Research Vanessa Joosen

Abstract

Families today come in various shapes and forms, characterized by a wide range of cultural, economic, social, and psychological determinants, and show increasingly "diverging destinies". The inherently dynamic nature of what comprises a family and how it is understood on both individual and societal level, therefore gives way to a continuous process of "doing family". The practices of doing family are shaped by social norms, inspired by cultural products that imagine possible families and regulated by a legal framework, all of which are dynamic in their own right. The overall aim of the FAMFLEX consortium is to advance theoretical sociological, literary and legal insights into how increasingly flexible and complex family practices (the families we live "by") unfold across cohorts within sociological and legal structures and institutions (the families we live "in"). This requires an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approach using largescale datasets and advanced analytical techniques. We develop and apply state-of-the art social science methods, socio-legal and literary approaches, embedded in the legal consideration of the constraints on current day family complexity. The innovative integration of classic (longitudinal) methodology with digital humanities (textual big data analysis incl. large language models), coupled with three main theoretical frameworks of life-course, gender, and ethnic and religious diversity, will push forward our sociological, legal and literary insights in how "doing family" unfolds today.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Mortelmans Dimitri
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Swennen Frederik

Research team(s)

• Centre for Population, Family and Health

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Adolescence is a time marked by bodily changes and often by insecurities about the body. Currently, most research on young adult literature or YA focuses on genres that treat bodies like problems. Following disability scholarship, which presents a positive focus on differences as an alternative to the pressure of the normative body, this project examines the portrayal of strange or non-normative bodies in young adult fairy-tale retellings. YA is a popular genre concerned with identity and the positive impact of representation, featuring protagonists with alternative bodies like a cyborg Cinderella or a disabled Beauty. Fairy tales already thematize the body and adolescence: happy endings often depend on the protagonists' bodies, like Cinderella's foot, and depict reaching adulthood through milestones like finding a partner. However, their normative patterns are challenged in fairy-tale retellings, which are an ideal genre to investigate the cultural conceptions of bodies. This project combines methods from disability studies (e.g. Garland-Thomson) and second-generation cognitive sciences (e.g. embodied narratology). Using concepts like crip time and chrononormativity, this project also analyses the relationship between temporality, specifically happy endings, and the body, to explore strange bodies as a dynamic concept that may provide adolescent readers with positive non-normative body images.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Goossens Lore

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

For authors writing about their youth in books for young readers, memories play a prominent role in the creative process. "Reimagined Memories" generates insights regarding the underexplored relationship between memory and imagination for approaches that consider episodic remembering, or recollections of experiences, as imagining the past. The project addresses this phenomenon from three angles: firstly, it rethinks how adult authors draw on memories of youth to create fiction. Focusing on Roald Dahl, Jamila Gavin, David Almond, and Jacqueline Woodson, "Reimagined Memories" charts how authors craft books at the nexus of memory and imagination. Secondly, the project transposes the study of writing processes, or genetic criticism, to children's literature studies: by examining an array of writing materials, we can trace how writers imaginatively incorporate memories of youth in their stories. Thirdly, this project contributes to filling the gap at the level of authorship in cognitive narratology, or the study of cognition in relation to narratives: although authors' thoughts during the writing process cannot be re-enacted, the paper traces of their creativity can be examined. Revealing mechanisms of reimagined memories unfolding on paper, this project forms an important contribution to literary studies by considering the narrative genesis of children's literature, while drawing on literary creativity to broaden the boundaries of knowledge regarding memory and imagination.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Silva Emma-Louise

