Young Scholars Program Spotlight:
Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair

Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair’s work explores the relationship between children’s agency and development as well as how institutional racism impacts how much individual and collective agency young children get to enact at school. The disparities that exist in the educational experiences of young children and the racialization of those experiences led her to apply to the Foundation for Child Development Young Scholars Program (YSP). As a member of the 2012 cohort, she examined how young children’s agency impacted their social and academic development. Methodologically, Adair is qualitative researcher specializing in video-cued ethnography and an educational anthropologist by training.

In this YSP Spotlight, she explains how YSP provided her with an extended sense of community, substantially grew her professional network, and how her YSP research provided the basis of her new book, Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Early Learning, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the winter of 2020.