Ecologies of Childhood

KEYNOTE:  The Complex Precursors, Legacies, and Possibilities of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins  

Dr. Sara L. Schwebel is Professor and Director of the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  A historian by training, her research centers on the historical narratives young people absorb through frequently assigned fiction and nonfiction—as well as the way K-12 educators can challenge the heritage-based approach long central to school history.  Schwebel is the author of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (Vanderbilt UP, 2011), editor of Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader’s Edition (U of California Press, 2016),   

co-editor, with Jocelyn Van Tuyl, of Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial (Routledge, 2022) and, in collaboration with student researchers and the National Park Service (United States), author of the Books to Parks site on Christopher Paul Curtis’ The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 (forthcoming) and Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, a survival story (ending in Santa Barbara) that has long been celebrated as a feminist and environmental text but which problematically positions an indigenous Californian as both a “girl Crusoe” and “the last of her tribe.” Before beginning her academic career, Schwebel taught middle school U.S. history and English Language Arts. 

KEYNOTE:  When Oil and Childhood Mix: Children's Literature and (or as) Petroculture

Dr. Lara Saguisag is Associate Professor and Georgiou Chair in Children’s Literature and Literacy at New York University. Her research, teaching, and community projects are informed by climate justice and energy justice movements. Her current research project investigates the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. Through the Children’s Literature Association’s Climate Justice Interest Group, which Saguisag founded and currently convenes, she works with colleagues to promote climate justice-oriented research and teaching. With Marek Oziewicz, she co-founded Climate Lit, an open-access web resource for teaching climate change and climate justice through literature for young people. Saguisag’s other interests include comics and graphic novels, Philippine children’s literature, and transformative justice in education. Her monograph Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP, 2018) examines how the intertwined discourses of childhood, citizenship, and nationhood were expressed in and complicated by Progressive Era newspaper comics. It received several honors, including the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and an Eisner nomination for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Saguisag is also the author of several children’s books, including Animal Games and Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People.

KEYNOTE: Thinking with Black Ecologies in Early Childhood Studies

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab.  She is also affiliated faculty in the School of the Environment. Her scholarship focuses on developing possibilities for anti-colonial early childhood environmental education. Her work seeks to make conceptual, methodological, curricular and pedagogical contributions in disrupting settler colonial erasures and anti-Blackness in environmental education for young children. Fikile’s scholarship works across multiple fields including childhood studies, children’s geographies, Indigenous and Black studies, social studies of science, and the environmental humanities and sciences. Her book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019) examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race, and settler colonialism in early learning contexts. Her current research aims to generate insights on how Black ecologies can inform the design of climate justice education in Canadian cities.

KEYNOTE:  Protecting Children, Protecting Nature: The Rise and Contestation of Environmental Education in China 

Dr. Orna Naftali is Director of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main research interests include the anthropology of childhood, schooling and education in modern and contemporary China, with a particular focus on issues of science and subjectivity, gender and sexuality, citizenship and legal consciousness, nationalism, militarization, and the nation-state. She is the author of two books: Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Children in China (Polity, 2016), and is currently working on a new book project on the militarization of children’s culture and education in the People’s Republic of China (1949-). Her articles have appeared in leading academic journals, including Journal of Youth Studies; Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; The China Quarterly; The China Journal; Modern China; and the Journal of Contemporary China. 

EVENING FILM EVENT SPEAKER:  Special Film Screening of "Whale Rider" and Discussion with Witi Ihimaera, Author of The Whale Rider, Carsey-Wolf Center

Māori author Witi Ihimaera celebrates 50 years since he became New Zealand’s first Māori novelist with Tangi, published, in 1973. Since then Ihimaera has become one of the world’s leading indigenous writers with four of his novels made into feature films. Among them is The Whale Rider, 1989, a huge hit in 2002, winning audience awards around the world. Acknowledged as a mentor of younger New Zealand writers, playwrights, editors and filmmakers, his titles include The Matriarch 1986, Bulibasha1994, The Uncle’s Story 2000 (in feature film development), Sleeps Standing 2017 (in feature film development), two memoirs and a non-fiction history of Maori mythology. He is a multi-award winner in his own country and, internationally, the holder of a Premio Ostana, 2010, and a Chevalier Des Arts et Lettres 2017. He lives in Auckland.

EVENING FILM EVENT MODERATOR:  Special Film Screening of "Whale Rider" and Discussion Moderated by Dr. Nicola Daly, Carsey-Wolf Center

An Associate Professor in Te Kura Toi Tangata, Division of Education, Dr. Nicola Daly is a sociolinguist interested in the language hierarchies present in children’s literature. She is also interested in the pedagogical potential of picturebooks for social justice in educational contexts from early childhood settings through to tertiary contexts. She teaches courses in children’s literature and supervises Masters and Ph.D. students in children’s literature and language-related topics. The main focus of her research is in the language used in children’s picturebooks. Her research has examined the use of Māori loanwords in New Zealand English picturebooks, and more recently has been analyzing the linguistic landscape of dual language picturebooks. She also has explored the link between national identity and children’s literature.