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Disney's Mickey Mouse character is a global icon, transcending generations, cultures, and media. 'Reading Mickey' studies the domestication and reception of the Italian and French Mickey magazine from 1932 until 1968. Unlike the animated movies and albums, these magazines have not yet been fully examined, and even less so from a comparative perspective. These magazines present an opportunity to compare practices of adaptation, appropriation, and reception in children's press. In particular, I will explore how French and Italian publishers adapted the global figure to their local reader and how those local readers responded to that product in correspondence sections, by competing in challenges, and through forming Mickey clubs. From the 1940s, Americanised popular children's press was subject to political pressure, censorship, and competition from new media. Mickey was being hated and loved, and resurfaced post-WW2 to thrive through the 1950s. 'Reading Mickey' will explore the hypothesis that these magazines created a melting pot of local and global, making a magazine that was relatable for the Italian and French child. The project will glean new insights into the local appropriations of Mickey magazines and the under-researched response they solicited among child readers, while providing a broader understanding of transmedia and commercial strategies targeting children as consumers.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Drawing on insights from childhood studies and age studies, interviews with theatre makers and children, as well as on my practical knowledge as a professional director of theatre for young audiences (TYA), this project analyses how adult theatre makers give shape to and embody child characters in contemporary British, Flemish, and Dutch TYA. The construction of the image of the child in art exposes underlying ideological and cultural assumptions about childhood. Literary scholars have extensively discussed the construction of the child on the page, or the so-called Literary Child, but so far there is a noticeable lack of scholarship on its sibling – which I propose to call the Stage Child – in both theatre studies and literary studies. The intergenerational representation of adults performing children creates an inherent tension. Since childhood only has meaning in relationship to adulthood, it is thus particularly relevant to scrutinize the construction of childhood in this medium. The main aims are to determine the representational strategies used by adults to embody staged children, and to lay bare how (cultural) differences in conceptions of childhood impact the staging and perception of child characters. Paying attention to the Stage Child will provide significant new insights on the construction of childhood in art, because the embodied nature of theatre offers different possibilities to reflect on or even criticize the delineation between adulthood and childhood.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Mertens Mahlu

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Today, queer teenagers are still more likely than their peers to develop mental health issues. Recent endeavours to combat those issues have been trying to show them that 'it gets better'. However, it is not only important to see whether queer adolescents can imagine happiness as a possibility in the future, but also how they perceive their own agency over such happiness in the present. This project aims to examine the literary portrayal of happiness in queer YA literature with specific attention to the characters' agency in their pursuit and experience of happiness. Research has shown that novels can empower readers if they can identify with characters that establish agency. In order to examine this potential in literature, this study will use a corpus of influential contemporary queer YA novels and first analyse their portrayal of happiness as a literary emotionality. In the next stage, those portrayals of happiness will be analysed in terms of agency to examine how these stories represent potential for empowerment regarding happiness. A focus on temporality will be a central aspect in both part of the analysis. As a result, this research not only contributes to literary research, but also aims to develop a toolkit for organisations that use literature to empower queer youth.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Eeckhout Bart
• Fellow: Claeys Lien

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Growing Up Urban is the first in-depth research project devoted to literary constructions of the city in Dutch-language children's books published in Belgium in the early decades of the 20th century, as well as to the contextual, cultural historical factors that informed such constructions. The project analyses 40 urban children's novels, i.e. children's books set in cities that engage with city life, published by the leading, Antwerp-based firm L. Opdebeek in the period 1900-1940. This is a time when European cities were developing and modernizing rapidly and the urban child became a prime focus of societal and cultural engineering for various ideological movements. Inspired by the state of the art, foreign examples and preliminary findings, the project hypothesizes that L. Opdebeek's children's books actively engaged with the city and urban life in Flanders in positive, though complex, ways, and that they used the city to explore discourses of belonging, including questions of Belgian and Flemish identity. It investigates this hypothesis and related research questions through close reading the primary works and contextualizing them in archival material that sheds light on their creators, production, marketing and reception. Growing Up Urban thus sheds light on the entanglement of children's literature with urban discourses and transformative processes of urban modernity in early 20th-century Belgium. It uncovers a body of understudied Flemish books, authors and illustrators and contributes to a better understanding of the role that children's literature played in the Flemish movement. In answering to these research goals, the project calls into question the supposed anti-urbanism among contemporaneous Dutch-speaking Belgians and reassesses the Flemish movement's complex relationship with the nation state of Belgium, modernity and the city, as well as with childhood. Growing Up Urban strengthens existing interdisciplinary research between three research groups at the Faculty of Arts, as well as with prominent external partners in heritage and literature.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Absillis Kevin
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Fellow: Burki Ulrike
• Fellow: Ledegen Louise

