Workshops

We live during a historical moment when nationalist sentiments are growing in countries around the world. Central to these movements is the effort to win over the minds and bodies of young people to their cause. What role has children’s literature played in both cultivating nationalism and critiquing it? Books are among the first sources of information that young people encounter about national origins, history, and identity. Through stories about foundational political figures and national war heroes, ones about military wars and social conflicts, and narratives about culture and tradition, children’s books help to construct ideas about what a nation is—and what it means to belong to one. Indeed, literary traditions for young people are still commonly organized according to national boundaries—British children’s books, Japanese manga, German fairy tales, etc.—even as these books circulate across borders in our increasingly globalized world. This workshop will examine the role that books for youth play in preparing both the minds and bodies of young people to become future citizens. Children’s literature can encourage their readers to imagine themselves as loyal patriots, strong civic leaders, and proud members of a national community. It can teach them not only what it means to identify with a nation, but also the behaviors, values, and traditions that typify the country where they live. Just as importantly, children’s literature can invite young people to question conventions, challenge longstanding understandings of national identity, and imagine new possibilities for what their nation—and its populace—might become. Through both primary and secondary readings as well as groups discussions, we will explore questions such as the following:

• What messages do books for young readers send about national identity, patriotism, belonging, and citizenship?

• How are children taught to imagine their nation—its history, culture, and citizens— through the books that they read?

• What role has children’s and youth literature played in producing the “national child”?

• How do books invite young readers to imagine themselves as part of a nation, and how do they shape not only what children think, but also what they feel, desire, remember, and embody?

• How do children’s books reproduce longstanding conceptions of what it means to “think like,” “look like,” and “behave like” a member of their nation—and how do they question, challenge, and even upend such beliefs?

• As a nation’s understanding of itself changes and evolves, what role has children’s literature played in reflecting, promoting, and propelling these shifts as well as resisting, rejecting, and impeding them?

• If books for young readers are understood to have a responsibility to cultivate national pride and foster patriotic loyalty, do they have an equally important responsibility to support political dissent and encourage civic questioning?

Through our examination of these and other questions, we will consider the way in which children’s literature can shape young people’s understanding of national identity as well as empower them to critically interrogate the meaning of civic culture and patriotism.In countries around the world, children are positioned as the future. This workshop will ponder the role that books for young readers play in linking children’s minds and bodies with the national body politic.

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How do visual narratives allow us to encounter lives, bodies and experiences other than our own? Using perspectives from Graphic Medicine (an emerging and vibrant intersection of health humanities and comics), this session explores visual storytelling as practices of embodied and relational meaning-making. By drawing on phenomenology, compassion studies and co-creation as method, we consider how visual metaphors interact with empathetic attunement to better understand how literature is able to foster more attentive and caring engagements with experiences of illness, vulnerability and difference.