Rate My Professor Olivera Kamenarac

Dr. Olivera Kamenarac is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where she previously worked as a Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of the Bachelor of Teaching Early Childhood Education in the Division of Education. Her academic qualifications also include a Bachelor of Education (Honours), Master of Education from Novi Sad, and a Master in Early Childhood Education from a program involving Oslo Metropolitan University, Malta, and Dublin Institute of Technology. Kamenarac holds ORCID 0000-0003-0444-0823 and maintains an active profile on Google Scholar affiliated with Southern Cross University.

Her research specializes in the sociology of education, philosophy of education, education policy, teacher education, and early childhood education, with a critical focus on neoliberalism's impacts, teacher agency, professional identities, ethics, and education as a public good. Key publications include 'Resistant curiosity: an ethical praxis of transforming neoliberal self and becoming an early childhood educator otherwise' (Ethics and Education, 2025); 'Why shouldn't teacher education produce "ready-to-teach" graduates?' (2024); 'Reconfiguring teacher agency within market-driven early childhood spaces' (2023); 'The policy-research-practice triangle in New Zealand early childhood education: Complexities, impossibilities and silences' (2023); 'Business managers in children\'s playground: Exploring a problematic (or not!) identity construction of early childhood teachers' (Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2023); 'Discourses Shaping Primary School Leaders\' Approaches to Enacting Social Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand' (International Journal of Educational and Life Transitions, 2023); 'Transnational conversations about teacher identities in early childhood education' (Policy Futures in Education, 2021); and 'Infantologies: An EPAT collective writing project' (2019). She co-edited 'The Geopolitics of Postdigital Educational Development' (Postdigital Science and Education, 2025) and contributed chapters to 'Postdigital Education for Development' (2025) and 'A Geopolitics of Postdigital Education: Foundations and Future Research' (2025). Kamenarac participates in early years research labs, supervises PhD students, and delivers conference presentations on teacher identities and educational discourses.