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In recent years, the notion of misandry as a liberating defence mechanism against systemic misogyny has become the subject of debate, particularly in French media, following the publication of Pauline Harmange's 2020 pamphlet "Moi les hommes, je les déteste". The portrayal of feminists as man-haters is an anti-feminist stigma, claimed as a discursive strategy by certain feminists such as Harmange. This project aims to provide deeper insights into the controversy surrounding the topic of misandry by examining if, where and in what forms misandrist literary discourse is expressed in the works of French women writers who are associated with feminist movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Relying on the discipline of Critical Discourse Analysis, my research approaches misandrist expressions in literature as a discourse and, more specifically, as a form of gendered hate speech targeted against a structurally dominant group. With my research outcomes, I intend to raise awareness on the subject of misandry as a discursive strategy and demonstrate what implications and possibilities this literary discourse can have for feminist movements.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Schuerewegen Franc
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Bortier Camille

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Recent debate about the preservation of literary works that present outdated or disfavored views, has shown that literary representation is a highly controversial issue. Books influence to a significant extent how we perceive reality, ourselves, and others. Nevertheless, we are still missing a comprehensive overview of representation in Dutch-language children's literature. My research aims to fill that gap by answering the question which biases regarding age, gender, ethnicity, and social class can be detected in illustrations to Dutch children's literature from 1800 to 1940. I will pay particular attention to the intersectional nature of these biases, the interplay between visual and textual elements in its construction and how it is given shape at a surface level. For this research, I propose a computational, data-driven method to analyze bias in a corpus of 3000 illustrated children's books. Certain machine learning models are proven to implicitly model social biases, an issue which is rightfully criticized for its undesirable – and at times unethical - effects in downstream applications. This project will turn this deficiency to our advantage, using it as a unique research possibility. I will employ a combination of distant viewing and reading methods to uncover patterns of biased representation in the dataset. The results of this analysis will then serve as a touchstone for more contextualized close readings.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Van der Eecken Paavo

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project proposes an interdisciplinary research in the fields of children's literature studies and translation studies. It aims to get a better understanding of multimodal children's literature in translation and intermedial adaptations in three languages. More specifically, Maureen Hosay wants to study how modes and media are combined in different versions, ranging from conventional interlingual translations to multimodal and intermedial adaptations in English, French, and Dutch. In the analysis of the case studies, Maureen Hosay will focus on the translations and adaptations of three contemporary multimodal works of children's literature that are very popular among young readers: We're Going on a Bear Hunt (M. Rosen, illustrated by H. Oxenbury), The Gruffalo (J. Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler) and The Story of Tracey Beaker (J. Willson, illustrated by N.. Sharratt). These children's books, written not long before the turn of the century (1989, 1991, and 1999 respectively), have been translated into numerous languages, and modally and medially adapted. Combining a bottom-up analysis of three case studies with a top-down approach based on insights of children's literature studies, translation studies, and adaptation studies, the project aims to develop a toolkit to supplement the current theoretical framework for studying children's literature in translation.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Mus Francis
• Fellow: Hosay Maureen

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ideological bias concerning age, gender, ethnicity and social class is a major ethical concern in contemporary society, influencing human behaviour both at macro- and micro-levels. Recent studies have demonstrated that machine learning methods (from artificial intelligence) not only capture, but amplify the ideological biases in the data they are trained on. In this project, we aim to strategically turn this undesirable property to our advantage and exploit the study of ideological biases for visual cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (c.1800-c.1940). Recent cognitive studies make clear how ideological biases largely result from processes of social learning. To study the construction and dissemination of ideological bias we put forth three case studies in crucial areas of social control: education (children's literature), mass communication (magic lantern slides and performances), and regulation (police reports). These interlinked areas of study come with a wealth of rights-free digitized material and pre-existing scholarship. Through the application of standard routines from machine learning, we aim to elicit implicit patterns and trends relating to ideological bias and confront these with received knowledge. The current project is innovative in its methodology through its study of pixel data through computer vision in the humanities which has received too little attention so far. Moreover, it uses data-driven technology to present a novel intersectional viewpoint on the construction of ideological bias in the past. Finally, by being embedded in recent cognitive studies, the project will be able to make claims on how implicit bias functioned in the past, understanding better what people thought and how such thinking structured behavioural interactions with their surrounding world.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Vanhoutte Kurt

