Diversity and Inclusion

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Age and intergenerational relationships are central to the field of children’s literature, both to the way that children’s books are produced and disseminated, as to their content and form. Various children’s books feature characters of different ages and thematize intergenerational relationships, conflicts and processes of growing up or growing older. In recent years, scholars have started drawing more and more on the interdisciplinary field of age studies to analyze children’s literature. This workshop offers an introduction to age studies and to key concepts from this field, such as age norms, ageism, the life course, chrononormativity and the decline narrative. We approach age from a constructivist perspective, that is not as a biological given, but as a social category. Next, we reflect on the role of children’s literature in establishing and questioning age norms. Anna Woltz’s My Especially Weird Week with Tess is an interesting children’s book to consider in this light. Not only does the narrative rely on age norms for its characterisation, age norms are central to the plot and thematized in the story. We consider the book’s construction of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, as well as its relevance in contemporary debates about age in Western Europe: children’s rights, greying societies and the crisis of adulthood that Susan Neiman has thematized in Why Grow Up?

Required reading list

Anna Woltz, Mijn bijzonder rare week met Tess or a translation of this book.

It is available in English (My Especially Weird Week with Tess) and in various other languages, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Slovakian. You can find translations here: https://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/translationdatabase1​

Duthoy, Leander. “‘I Became Much Wiser over Time’ : Readers’ Use of Innocence and Wisdom as Age Norms in Responses to Children’s Literature.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 3, 2022, pp. 279–93, https://doi.org/10.3366/IRCL.2022.0467. Access full text here.

Recommended reading

Falcus, Sarah et al., eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film. Bloomsbury, 2023.

Gubar, Marah. “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 450-457. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526079/pdf​

Joosen, Vanessa. “Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp. 126–40, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2015.0016.​

Wohlman, Anita. “Age and its Metaphors.” The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 367-387.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

First read Anna Woltz’s novel. Then choose one of the following statements or questions and write a 500-word essay about it.

1. My Especially Weird Week with Tess thematizes a crisis of adulthood in the Western world. Do you agree? Why (not)?

2. My Especially Weird Week with Tess presents a stereotypical image of old age. Do you agree with this statement? Why (not)?

3. What are the metaphors related to age that you can identify in My Especially Weird Week?

As the posthuman research paradigm starts to emerge in children’s literature, children’s books are rendered as agentic object and assemblages which blur the boundaries between adult and children. This also shifts the focus from adult researchers scrutinizing the texts as “beings” into the becoming process of the readers (researchers and young readers alike) during their interaction with the texts, environments, intergenerational reading, agencies, multiple identities, and other nonhuman elements. The readers’ understanding of the text is not only limited to the cognitive knowledge but also acknowledged as embodied experience which might be different from one person to another.

Being based on Deleuzoguattarian rhizome and assemblage, a/r/tography can thus be a viable alternative for inquiry practice—as a/r/tography believes that practice is more inclusive than research methodology—to address this emerging paradigm within children’s literature. This workshop will start with introductory discussion of a/r/tography and how the practice engage and take into account the multiplicities of our identities; (a)rtist, (r)esearcher, and (t)eacher. A short a/r/tographic practice in form of walking pedagogies connecting personal reading of children’s literature and Antwerp as city will follow. Participants are expected to gain awareness of their embodied experience in reading the book and the city, alongside seeds or idea that could be further developed into a/r/tographic study / essay.

Required reading list

Irwin, Rita. ‘Becoming A/r/tography’. Studies in Art Education 54.3 (2013): 198 – 215 (Available in https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894)

Malilang, Chrysogonus S. ‘(Random) Encounters in the Uncanny City’. Walking in Art Education: Ecopedagogical and A/r/tographical Encounters. Eds. Nicole Rallis, Ken Morimoto, Michele Sorensen, Valerie Triggs, & Rita Irwin. Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2024. 237 – 253

A children’s book of your choice which you associate with Antwerp or summer. Bring a hard copy if possible.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read Irwin and Malilang’s articles and think about the connection behind a/r/tography and the emerging posthuman paradigm in children’s literature. If you have been working with creative process for children (creative writing, multimedia production, children’s illustration, etc), reflect on how your creative engagement has influenced your research process and vice versa. What limitations have you experienced in conducting your research in children’s literature? With the dawn of posthuman paradigm in children’s literature, how can we involve children’s book creators more in the research? Which creative outlet do you feel most comfortable to work with? Come to the workshop with creative tools you are most comfortable with (e.g. bring a camera if you enjoy photography, bring a sketch book if you are more inclined to drawing and sketching, etc).

