Karl Kitching

Karl Kitching is Professor of Public Education, University of Birmingham. His expertise lies in questions of race, religion, gender and sexuality in children's and young people's experiences of school, and education policies relating to these questions. He collaborates with a variety of stakeholders to address these issues.

He has published a range of research on young people’s experiences of racism in school, the sexualisation of childhood, and children’s religious identities at school. He has also published two key books on the politics of racism and on religion in education, childhood and youth. The first, The Politics of Compulsive Education: Racism and Learner-Citizenship (Routledge, 2014) explores how racism, education and resistance have been entangled in Ireland from the colonial to the global age, and offers new ways of thinking about anti-racism in education as a form of learner-citizenship. The second book, Childhood, Religion and School Injustice (Cork University Press, 2020) examines how children and parents negotiate secular-religious relations and inequalities across school contexts.