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Fairy tales represent an important site where relationships between age and gender are shaped and materialized by the use of clothing. Adulthood, body and age conceptions have recently been a central focus in scholarship on children's literature. Clothing in fairy tales is informed by the undressing and dressing of characters crossing different developmental stages: Cinderella's dress not only denotes a new social boundary but depicts her as having developed into a potential mating partner for the prince. This project examines fashion in folkloric and literary fairy tales and looks at age boundaries expressed by different modes of dress. Age represents one of the cardinal formative forces in fairy tales and decides how characters unfold in the course of the narrative. It is exactly the intersection between age and gender that drives the development of the characters in literary and folk tales. Clothing not only contributes to the construction of age and gender in fairy tales, but also marks a social distinction between the child's and the adult's body (Joosen 2018). In scholarship about age and gender in fairy tales, clothing has been rarely analyzed. While Catherine Orenstein, Lori Baker-Sperry, Liz Grauerholz and Carol Scott mention that clothing becomes the agent of many kinds of magical transformations of identity, they do not look at the relationship between age and clothing and their effect on gender identity. While Vanessa Joosen examines the construction of age and bodily conceptions in fairy tales, and Christina Bacchilega and Alessandra Levorato look at gender questions in fairy tale literature, there has been a complete gap in bringing the question of age and gender into discussion when looking at the use of clothing and accessories in fairy tales. The meaning that we attach to certain bodily features is socially and culturally determined (Ferguson 1994; Fraser and Greco 2004; Lesnik-Oberstein 2007, Joosen 2018). When thinking about age in children's literature, clothing represents new social and historical benchmarks. One might think of clothing as a social skin (Joosen 2018). Textile features and bodily features come into play when it comes to reading the body in terms of the social categories that constitute stages of life (Joosen 2018). This research project offers the first systematic, international, interdisciplinary and gender-connoted study of clothing and accessories in international folkloric fairy tales. Clothing informs new developmental stages of social and gender identities in fairy tales, while undressing as a form of unmasking in fairy tales often introduces the desire to pervert the process of aging in order to become young again; it refers back to jumping nakedly into the fountain of the youth in the 18th and 19th century (Just 204). The way people use and consume clothing as a process is fairly studied in sartorial studies (Turney & Franklin 2014, Almila 2016,) but has barely been examined and connected with respect to the study of fairy tales.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Wray Miriam

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

CAFYR starts from the observations that Europe has recently witnessed a few pertinent crises in intergenerational tension, that age norms and ageism frequently go unchecked and that they are part of children's socialization. It aims at developing pioneering research for understanding how age is constructed in cultural products. CAFYR focuses on fiction for young readers as a discourse that often naturalizes age norms as part of an engaging story and that is endorsed in educational contexts for contributing to children's literacy, social and cultural development. The effect of three factors on the construction of age in children's books is studied: the age of the author, the age of the intended reader, and the age of the real reader. CAFYR aims to lay bare whether and how the age and aging process of children's authors affect their construction of the life stages in their works. It will show how various crosswriters shape the stages in life differently for young and adult readers. It considers the age of young readers as varied in its own right, and investigates how age is constructed differently for children of different ages, from preschoolers to adolescents. Finally, it brings together readers of various stages in the life course in a reception study that will help understand how real readers construct age, during the reading process and in dialogue with each other. CAFYR also aims to break new theoretical and methodological ground. It offers an interdisciplinary approach that enriches children's literature research with concepts and theories from age studies. It combines close reading strategies with distant reading and tools developed for digital text analysis. It provides a platform to people of different stages in life, contributing to their awareness about age, and facilitating and investigating dialogues about age, with the aim of ultimately fostering them more.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

