya Sirdar Central to her pursuit is an interest in how pedagogies attend to young children’s life-worlds and lived experiences, and the formation of their identities through storying these experiences. By critically examining dominant narratives and storytellers, she investigates what it means to listen to the youngest storytellers and acknowledge the power of their stories in shaping identities, communities, and life-worlds.
MAUREEN CULLEN (MA, completed; Ph.D., ongoing). Maureen is a registered early childhood educator and assistant professor of Child Studies; her research is grounded in Feminist New Materialist frameworks and Common Worlds pedagogies. Her work critically engages with the dominant discourses of scientism, modernism, and developmentalism in early childhood education, aiming to disrupt these paradigms by fostering more-than-human kinships and multispecies pedagogies. Maureen's dissertation explores the integration of pedagogical documentation, more-than-human kinships, and speculative storytelling in curriculum-making processes. Her research has the potential to cultivate inclusive and equitable learning environments as it offers hope for creative responses to global challenges such as climate change and promotes mutual flourishing for all entities, human and more-than-human.
Paolo Russumanno (Ph.D., ongoing) Paolo is an urban geographer with strange devotions to his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. His Master’s thesis analyzed neoliberal urbanization, primarily the discursive mechanisms that shaped a hyper-vigilant, exclusionary and consumerist creative city landscape that experts, boosters and managers across Hamilton touted as viable and necessary progress. He found many of these same discourses, threads and relations, which shaped contemporary urban design and processes, also informed early childhood learning and curriculum. His research thinks with common world pedagogies, and the possibilities that emerge when we reimagine and create space in cities for childhood rather than as sites of consumption. He thinks with Hamilton’s city motto, “the best place to be and raise a child”, as a provocation to his research.
Former Students
CORY JOBB. Wit(h)nessing Blasted Landscapes: Waste Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education (Ph.D., 2024)
LAURA COULMAN. Disabling Consent: a feminist Hobbesian analysis of Early Childhood Education and the production of disability (Ph.D., 2024)
COURTNEY NEIDIG. Food, Meal Times and School Gardens: Territories for Curriculum Making and Resistance (MPEd, 2022)
SARAH HENNESSY. Creative Common Worlding with Research Creation in Early Childhood Education (Ph.D., 2022)
MEAGAN MONTPETIT. Reimagining Climate Relations with Feminist Earth-Based Spirituality through Common Worlds Ethnography with Young Children (Ph.D. 2023)
JOHN DREW. Animals in Literary Education: Towards Multispecies Empathy (Ph.D., 2022)
ALEXANDRA BERRY. Weaving Child-plastic Relations in the Ecuadorian Andes (Ph.D., 2022). An artistic project in India (MA, 2017)
KELLY-ANN MACALPINE. Common Worlding Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education: Storying situated processes for living and learning in ecologically precarious times (Ph.D. 2021)
EMILY ASHTON. Child Figurations (Ph.D., 2020)
NICOLE LAND. Fatty Muscles and Muscular Fats: Relating-With and Interrogating Fat(s) in Early Childhood Education (Ph.D. - 2017). What Can a Body Do? Exploring Female Adolescent Sporting Bodies (MA - 2014)
FIKILE NXUMALO. Unsettling encounters with 'natural' places in early childhood education (Ph.D. - 2014)
DENISE HODGINS. (Re)Storying Dolls and Cars: Gender and Care with Young Children (Ph.D. - 2014)
ERIN MIRAU. Can Early Childhood Educators ‘do’ Postfoundational Praxis in a Foundational World? A Praxiographic Inquiry into the Enactment of Reconceptualist Engagements (MA - 2017)
VANESSA CLARK. The Arts, Imperial and Settler Colonialism, and Places and Spaces (Ph.D. 2017). Disrupting the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and car (MA 2013)
ANASTASIA BUTCHER. Exploring Experiences of Early Childhood Educators Who Are New to the Field (MA - 2017)
IRIS BERGER. Narration-As-Action: The Potential of Pedagogical Narration for Leadership Enactment in Early Childhood Education Context (Ph.D. - 2013)
KATHLEEN KUMMEN. Making Space for Disruption in the Education of Early Childhood Educators (Ph.D. - 2014)
MARY CAROLINE ROWAN. Thinking with Nunangat in Proposing Pedagogies with Inuit Early Childhood Education (Ph.D. - 2017). Exploring the possibilities of learning stories as a meaningful approach to early childhood education in Nunavik (MA - 2013)
SCOTT KOURI. Conceptualizing Self, Identity, and Subjectivity: Engagements with Theories and Theorists in Child and Youth Care (MA - 2014)
CONNIE ANTONSEN. Children’s Bodies in Early Childhood Education (MA 2018)