Lecture: Children Becoming Writers: Intergenerational Assemblages for Children’s Literature

The Center for Young People's Literature and Culture (Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław) and The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (the Faculty of Letters, University of Wrocław) has the honor to invite you to an open lecture organized in the “Excellence Initiative – Research University” Programme at the University of Wrocław.

LECTURE: Prof. Macarena García-González's

Children Becoming Writers: Intergenerational Assemblages for Children’s Literature

DATE: November 24, 2022 (12.00 CET)

TIME: 12:00 (CET, Central European Time)

6:00am (Eastern Standard Time)

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VENUE: MS Teams and the Institute of English Studies (Room 208)

For online participation, please contact

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, justyna.deszcz-tryhubczak@uwr.edu.pl

Our quest to counter adultism in culture has motivated different initiatives that give “voice” to children or recognize their cultural productions and preferences. In children’s literature studies, we may trace such an interest in the critical attention to the juvenilia of children’s literature writers, in the examination of archives with children’s texts, as well as the appreciation of collaborations between children and adult authors. Such explorations are pressed to deal with the complex question of how to approach such child-authored texts: are all children’s texts of interest? If not, how do we decide which of them are? How do we deal with our adult ways of knowing when we decide what children's texts are to be considered? In this talk, I propose that a concern with relational ontologies may produce more affirmative questions such as what do these texts do with us and how the attention to them may open up what we understand by children’s literature and by literary mediation. I examine three initiatives in which children become writers in order to invite you to see them as lines of flight, ways of interrupting normative repertoires of childhood and literary education.

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ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Macarena García-González is currently a postdoctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Glasgow. She investigates the shifting relationships between literature, cultural materials, and children working with transdisciplinary and collaborative methodologies. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies from the University of Zurich and a MA on Cultural Studies from the University of Maastricht. She has authored two monographs —Origin Narratives. The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (Routledge, 2017) and Enseñando a sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (Metales Pesados, 2021)—, as well as several articles and book chapters on children's literature, reading promotion, culture and education. She has been visiting scholar at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Graz, the Collegium Helveticum in Switzerland, the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the Internationale Jugendbibliothek in Munich. She has led the research project “Emotional and Literary Repertoires for Childhood” (2018-2022), a new materialist exploration of the affective in encounters between texts and children, as well as the research line BioSocioCultural Inclusion. Challenging Homogeneity in Educational Spaces at the Center for Educational Justice of the Catholic University of Chile. She was the convener of the 25th IRSCL Congress Aesthetic and Pedagogic Entanglements and has served as a member of the IRSCL executive board since 2019.