CAFYR starts from the observations that Europe has recently witnessed a few pertinent crises in intergenerational tension, that age norms and ageism frequently go unchecked and that they are part of children's socialization. It aims at developing pioneering research for understanding how age is constructed in cultural products. CAFYR focuses on fiction for young readers as a discourse that often naturalizes age norms as part of an engaging story and that is endorsed in educational contexts for contributing to children's literacy, social and cultural development. The effect of three factors on the construction of age in children's books is studied: the age of the author, the age of the intended reader, and the age of the real reader. CAFYR aims to lay bare whether and how the age and aging process of children's authors affect their construction of the life stages in their works. It will show how various crosswriters shape the stages in life differently for young and adult readers. It considers the age of young readers as varied in its own right, and investigates how age is constructed differently for children of different ages, from preschoolers to adolescents. Finally, it brings together readers of various stages in the life course in a reception study that will help understand how real readers construct age, during the reading process and in dialogue with each other. CAFYR also aims to break new theoretical and methodological ground. It offers an interdisciplinary approach that enriches children's literature research with concepts and theories from age studies. It combines close reading strategies with distant reading and tools developed for digital text analysis. It provides a platform to people of different stages in life, contributing to their awareness about age, and facilitating and investigating dialogues about age, with the aim of ultimately fostering them more.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Since the late 1960s, children's literature studies has developed into a vibrant field of research that unites literary, social and educational approaches to books for young readers (including fiction for adolescents). Over the same period, genetic criticism has grown into an area of study that surpasses traditional philology and text-critical analysis, focusing on the so-called avant-texte (documents preceding the publication of a literary work) as interesting literary material in its own right. To this date, the two fields of children's literature studies and genetic criticism have rarely engaged with each other. In this project, theoretically framed and in-depth genetic research is used to explore the construction of adolescence and the defining notion of the young addressee in the writing process of children's books. The project also pays attention the collaborative process that precedes the publication of a book for young reader – a process that always involves gatekeepers such as publishers, and sometimes also graphic designers and young readers themselves. It focuses on a canonical, particularly challenging author who has been both lauded and criticized for his approach to adolescent literature: Aidan Chambers. This British author won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2002 for his experimental approach to adolescent fiction. Chambers' Dance series (1978-2005), named after its best known title Dance On My Grave (1982), is considered a milestone. For this project, selected items from Chambers' notebooks, sources, manuscripts, typescripts and correspondence are transcribed and digitized. The researchers involved reconstruct and interpret the writing process of Aidan Chambers' Dance series, thus contributing to a better understanding of this seminal author's adolescent fiction. In doing so, they aim to supplement the field of children's studies with state-of-the-art approaches from genetic criticism, including tools from digital humanities, in order to get a better understanding of the creative processes of adolescent fiction in particular, and vice versa, to introduce the aspect of "age" (including the author's own age and the concept of the "young addressee") to genetic criticism. Finally, they also develop practice-based methodological reflections on doing genetic research with a living author. Chambers' writing process will be visualized and studied with Manuscript Web, a digital scholarly editing platform developed at the University of Antwerp to accommodate the needs of genetic editions, allowing the editor to process and visualize not only the scans and transcriptions of draft materials, but also the intricate relations between those documents. By plotting out genetic pathways between different types of documents (like personal library items, notebooks, manuscripts, or published versions), the user can follow the progression of the text as it developed over time. At the end of the project, an online, educational manual will be developed to help teachers and secondary-school pupils navigate the genetic edition of Chamers' works, raise their textual awareness and critical reading skills, and add further depth to their understanding of Chambers' books and children's literature in general.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk
• Fellow: Davidson Andrea

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Adolescents' reading habits, particularly of literary texts, are the object of scientific and social concern. Due to the omnipresence of short, digital texts they would read fewer literary texts, be less motivated to do so, and consequently underperform. Especially young adolescents are characterized by a drop in reading motivation. However, reading promoters point out the new possibilities of digital literary texts, such as hypermedia fiction. Hypermedia fiction offers the possibility to read literary texts on tablet, enriched with hyperlinks to supportive or comprehensive information. Hypermedia fiction could address a specific reading audience, particularly young, reluctant readers. In view of its recent character, research on hypermedia fiction is rather scarce and consequently the scientific and societal question whether hypermedia fiction can enhance reading motivation and story world immersion has not yet been answered. This project aims to fill that void. The research will be based on two consecutive studies on 12 to 13-year-old pupils and their teachers of Dutch. Five novels from different literary genres will be used as study material. In study 1 pupils (N=30) and teachers (N=30) are invited to mark the instances where they would like to have hyperlinks. This study results in two different data sets: 60 annotated novels, and qualitative data based on focus groups. These data provide insight in the desirability of hyperlinks (a.o. type, frequency) in literary texts and their influence on reading motivation and story world immersion. The annotated novels serve as the basis for study 2, in which the five novels are first converted to hypermedia fiction, and consequently read by 200 pupils in five so-called tablet schools. Each class is divided in three subgroups. One group reads a novel as hypermedia fiction (= experimental group); the other two groups read it on tablet (without hyperlinks) and on paper (= control groups). The experiment is conducted three times, in which each subgroup adopts the role of experimental group once. Data collection will be carried out with preliminary, intermediate and post-measurements; by monitoring click behaviour in the experimental group and focus groups. The research project will be carried out in close interfacultary cooperation between FSW/ASoE and FLW.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Simons Mathea
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Vanhees Claudio

