Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, “Child Researchers in the Field of Children’s Literature.”
Tuesday, 12 June 2018, 4:15 – 5:30 pm. Museum of Childhood.
Image courtesy of ©Katarzyna Wasylak
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak will discuss child researchers’ participation in ChildAct Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times. This was a participatory reader response project she co-organised at two primary schools in Cambridgeshire in 2017-2018. Its goal was the creation of common spaces in which young and adult readers collaborate towards a better understanding of how utopian literature shapes ideas for the desirable future, how these ideas evolve in the encounters with the materiality of readers’ local environment, and how they call readers into individual and collective action in relation to these environments.
This paper will argue that the presence of child researchers in children’s literature studies marks an important shift in the field, providing evidence for the impossibility of looking at children’s literature as only a manifestation of adult power over young generations.
Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland. She is the author of Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression: Radical Fantasy Fiction and Its Young Readers (2016). Her research focuses on speculative fiction, utopianism, and child-led approaches. She is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie visiting fellow in the Department of English and Media, Anglia Ruskin University.
This event is free. No booking needed.
Children's Literature / Children's Lives 