Shane Breitenstein is a PhD candidate in the Visual Studies Program at UCI. Before returning to school, Shane worked in program assistance and public policy for Pennsylvania’s largest early childhood education advocacy and professional development non-profit. His research combines queer theory, feminist theory and cultural studies with a focus on the visual culture of childhood, media policy, and consumer activism. His dissertation questions the common understanding of the 1980s as an ideologically regressive, and sexually repressive, decade through a cultural history of media regulation and the figure of the imperiled child. He joins the UCHRI staff this year as a graduate student research assistant.