{"id":638,"date":"2019-04-09T17:12:36","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T16:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/?p=638"},"modified":"2019-04-13T09:54:11","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T08:54:11","slug":"clugg-a-snapshot-of-what-happens-in-the-groups-weekly-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/clugg-a-snapshot-of-what-happens-in-the-groups-weekly-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"CLUGG: A snapshot of what happens in the group&#8217;s weekly meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Children\u2019s Literature Unit Graduate Group (CLUGG) holds weekly 2-hour meetings where members pick a relevant theme to discuss together, allowing us as researchers to\u00a0broaden our academic interests, learn from one other and engage more widely with the Children&#8217;s Literature academic community. By posting about our previous sessions, we hope to give you an idea of some of the research interests of CLUGG members, as well as the work that they are currently undertaking.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In this blog post, MLitt Student Enya-Marie Clay looks back on the first few CLUGG sessions of Semester 2. Further posts about CLUGG sessions will feature on the blog in the future, as and when members can contribute, so please bookmark the blog if you&#8217;re interested in future updates relevant to all things Children&#8217;s Literature at Newcastle University.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Session 1: 30th January 2019<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In this session we discussed extracts from Peter Hollindale\u2019s <em>Signs of Childness in Children\u2019s Literature<\/em> (1997), specifically chapters 1 and 5: &#8216;The Uniqueness of Children\u2019s Literature&#8217; and &#8216;Signs of Childness: A Summary and Critical Approach&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>This prompted discussions surrounding key critical questions of the field such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What is a child?<\/li>\n<li>What is children\u2019s literature?<\/li>\n<li>What is the relationship between the intended reader and the producers of children\u2019s literature?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We also discussed how Hollindale\u2019s work sits within the broader landscape of scholarship by thinking about how it compares with the prominence of Jaqueline Rose\u2019s work. This led to comparisons with non-British theorists within children\u2019s literature, such as Perry Nodelman, and an exploration of how different social and geographical contexts affect the prominence of different works. In doing this, we also discussed which texts stand out as seminal reading and how these texts connect with the development of children\u2019s literature as a discipline.<\/p>\n<p>We ended the session by planning Semester 2 CLUGG meetings with the view to increasing the variety of activities and interests, such as student presentations and primary texts, and to move towards more student-led sessions now that the academic year is more established.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Session 2: 6th February 2019<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In this session we welcomed Rachel Pattinson, the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/vitalnorth\/about\/\">Vital North<\/a> Partnership Manager, who kindly brought along books from the IBBY UK Selection of Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities (2017) from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sevenstories.org.uk\">Seven Stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We spent the session exploring the books and discussing their features. We were all struck by the importance of communal reading as a theme across the books, with many encouraging collaborative reading between the reader and child, such as <em>Morgh-e Sork-e Pa Kootah<\/em> (<em>The Little Red Hen<\/em>), which Rachel and Helen read together using the step-by-step guide to unfold the tactile story.<\/p>\n<p>With the collection featuring books in over 40 languages from a variety of countries, we also had the opportunity to discuss how the books reflected their cultures of origin and how this compares with our understanding of children\u2019s literature as British scholars. Yasuhiro Hunimori\u2019s <em>Ren-chan hajimete no mitori: Obaachan no shi to mukiau<\/em>\u00a0(<em>Good-bye great grand-ma: A young girl\u2019s first encounter with end-of-life care-giving<\/em>), an incredibly moving photographic picture book with realistic photos of death, is a good of example of this, as we considered such stark images to be unusual in British children\u2019s literature. This prompted conversation around how representations of trauma in children\u2019s literature vary greatly across cultures and how this can reflect distinct attitudes to children and childhood.<\/p>\n<p>The collection also features portrayals of disability (category 3), a notable example being a graphic novel titled <em>El Deafo<\/em>\u00a0(2014) by Cece Bell. It was interesting how this novel transformed the bullying taunt \u2018deafo\u2019 into a superhero persona (hence the novel\u2019s title), and thus showed a young protagonist celebrating their own disability. We discussed the novel\u2019s use of speech bubbles, in which the text fades or disappears entirely to reflect the protagonist\u2019s hearing loss, and how these effectively communicated the main character\u2019s disability in a way that was accessible to readers who may not have experienced hearing impairment.<\/p>\n<p>More details about the collection can be found on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibby.org\/awards-activities\/activities\/ibby-collection-of-books-for-young-people-with-disabilities\/\">IBBY website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Session 3: 13th February 2019<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This week\u2019s session centred around an article provided by doctoral candidate Rebecca Jane titled \u2018\u201cAway with dark shadders!\u201d Juvenile Detection Versus Juvenile Crime in <em>The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times<\/em>\u2019 written by Lucy Andrew. We used the article to discuss ideas surrounding penny dreadfuls, such as their use in juvenile court cases as Andrew discusses and how their depiction of violence differed in comparison to other periodicals of the time, such as\u00a0<em>The Boy\u2019s Own Paper<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This led to discussions on ideas from Michel Foucault\u2019s <em>Discipline and Punish,\u00a0<\/em>such as how lurid descriptions and publicisation of a trial or a punishment can serve as a way of making the public an agent of control. We discussed this in the context of how violence was written about in the 19th century and then thought about how a degree of \u2018acceptable\u2019 criminality in the upholding of justice seemed to be a trope of the detective genre more generally.<\/p>\n<p>We then discussed Andrew\u2019s take on class and power tensions in <em>The Boy Detective <\/em>and explored the idea that penny dreadfuls could be a way of upholding conservatism through subversion; in other words, they can act as an abstract platform to explore ideas of criminality which exhausts the desire for this exploration in real life.<\/p>\n<p>The latter part of the session then looked at ideas about radicalism in children\u2019s literature and how different parenting styles globally can affect childhood experiences and the way that we ultimately come to research children\u2019s literature. This led us to talk about attachment theory, the sacralisation of the mother\/child relationship and how children\u2019s literature traditionally reinforces this, and the adult fear of the loss of control over children as they mature. Through considering this, we recognised how our understanding of a text\u2019s intended reader is socially constructed depending on context and how this must be considered when discussing texts.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo Credit: Rachel Pattinson, Vital North Partnership Manager, @rachelalmost. Texts from the IBBY Selection of Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Children\u2019s Literature Unit Graduate Group (CLUGG) holds weekly 2-hour meetings where members pick a relevant theme to discuss together, allowing us as researchers to\u00a0broaden our academic interests, learn from one other and engage more widely with the Children&#8217;s Literature academic community. By posting about our previous sessions, we hope to give you an idea &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/clugg-a-snapshot-of-what-happens-in-the-groups-weekly-meetings\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">CLUGG: A snapshot of what happens in the group&#8217;s weekly meetings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7850,"featured_media":676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,66,42,43,67],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-clugg","tag-ibby","tag-mlitt-in-childrens-literature","tag-phd-in-childrens-literature","tag-vital-north"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":691,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/691"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}