ARTIST-AUTHOR PLENARY: Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang writes, and sometimes draws, comic books and graphic novels. As the Library of Congress’ fifth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, he advocates for the importance of reading, especially reading diversely. American Born Chinese, his first graphic novel from First Second Books, was a National Book Award finalist, as well as the winner of the Printz Award and an Eisner Award. His two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints won the L.A. Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist. His other works include Secret Coders (with Mike Holmes), The Shadow Hero (with Sonny Liew), New Super-Man from DC Comics (with various artists), and the Avatar: The Last Airbender series from Dark Horse Comics (with Gurihiru). In 2016, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

ARTIST-AUTHOR PLENARY: Eugene Yelchin

Eugene Yelchin is a writer and illustrator of books for children and young adults. Yelchin is a National Book Award finalist for The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge co-authored with M. T. Anderson and the recipient of Newbery Honor for Breaking Stalin’s Nose. He received Sydney Taylor Award for The Genius Under the Table, Golden Kite Award for The Haunting of Falcon House, Crystal Kite Award for illustrating Won Ton, National Jewish Book Award for illustrating The Rooster Prince of Breslov, and Tomie DePaola Award from the Society of Children Books Writers and Illustrators. His books were named Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, People Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Horn Book, USA Today, Amazon, NPR, Huffington Post, School Library Journal, etc., and were translated in dozens of languages worldwide. For more information please visit: eugeneyelchin.com

ARTIST-AUTHOR PLENARY: Maya Gonzalez

Maya Gonzalez is an award-winning children’s book artist, author, activist and progressive educator. Maya's work addresses systemic inequity in relation to race/ethnicity, sexism and cissexism using children’s books as radical agents of change and healing, both personally and culturally. Maya co-founded Reflection Press, a POC, queer and trans owned independent publishing house that uses holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for kids and grown-ups. Maya is also the creator of the Gender Wheel, a tool to express the dynamic, infinite and inclusive reality of gender, and provides lectures and workshops to educators, parents and caregivers. See also: www.mayagonzalez.com | www.genderwheel.com | www.reflectionpress.com

ARTIST-AUTHOR PLENARY: Reine Dibussi

Reine Dibussi is a French and Cameroonian Author, Illustrator, Scriptwriter and since 2021 Co-founder of AFIRI Studio, a graphic studio and independent publishing house. In 2017, she self-publishes the science-fiction graphic novel for kids named MULATAKO, followed by a 2nd volume in 2021, with Carine Bahanag as scriptwriter. Her work focuses on the representation of black and Afro people, feminism in comic books and illustration and contributes to the development of a more diversified illustrated francophone literature. MULATAKO is about a young water spirit named Jemea who defies her underwater world leaders by seeking refuge on earth, after those leaders decided to exterminate her school. In that story inspired by a Sawa Cameroonian belief of the water spirits “Miengu”, Jemea, her friends and teachers emerge in a 2114 rural Cameroon, on the land of less technologically-advanced humans, who still share the place with nature, robots and animals. Reine is currently working as a scriptwriter on an afro-fantasy video game project Amma: Chronicles of Lost Stars of JoinPlay Games, on a collective comic book about French women in science and as an illustrator on a graphic novel of the scriptwriter Laura Nsafou to be issued in 2024.

ARTIST-AUTHOR PLENARY: Jorge Argueta

Jorge Argueta is a Pipil Nahua Indian from El Salvador. He is a prize-winning poet and author of more than twenty children’s picture books, including Una película en mi almohada / A Movie in My Pillow (Children’s Book Press, 2001) and Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds (Groundwood Books, 2016), which won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and was named to USBBY’s Outstanding International Book List, the ALA Notable Children’s Books and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices. His books in the Madre Tierra / Mother Earth series are Viento, Vientito / Wind, Little Wind (Piñata Books, 2022); Fuego, Fueguito / Fire, Little Fire (Piñata Books, 2019); and Agua, Agüita / Water, Little Water (Piñata Books, 2017), winner of the inaugural Campoy-Ada Award in Children’s Poetry given by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española.  The California Association for Bilingual Education honored him with its Courage to Act Award. In addition, Jorge Argueta is the founder of The International Children's Poetry Festival Manyula, and also created The Library of Dreams in his native El Salvador, a non-profit organization that promotes literacy in both rural and metropolitan areas. This year, 2023 He became The Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, also his book Viento, Vientito won first place in the in Campoy-Ada Award in Children’s Poetry given by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. His fourth book in the series celebrating Mother Earth, Tierra, Tierrita won The Salinas De Alba  Award, for Latino Children’s Literature Jorge divides his time between San Francisco, California, and El Salvador.