Racist Love

In Racist Love Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

Remote reading: a shelf list analysis of an academic library’s juvenile collection

Purpose This study aims to detail an analysis project of a juvenile collection within an academic library. The analysis became a starting point for the development of a coherent collection policy, and for charting a path toward a better maintained, more used, more diverse, inclusive and representative collection. Design/methodology/approach The analysis was done by using a catalog-generated shelf list, which revealed specific details about the aged state of the collection and brought to light the lack of attention the collection has been getting in recent years. Findings The analysis of a collection of children’s books in an academic library revealed a collection long out of date and unable to serve the needs of our user population. Research limitations/implications This analysis is specific to academic institutions that have collections of children’s material. Originality/value The literature on juvenile collections in academic libraries is relatively sparse. This research details a social justice approach to building and maintaining juvenile collections in academic libraries.

Money for beginners

The aim of this article is to look at children's books and stories about money, especially those suitable for early years, and to start to explore money and simple economics through practical activities.

A Framework for Evaluating Children's Books About Poverty

Enacting a class-sensitive pedagogy means disrupting negative discourses about social class and affirming the lives and experiences of children and families from poverty and the working class. One step that educators can take toward embracing a class-sensitive pedagogy is the inclusion of books with poor and working-class perspectives in the curriculum. This chapter describes a framework that educators can use to analyze and evaluate depictions of poor and working-class characters in books for children. This framework can support educators with selecting books that are respectful of and affirming to children from low-income families. In addition, the chapter offers book recommendations and approaches for integrating children's literature in elementary and middle grades classrooms.

What Might Books Be Teaching Young Children About Gender?

We investigated how gender is represented in children’s books using a novel 200,000-word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using adult human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We found that children’s books contain many words that adults judge as gendered. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicated that many books instantiate gender stereotypes identified in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading, and boys are better at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and we found that children are more often exposed to stereotypes for their own gender. Together, the data suggest that children’s books may be an early source of gender associations and stereotypes.

Sixty years of gender representation in children’s books: Conditions associated with overrepresentation of male versus female protagonists

As a reflection of prominent cultural norms, children’s literature plays an integral role in the acquisition and development of societal attitudes. Previous reports of male overrepresentation in books targeted towards children are consistent with a history of gender disparity across media and society. However, it is unknown whether such bias has been attenuated in recent years with increasing emphasis on gender equity and greater accessibility of books. Here, we provide an up-to-date estimate of the relative proportion of males and females featured as single protagonists in 3,280 children’s books (0–16 years) published between 1960–2020. We find that although the proportion of female protagonists has increased over this 60-year period, male protagonists remain overrepresented even in recent years. Importantly, we also find persistent effects related to author gender, age of the target audience, character type (human vs. non-human), and book genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) on the male-to-female ratio of protagonists. We suggest that this comprehensive account of the factors influencing the rates of appearance of male and female protagonists can be leveraged to develop specific recommendations for promoting more equitable gender representation in children’s literature, with important consequences for child development and society.

Investigating the Reading Strategies Used by French Immersion Pupils as They Engage With Dual-Language Children’s Books: A Multiple Case Study

As dual-language children’s books are becoming increasingly popular in language and literacy education, scholars are starting to zero in on how students construct meaning as they read these books. In this paper, in light of the previously mentioned body of literature, we present a qualitative study focusing on the reading strategies that three Grade 3 French immersion pupils schooled in Saskatchewan deployed when they read two types of dual-language books: translated, where the entire text appears in both English and French, and integrated, where passages in French organically complete those in English without providing the exact same information. This multiple case study highlights three distinct reading profiles, and shows how monolingual and cross-linguistic reading strategies can be used by the same student as they read a dual-language book. It also shows that some students were able to adapt their reading strategies as they engaged with different types of dual-language books, whereas others more frequently utilized the same strategies. Keywords: dual-language children’s books, reading strategies, French immersion Résumé Alors que les livres bilingues deviennent de plus en plus populaires en didactique des langues, la recherche commence à s’intéresser aux comportements cognitifs de l’élève qui s’engage dans la lecture de ces œuvres. Dans cet article, à la lumière de ces études, nous relatons les résultats d’une recherche qualitative visant à décrire les stratégies de lecture que trois élèves de 3e année scolarisés en Saskatchewan en immersion française déploient lorsqu’ils lisent deux types de livres bilingues : le livre traduit, dans lequel tout le texte apparait en français et en anglais, et le livre intégré, dans lequel le texte en français complète celui en anglais, sans toutefois offrir au lecteur la même information. Cette étude de cas multiple relève donc trois profils distincts de lecteur et, par son entremise, nous montrons comment des stratégies de lecture monolingues et translinguistiques peuvent être utilisées par un même élève lorsqu’il lit un livre bilingue. Nous révélons en outre que certains élèves sont à même d’adapter leurs stratégies de lecture selon le type de livre bilingue lu, tandis que d’autres font fréquemment usage des mêmes stratégies. Mots-clés : livres bilingues, stratégies de lecture, immersion française

Black, White, Colourful, Gray: Visual Effects in the Children’s Book Mimi & Liza

The study presents the reader with an intermedial interpretation of the storybook Mimi & Liza written by Katarína Kerekesová – Katarína Moláková – Alexandra Salmela (2013). The storybook follows the story of the friendship of two little girls, Mimi, who sees the world proliferating in mad colours, and the blind Liza, who is immersed in inner seeing. The two girls are presented as each other’s opposites through the semiotics of two counterpointing colour schemes. The analysis is based on Mitchell’s conception of media (Mitchell, 1994), that is, it sets out by acknowledging the intermedial state of the culture of children’s books, and then it follows the unfolding of the visual elements up through the investigation of expressive visual effects created by the text’s rhetoric. The visualization happening with the help of language is the condition of the common worldview of the blind and seeing characters as well as the guiding principle and goal of the volume; therefore besides the visual representation characteristic of children’s books, an emphasized role is given to the validation of the ekphrastic perspective in the analyzed work. The ekphrases of the text are presented as intermedial references (Rajewsky, 2010) based on Irina O. Rajewsky’s interpretation of intermediality. A unique feature of the interpretation is that the ekphrases of the volume read as sort of imaginary/imagination ekphrases which create the special, children’s book version of ekphrasis. It is characteristic for this imagination ekphrases that the order of the imaginary image and its linguistic description create an undecidable symbiosis. These images, however, can also be interpreted as inverted ekphrases, since they function not merely as descriptions of imagination ekphrases, but also as the visual world representations of linguistic imagination. Through several examples the study introduces and analyzes the mechanisms of the visualization happening with the help of language as well as the scenery painted with words.