Clippings: Looking into socially relevant picturebooks
Clippings: Looking into socially relevant picturebooks
School of Education Clippings
Date: Tuesday 23 April 2024
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Venue: Room 337, St. Andrews Building, and online
Category: Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Mark McGlashan (Birmingham City University), Izaskun Elorza (LINDES, University of Salamanca; CLIP Associate, University of Glasgow)
Website: www.tickettailor.com/events/universityofglasgow15/1198836
Join us at Clippings’ April hybrid event 'Looking into socially relevant picturebooks', bringing together the expertise of our Glasgow University CLIP associate, Izaskun Elorza from LINDES, University of Salamanca, alongside Mark McGlashan who will join us virtually from Birmingham City University. They will talk about the affordances of corpus-assisted and systemic-functional multimodal critical discourse analysis for studying multimodal representations of socially relevant themes, and will present recent research focusing on picturebooks featuring same-sex parents/caregivers, non-conforming male gender identities and migrant characterisation. We look forward to welcoming you for discussion and exchange of ideas.
Tuesday 23 April 2024
2pm – 4pm BST
Room 337, St Andrew’s Building (online attendance option available)
Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/universityofglasgow15/1198836
Join us for this hybrid event featuring an online talk by Mark McGlashan (Birmingham City University) followed by an in-person talk by Izaskun Elorza (LINDES, University of Salamanca; CLIP Associate, University of Glasgow).
Event agenda:
1. Welcome
2. "Same-sex parents in children’s picturebooks: examining representations using corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis"
By Mark McGlashan, Birmingham City University
Children’s picturebooks featuring same-sex (lesbian and gay) parents/caregivers have been historically rare yet extremely controversial – in their short history of publication they have become some of the most requested-to-be-banned books of modern times. Despite there being few of these picturebooks in existence, frequent and consistent requests have been made to ban books such as And Tango Makes Three (a true story about two male penguins who ‘adopt’ a lone egg in New York Central Zoo) and King and King (a fairy tale about two princes getting married).
This talk begins by outlining some of the relationships between language, gender, sexuality, childhood, and children’s literature in relation to picturebooks featuring same-sex parent families (SSPFs) before discussing corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis as an approach to the analysis of a corpus of over 50 picturebooks, including a discussion of methods for interpreting multimodal collocation, which I call collustration. Following this, findings are discussed which concentrate on the discursive constructions and representations of parenthood, family, and gay and lesbian sexualities with reference to the wider social situation of gay and lesbian people. Findings suggest that the representations of SSPFs in this picturebook corpus are underpinned by discourses of homonormativity (Duggan 2002; 2003) and attempt to position families with same-sex parents as ‘a different kind of family’ rather than as something radically different from families with heterosexual parents.
References
Duggan, L. (2002). The new heteronormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. In: R. Castronovo & D. D. Nelson (eds.). Materializing Democracy: towards a revitalized cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 175–194.
Duggan, L. (2003). The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Mark McGlashan is Senior Lecturer in English Language at Birmingham City University. Mark’s research interests predominantly centre on the synthesis and application of methods from Corpus Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Studies to study a wide range of social issues, and his recent work has focussed on relationships between language and abuse. This work includes examination of children’s online disclosures of abuse, improving linguistic safeguarding solutions in industry as Academic Supervisor on an Innovate UK funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Senso.cloud, and collaboration with the MANTRaP (Misogyny and The Red Pill) project team to investigate abusive language used within the ‘manosphere’. Mark is co-editor of Toxic Masculinity: men, meaning and digital media (Routledge, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation (Routledge, 2023).
For more information about Mark: https://www.MarkMcGlashan.com/
3. "Looking at socially relevant characters in picture books from a broad perspective"
by Izaskun Elorza, University of Salamanca (LINDES Research Group) & University of Glasgow (Associate to CLIP)
The last decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the publication of picture books focussing on socially relevant themes, such as non-conforming gender identities or migration, many of which are used for addressing critical literacy, social justice or diversity. It is generally agreed that having a deep understanding of the narrative resources employed by writers and illustrators will allow teachers to be better equipped for class discussions that can foster readers’ engagement from a critical perspective. In this talk, I will look into how different socially relevant characters are represented from a multimodal discourse analysis perspective that can be useful to connect more narrowly character representation features with critical discussion topics.
This talk focuses on how picture books represent characters as social actors in non-conforming male narratives, as well as in narratives of migration. I will start by exploring the concept of social actor as a type of collective identity, and how it is represented visually and verbally in picture books and will present my model of character representation (Elorza 2022, 2023). This approach stems from descriptive linguistics in its attempt to find regular patterns in the way we use language, also for literary representations, so that generalisations can be made about how discourse is constructed multimodally to talk about socially relevant topics in different genres. Building on Halliday’s conception of language as a social semiotic, a variety of models have been developed in the last decades, notably drawing from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s model of a ‘social visual grammar’, so I will situate the model of character representation in relation to other approaches. In the second part of the talk I will explore a variety of examples taken from non-conforming male gender and migration narratives, to illustrate how this approach can help gain a better insight into how socially relevant characters are represented in picture books, and how multimodal discourse analysis can be used as a bridge between the text and the critical discussions in the classroom.
References
Elorza, I. (2023). Gender-inclusive picture books in the classroom: A multimodal analysis of male subjective agencies. Linguistics & Education 78 (2023) 101242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2023.101242
Elorza, I. (2022). Ideational construal of male challenging gender identities in children’s picture books. In Moya-Guijarro, A. J. & Ventola, E. (eds.). A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books. Routledge, 42-68.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. Edward Arnold.
Kokkola, L. & Van den Bossche, S. (2019). Cognitive Approaches to Children's Literature: A Roadmap to Possible and Answerable Questions. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 44 (4), 355-363.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Painter, C., Martin, J., & Unsworth, L. (2012). Reading visual narratives: Image analysis of children’s picture books. Equinox.
Izaskun Elorza is Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Salamanca, and Associate to CLIP (School of Education) in the University of Glasgow for 2023-2024. Izaskun leads the Research Group of Linguistic Descriptions of English (LINDES) of the University of Salamanca. She is concerned with the representation of socially relevant themes in discourse from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis, and her recent work (Elorza 2022, 2023) delves into the multimodal characterisation of non-normative male protagonists in children’s picture books. Izaskun is now working on refining a model for analysing character representations in picture books as part of the Project: Children’s picture books about migration: Multimodal analysis and applicability in multicultural and multilingual environments (MIAMUL) (Project PID2021-142786OB-100 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”).
More information about Izaskun at: https://lindes.usal.es/ and at https://miamul.es
4. Tea and coffee
Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/universityofglasgow15/1198836