Childrens Literatures, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene: Multidisciplinary Entanglements

(Hardback)

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Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, this open access book explores how childrens literature, and cultural experiences tailored to them, afford young people new ways of navigating a world facing impending environmental crisis. With chapters from researchers in Europe, North America, Australasia and Asia, and working in fields such as literary, cultural, childhood and education studies, it provides multidisciplinary perspectives, visions and practices on, and models for, how children might embrace hope rather than fear as they confront todays environmental issues. Starting and then moving out from stories to imagining and putting into practice more ethical ways of engaging with and being in the world, Childrens Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene examines various forms of storytelling, learning, thinking, and teaching that ask what children can learn from each other, from intergenerational and interspecies engagement, from human and more-than-human teachers. The chapters cover a huge variety of topics including: eco-pedagogy; depictions of food and malnutrition; engaging nature through graphic narratives; using indigenous childrens stories to navigate the Anthropocene; how childrens literature can enable eco-literate young people; social and environmental justice in Latinx literature; and how (re)reading popular dystopian works can help youth readers identify eco-critical hope in seemingly end-of-the-world narratives. A model for how humanities scholarship can have an impact greater than itself, Childrens Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene demonstrates how childrens texts and cultures might encourage ways of living more ethically in a world constantly changing. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Wroclaw University, Poland

Reviews

This wide-ranging collection of papers brings together childrens literature scholars, ecopedagogical theorists and practitioners, early childhood educators, anthropologists, and arts educators to generate a fascinating dialogue on childhood in the Anthropocene. Analyzing materials drawn from five continents, the collection presents a generous overview of current thoughts on more-than-human entanglements in the current moment. The collection tackles complex questions concerning matters such as the ethics of consumption and of hope. It draws heavily on Indigenous knowledge to build understandings of how humans might live response-ably alongside the rest of the living world. * Lydia Kokkola, University of Oulu, Finland *

Author Bio

Terri Doughty is Professor of English literature at Vancouver Island University, Canada. She has published articles and book chapters on girl culture, intergenerational collaboration, and critical plant studies approaches to childrens multimodal texts. She is co-editor of Knowing Their Place Identity and Space in Childrens Literature (2011). Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland. She has published on child-led research, posthumanism, and new materialism and co-edited Rulers of Literary Playgrounds Politics of Intergenerational Play in Childrens Literature (2021), Intergenerational Solidarity in Childrens Literature and Film (2021), Childrens Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind, and Childrens Cultures after Childhood (2023). Janet Grafton holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island University. Her teaching and research interests include the environmental humanities, food literacy, and childrens literature. She has published a number of articles related to childrens literature.