Assignment for students talking ECTS credits

Write a short a/r/tography essay (2 – 3 pages) about children’s text of your choice and the city of Antwerp or summer. Include your creative works in your essay. One of the examples for a/r/tography essay is Malilang’s chapter, but you are free to structure your work differently. Send your essay (preferably in PDF to retain the format, but Word or Pages file is also acceptable) to chrysogonus.siddha.malilang@mau.se before July 30th.

The workshop examines the interplay between the categories of age, gender and body. We will use paratexts as our objects of investigation in order to discuss how age, gender and body are staged in images and texts. For example, the following paratexts could be analysed: endpapers, blurb texts, author biographies, disc covers, vignettes, forewords, epilogues… We will also ask how categories of difference are created, consolidated or perhaps also questioned in the paratexts of (picture) books (and other media).

Reading List

Sylvia Pantaleo (2017): Paratexts in Picturebooks. In: The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Routledge, 38-48. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315722986-5/paratexts-picturebooks-sylvia-pantaleo​

Preparatory task for all participants

Participants are asked to read the text by Sylvia Pantaleo and make notes.

How can we analyse paratexts with regard to markers of difference like age, gender, and body? What else can we focus on when analysing paratexts?

Each person is also asked to bring one or two examples of an interesting paratext. Come to the workshop with a hard copy of a book/record/other (or take pictures of it) and be prepared to share your thoughts with other participants.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Referring to Sylvia Pantaleo (2017), analyse a paratextual example of your choice and consider how it frames and comments on the text (novel, picture book narrative, song etc.). Pay attention to aspects of gender, race, class, age, and body. You are welcome to select an example in your language/from your country. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include any number of images. Send the Word or PDF to bennerju@hu-berlin.de (Julia) and anna.stemmann@uni-leipzig.de (Anna) before 1 June.

Archival materials produced by children from the past (including diaries, exercise books, fan letters, and children’s artwork), are most often tucked away in special collections dedicated to children’s literature studies—and thus the adults who contribute to producing literature for children. Only recently has more attention been given to the value of these historical materials in their own right, with special ‘archives of childhood’ emerging.  Scholars, including Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Mahshid Mayar, have worked to theorize the space of ‘archives of childhood’, often positioning these debates within studies of the history of childhood. Yet there is still much more to investigate concerning this type of archival material and how we, as researchers of children’s literature, might approach it. 

This workshop aims to discuss how we can understand the evolving collecting missions of children’s literature archives, and how they in turn bestow value on children’s historical materials. As well, we will consider how we, as researchers of children’s literature, can take practical steps towards analyzing and interpreting this material: How do we discover this material in the first place? What do we do with it once we find it? We will examine historical materials from multiple collections around the world, as well as share our own experiences of archival research using the digital collection, Exercise Book Archive, which houses an number of children’s exercise books in their original languages and with accompanying English translations. As a result, participants will gain a heightened awareness of the methods for archival research more broadly, but also be attuned to the specific requirements for working with children’s materials in the archive.

Required reading list

Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. ‘In the Archives of Childhood’. The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. Ed. Anna Mae Duane. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013. 213–237.

Mahshid, Mayar. ‘Playes Print the Letter: American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce’. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 16.4 (2023): 361–383.

Select a digital exercise book or personal diary from Exercise Book Archive. There are many examples in languages from other countries. You could also, as an alternative, bring an old exercise book or diary of your own or of a parent or grandparent, which, if you are interested, could potentially become part of Exercise Book Archive’s participatory archive. These should be from childhood (age 0-18). You should ensure, if the archival material is your own, that you omit any details that you would not want to share with others, in the same way that archivists at Exercise Book Archive act to remove personal identifying information (e.g. names of authors, personal addresses, etc). *Note that exercise books with freely available pages/translations have a checkmark underneath them.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Mahshid Mayar’s articles on archives of childhood, and make notes useful for analysing the exercise book you have selected from Exercise Book Archive, paying attention to their use of the term ‘archive’ and their methods for analyzing archival materials created by children. Finally, take a closer look at the exercise book you selected (remember, this could be a personal one if you have access to this) and reflect on it: How did you decide what material was worth interpreting? What conclusions did you draw about childhood based on your interpretation? Did the context surrounding the book (e.g. its place within an educational system) influence any of your ideas about the meaning behind the passages you selected for analysis? Come to the workshop with a hard copy of the exercise book (or take pictures of it) and be prepared to share your thoughts with others.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Referring to secondary source(s) from the reading list, analyse an exercise book of your choice and consider how it serves as a commentary on the relationship between adults and children and/or the role of the school in providing windows into children’s everyday lives (i.e. can we trust these snapshots into children’s lives?).  You are welcome, and even encouraged, to select an exercise book in your language/from your country. Focus on the origins of the exercise book you have selected and how this frames your reading of the words written by the child author. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include any number of images. Send the Word or Pages file to emily.murphy@newcastle.ac.uk before 1 June.

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