Research team(s)

• Didactica

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Literacy with regard to Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) is considered worldwide to be a key factor in societal growth. Research and education are therefore strongly geared towards fostering STEM literacy. Cultural artefacts for the young, such as children's books, are rarely included in these efforts. That omission is deplorable, because children's concepts of science are not only constructed in schools or museums. Stories and books contribute to children's identity construction, to their worldviews, and to their perception of STEM. Contemporary children's literature is characterized by a great diversity in terms of target groups, genres and literary quality, but science is a recurrent topic. We find scientific themes in popular series, awarded books (in particular in so-called literary nonfiction) and as the focus of the children's book week. The rich array of contemporary children's books offers a varied image of STEM and scientists and can thus counteract the stereotypical image of the male, old and confused scientist that children encounter time and again in popular culture. This research project therefore focuses on contemporary children's books carrying schemes, scripts and metaphors related to STEM, in order to assess their potential contribution to STEM-education and to reflections on science and scientists. Based on theories and models from cognitive sciences, we analyze a corpus of children's fiction and nonfiction for children aged 6 to 14, published in 2000-2015. First, we map the diversity of scientists as characters in the children's books. In addition to the importance of gender that is highlighted in STEM-education, we also draw attention to age, social class, race, and physical and mental abilities. Second, we explore the narratological features that are used to address children as budding scientists. Crucial is the concept of scientific agency, that is the way in which STEM is shown to increase (or limit) the power and opportunities of growth for the characters. Next, we analyze how children's books teach scientific knowledge and skills and how they cast the relationship between science and society. In the course of this analysis, we focus on recurrent scripts, such as the Eureka experience, or the Frankenstein plot. This project is the first to apply models from cognitive poetics to children's literature about STEM. In addition, it is unique in studying both fiction and non-fiction for children, and exploring a corpus of contemporary Dutch-language children's literature that has been neglected by literary scholarship. Finally, in connecting STEM education and literary scholarship, this project aims to have a significant social impact.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Absillis Kevin
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Fellow: Pauwels Frauke

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project represents a research contract awarded by the University of Antwerp. The supervisor provides the Antwerp University research mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions stipulated by the university.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This postdoctoral research project charts the most important tendencies in the Flemish and Dutch reception of Grimm's fairy tales. It compares the translations, adaptations, illustrated versions and parodies of "Snow White" with Grimm's source text and interprets the stylistic, structural and thematic shifts in the light of dominant and changing attitudes towards the fairy tale, fantasy literature, children's literature and translated literature.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Lernout Geert
• Fellow: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ever since children's literature gained its status as a part of literature worthy of academic study, fairy tales have received much attention from critics and scholars, especially the tales that were collected by the Grimm Brothers. 'Adult' literary theories such as feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism have provided interesting new perspectives on the old texts. At the same time there was, and still is, a lively interest in fairy tales on the part of writers and illustrators. Authors invent new tales or rewrite older ones, and the original stories are often published with new, inventive illustrations. In my PHD I investigate the relationship between the theoretical discussion of fairy tales and fictional adaptations or rewritings based on these tales. Both genres often express the same ideas, but have to make use of their own typical characteristics and constraints. Since children have no access to literary criticism, fairy-tale retellings can partly fill in that gap: very often they offer the reader a critical perspective on the Grimm tales.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Lernout Geert
• Fellow: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ever since children's literature gained its status as a part of literature worthy of academic study, fairy tales have received much attention from critics and scholars, especially the tales that were collected by the Grimm Brothers. 'Adult' literary theories such as feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism have provided interesting new perspectives on the old texts. At the same time there was, and still is, a lively interest in fairy tales on the part of writers and illustrators. Authors invent new tales or rewrite older ones, and the original stories are often published with new, inventive illustrations. In my PHD I investigate the relationship between the theoretical discussion of fairy tales and fictional adaptations or rewritings based on these tales. Both genres often express the same ideas, but have to make use of their own typical characteristics and constraints. Since children have no access to literary criticism, fairy-tale retellings can partly fill in that gap: very often they offer the reader a critical perspective on the Grimm tales.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Lernout Geert
• Fellow: Joosen Vanessa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project