Keynotes

Keynote lectures took place at 10:00 AM Santiago time (GMT-3 at the time of the event). Each keynote lecture was introduced and moderated by a member of the organizing committee,
and they were laid out as follows:

Tuesday 19th: Valeria Sardi, moderated and introduced by Macarena García-González.

Keynote Title: A Desire Looks for its Dwelling: Genders and Sexualities in Literature Teaching

Abstract: Literature classes at school are a territory in which apparitions of sexual and gendered dimensions are habitual, a happening that sparks discussions and tensions among both students and teachers, and brings to focus didactic concerns on how disciplines are to approach gender and sexuality in classroom settings. This presentation aims to inquire into how literature teaching is a propitious space to deploy ways of reading, interpreting and hypothesizing on reading from sexed and gendered practices. That is, from a gendered and sexed perspective, lectureship practices may promote the forming of readers whose desire and curiosity operate in the conformation of aware readers that denaturalize and reflect around sexism and androcentrism. It is under the light of the aforementioned conformation that literature teaching from a gendered and sexed perspective stands as both a necessary and urgent process in the search for a more egalitarian society, one that defies heterocisnormative and patriarchal mandates.

Recording available here.

Thursday 21st: Clémentine Beauvais, moderated and introduced by Soledad Véliz.

Keynote Title: The Future of Reading For Pleasure

Abstract: Once upon a time, it seemed so easy to say: we should encourage reading for pleasure. It became a campaign, a field of research, a pedagogical conversation. Get the children to choose their own books, to read for pleasure, never judge them on their reading, we said, and they will become lifelong, avid readers. Not so easy anymore: children’s literature studies and literacy studies have become increasingly concerned with the political and moral responsibilities associated with children’s chosen reading. What if children are loving books that perpetuate and strengthen dominant forms of power, comfortable visions of the world for the already privileged? What hides behind ‘pleasure reading’, behind ‘books children like’, behind ‘spontaneous choices’, is beginning to appear less and less attractive – and is making the role of academics, mediators and teachers of reading more and more complex. Can we still advocate reading for pleasure when the urge is to read politically? How can we retheorise pleasure reading to incorporate those nuances and transformations? In this talk I argue that we should embrace the opportunity to reconceptualize pleasure reading, and attempt to do so in dialogue with contemporary and past academic conversations around that tricky concept.

Recording available here.

Saturday 23rd: Helma van Lierop-DeBrauwer, moderated and introduced by Claudia Matus

Keynote Title: ,em>Children’s Literature Studies: a Joint Venture

Abstract: Until recently, text-oriented research on children’s literature has gone largely unnoticed by colleagues from reading and literacy studies, whereas for quite some time, research on the reading and literacy development of children has often not been considered to be a genuine part of children’s literature studies. As a children’s literature researcher involved in both text-oriented research and reading and literacy studies, I have always seen this divide as highly artificial. The recent interest in participatory research practices, indicating a shift to a more child-centered point of view in children’s literature studies, and the development of childhood models that acknowledge the kinship between children and adults, offer fruitful opportunities to move away from this unnatural split and to create synergy between a text-oriented and a child-oriented approach to children’s and young adult literature. Although my own research was never purposefully designed on the basis of a participatory research model, it has definitely provided insights in how children are experts on their own literature and in how intergenerational collaboration fosters dialogues about literature between children, young adults and adults in which age-based power is no longer a decisive factor. In my three-part presentation I focus on children as emergent readers, on children as critical judges and on young adults as creative (co-)authors. On the basis of a retrospective rereading of my data from studies on the literary socialization of preschool children, children’s juries and on young adults as life writers, which I gathered over a period of almost forty years, I argue that children’s literature studies is a joint venture between children, adults and books.

Recording available here.

Monday 25th: Spyros Spyrou, moderated and introduced by Andrea Casals

Keynote Title: The Irreducible Child: Notes Towards a more Critically Open Childhood Studies

Abstract: To assume that one knows ‘what a child is’, is to foreclose the possibilities for ontological surprise, for the unexpected. But if one cannot know the child (what is and can be) then how does one proceed to produce knowledge about the child that is meaningful, critical, ethical and matters for the times we live in? In my presentation, I argue for a critically open Childhood Studies which sees the child as fundamentally irreducible, as an ontological becoming, always unfinished and in process, assembled and reassembled materially and discursively in encounters with both human and non-human others. Decentering the child in this way offers possibilities for new forms of knowledge that are more critical and ethical because they are attuned to the radical interdependencies of life. It also opens up the possibility for counter-hegemonic renderings of what a child is and can be in a neoliberal world which seeks to foreclose more ethical and just alternatives.

Recording available here.

Wednesday 27th: Marilisa Jiménez, moderated and introduced by Isabel Ibaceta

Keynote Title: Transnational LIJ: Latinx Studies, Puerto Rico, and the Praxis of Transnational Solidarity

Abstract: This presentation will take into account the importance of children’s and young adult literature in documenting the Puerto Rican past and present through its communities in Puerto Rico and the diasporas. Focusing on the Caribbean, I will also analyze the problems and barriers literature for young people (LIJ), and its authors, have faced in terms of visibility in various canons and tensions between pedagogy and aesthetics. Yet, how does LIJ wonderfully disrupt our prejudices about childhood, nations, and the future of our fields of Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies? Furthermore, how might the field of international children’s and young adult literature truly support critical conversation that cross borders?

Recording available here.

Thursday 28th: Magda Sepúlveda, moderated and introduced by Felipe Munita

Keynote Title: The Round as Spatial Repossession and Political Agency: Gabriela Mistral

Abstract: Children’s texts created by Gabriela Mistral seek for children to enact a spatial repossession, fostering the exercise of political agencies to validate their territories from the cultures sprung from symbolic and material geographies. Her texts have a concrete recipient: indigenous and lower-class children. These children are invited to hear the sounds of their own cultures, and to value the food on their tables and kitchens. But they are also called over to analyze the territories that have been taken away from them, and that can be recovered through the round, wherein names are lost in search of a collective that shares a common tempo.

Recording available here.