Steve Gennaro
Dr. Steve Gennaro is a critical theorist and children's rights scholar whose work examines how children and young people experience media, technology, education, play, sport, and public life through rights-based and UNCRC-informed approaches. He holds a PhD from McGill University and completed a postdoctoral appointment in Philosophy of Education at UCLA, where he worked with Douglas Kellner.
A founding faculty member of York University’s Children, Childhood and Youth Studies Program, Dr. Gennaro has taught at York for more than two decades and has been nominated for more than half a dozen teaching awards. He received York University’s Department of Humanities Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021 and the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award in 2023, York’s highest teaching honour. His teaching is cross listed across CCY, Humanities, and Communication and Media Studies.
Dr. Gennaro has published more than 20 refereed articles and scholarly book chapters, including several co-authored with Douglas Kellner, on artificial intelligence, critical theory, social media, youth identity, children’s rights, and critical media education. His most recent book is Playology: A Media-Critical Exploration of Digital Technologies and Identity in the Global Village (2026). Previous books include Transformative Practice in Critical Media Literacy: Radical Democracy and Decolonized Pedagogy in Higher Education (2024), Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children’s Digital Culture (2021), and Selling Youth: How Market Research at the J. Walter Thompson Company Framed What It Meant to Be a Child (and an Adult) in 20th Century America (2010).
From 2024 to 2025, Dr. Gennaro was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bologna’s Centre for Research and Training in Outdoor Education. He holds distinction as an Academician of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and as a member of the Child Rights Academic Network at the Landon Pearson Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights in Ottawa, Canada.