Sarada Balagopalan is an associate professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Childhood Studies. Her research broadly focuses on post-colonial childhoods and often combines archival and ethnographic research. She has published on child labour, children’s rights and schooling in India. She is the author of Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India (2014).
Erica Burman (University of Manchester, UK) is well known as a critical developmental psychologist and methodologist specializing in innovative and activist qualitative research. Her research has focused on critical developmental and educational psychology, feminist and post-colonial theory, childhood studies, and critical mental health practice (particularly around gender and cultural issues). Her recent work addresses the connections between emotions, mental health and social (as well as individual) change, in particular as anchored by representations of, and appeals to, childhood. She has co-led transnational research projects on conceptualizing and challenging state and interpersonal violence in relation to minoritized women and children, on educational and mental health impacts of poverty and ‘austerity’, on superdiversity and ‘traditional’ Muslim healing practices, and she is a co-investigator on a cross-national project exploring post-socialist childhoods. She sees debates about children and childhood as central to current theories and practices around decolonization.
Tendai Nhenga is the director of the Child Rights Research Centre and dean of the School of Law, Africa University, Zimbabwe. Her research interests focus on violence against children and child labour. She has published, among others, on the application of international law on child labour in an African context and provides an overview of the law informing the rights of children in Zimbabwe. Tendai has conducted several collaborative implementation child-related researches with UNICEF, University of Edinburgh, Porticus, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Academic Research Centre; University of Zimbabwe, Women’s University in Africa, Zimbabwe on, inter alia: the Social Determinants of Violence against Children; Prevalence of School-Based Violence in Zimbabwe; Exploring children’s formal help-seeking behaviour for violence in Zimbabwe; an interrupted time-series analysis on the trends in help-seeking for violence against children in Zimbabwe during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Access to essential health care services in Zimbabwe during COVID-19.
Irene Rizzini is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (PUC-Rio), and director of the International Center for Research and Policy on Childhood (CIESPI) at PUC-Rio. Professor Rizzini has been focusing on various issues of rights violations, particularly children living in situations of vulnerability such as poverty, violence, urban slums, children and youth in institutions and living or working on the streets. She has also conducted studies on family support structures, children with mental and developmental disabilities, children in the juvenile justice system, and children and young people´s activism and their right to participation. Her most recent books are Entre a casa, as ruas e as instituições (Between home, the streets and institutions for children and youth (2021) and Crianças e adolescentes em conexão com a rua: pesquisas e políticas públicas (Street connected children and youth: Research and public policies (2019)).
Professor Amanda Third (PhD) is a professorial research fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre, research stream co-lead in the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (Victorian government), and faculty associate in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. An international expert in child-centred, participatory research, her work investigates children’s technology practices, focusing on marginalized groups and rights-based approaches. She has led child-centred projects to understand children’s experiences of the digital age in over seventy countries, working with partners across corporate, government and not-for-profit sectors and children and young people themselves. Professor Third is the lead author of: Young People in Digital Society: Control/Shift (Palgrave, 2019); Our Rights in the Digital World: A Report on the Children’s Consultations to Inform UNCRC General Comment 25 (5Rights Foundation/WSU, 2021); Young and Online: Children’s Perspectives on Life in the Digital Age (WSU/UNICEF, 2017); and Children’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Download from Children around the World (Young and Well CRC/UNICEF, 2014). She co-authored the UNCRC General Comment 25 on Children’s Rights in relation to the Digital Environment.
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