Kate Cairns is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her work brings a feminist perspective to the politics of childhood, with particular focus on how young people are positioned as the promise or threat of collective futures. As a feminist ethnographer, she has investigated this dynamic across multiple realms, including neoliberal education reform, the care work of feeding children, and youth urban agriculture. Rooted in community-based research, her work centers the experiences, insights, and aspirations of marginalized young people as they strive to live well in the face of structural violence – from rural Ontario youth struggling to imagine futures in contexts of poverty, to Black and racialized youth in Camden, New Jersey, forging place-based identities in the face of environmental racism. Dr. Cairns is coauthor of Food and Femininity (Bloomsbury 2015) and has published widely on issues of education, food and environmental justice. Her work can be found in venues such as Harvard Educational Review, Signs, Antipode, Curriculum Inquiry, Gender & Society, and Gender, Place and Culture. She is co-PI on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation entitled “Rethinking Race and Justice through Childhood Studies.”