Role of Animals in Books for Children and.Youth

In this paper I test the capacity for functional linguistics, in particular register theory (Halliday, 2002) and cohesive harmony analysis (Hasan, 1984), to illuminate how habitual patterns of language make meat-eating and factory farming seem natural, and how certain counter discourses work to expose the seams in such practices. My primary example is an award-winning animal welfare campaign based on mock recipe cards. While such genre-bending clearly aims at bypassing reader defenses, the text’s real achievement is to combine semantic features whose co-occurrence is normally blocked by the cultural-linguistic system, allowing it to project a sophisticated food identity for readers and construe a social identity for the recipe ‘ingredients’ (pigs), realized largely through bizarre cohesive harmony. Implications discussed include relations between ‘major and minor identities’ (Lakoff, 2006), the mobilization of identity in dominant and emerging ideologies, and the limits on who/what can count as a social subject that might ‘perform’ or ‘negotiate’ identity.

In his preface to The Order of Things, Michael Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ of modern scientific epistemology, he quotes a passage from Jorge Louis Borges, supposedly derived from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.’ For Foucault ‘the wonderment of this taxonomy’ has the effect of ‘breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.’ Borges’ hoax classification and Foucault’s response embody the topic of this essay: the wonder provoked by animals, and its function both as an invitation and a challenge to the organisation of knowledge about the nonhuman natural world. The essay begins by considering some types of wonder evoked by animals in medieval bestiaries. It then briefly outlines the place of wonder in the emergence of scientific and Enlightenment thought, with a particular focus on René Descartes and Carl von Linné. The discussion concludes with a consideration of the role of wonder in three contemporary bestiaries: David Attenborough’s wildlife documentary Galapagos 3D (2013), Casper Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings (2013), and Bruce Bagemihl’s study of non-heteronormative behaviour amongst animals, Biological Exuberance (1999).

Published Dissertation (2016)

The starting-point of this thesis is the hypothesis that, from at least 22 months old, children who watch movies (i.e. any moving-image media) may be learning how to make sense of them. Rather than looking for evidence of precursors to further learning (such as language, literacy or technological skills) or for the risks or benefits that movie-watching may entail, the thesis argues that viewing behaviour provides enough evidence about the practices and processes through which children of this age learn how understand movies, to indicate that this is a significant achievement, and has implications for later development. Data were gathered during an ethnographic study of two of my grandchildren (dizygotic girl and boy twins), covering a 20-month period (from ages 22 to 42 months) but focusing particularly on their third year of life. Analysis of the resulting 12.7 hours of video, together with observational field notes and parental interviews, draws on a combination of sociocultural and embodied cognition approaches in addressing the challenges of interpreting two-year-olds’ movie-viewing behaviour. Following the literature review in Chapter 1 and a description of the research design and method in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 provides a chronological account of three sequences of viewing events. The themes that emerged from the analysis of these sequences are discussed in Chapter 4, on emotion, and Chapter 5, on social and cultural learning. The thesis recognizes the role of movie-watching in human ontogeny, arguing that it is driven by emotions, and enabled by embodied simulations, and that the early learning enabled by children’s intensive – and often self-directed – viewing and re-viewing of movies is complementary to all their other cultural and social learning.

The world-wide panic occasioned by outbreaks of BSE was (and is) incommensurate with the number of human fatalities incurred. This apparent over-reaction can in part be accounted for by BSEs simultaneous disruption of cherished "boundaries" between those categories (civilization and savagery; cannibalism and carnivory; human and animal) upon which our human self-definition depends.

Innovative Shared Practical Ideas (I-Spi) is a guide to help you and your children learn together. It is designed to affirm, support and strengthen your role as home tutor/supervisors in your daily learning sessions with your children. In this guide particular emphasis is given to the value of talk, formal and informal early literacy and numeracy practices (including ideas from distance school lessons, from home tutor/supervisors, research, and beyond), assessment of these practices together with informal assessment ideas for gauging your ...

My interview with Carol J. Adams, from "The Feral Issue": a special issue of the minnesota review about animal studies, which I guest edited in 2009.

In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an ‘animal turn’, an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals showcases original explorations of the ‘animal turn’ by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at least partly) conceptual and textual: paper tigers, beast fables, anthropomorphs, humanimals, l’animot. In so doing, they investigate the benefits of knowing animals differently: more closely, less definitively, more carefully, less certainly. Contributors include: Laurence Simmons, Alphonso Lingis, Barbara Creed, Tanja Schwalm, Philip Armstrong, Annie Potts, Allan Smith, Ricardo De Vos, Catharina Landström, Brian Boyd, Helen Tiffin, Ian Wedde.

This chapter offers a common worlds approach to unsettling the spaces and places of early childhood education. It draws on ongoing collaborative practitioner/researcher ethnographic research in early childhood education centres in British Columbia, Canada, and Canberra, Australia. As an alternative to the “pure and innocent” nature pedagogies that are so popular in early childhood education, this research is constructing a common worlds pedagogy that responds to children’s entanglement in messy colonialist and ecological relations in the local places they inhabit. To illustrate this unsettling pedagogy, the authors provide a selection of narrative accounts of educators’ and children’s grapplings with (post)colonial encounters with bears and kangaroos in their respective local British Columbia forests and Canberra bushlands.

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children's place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey's notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt's notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.

This thesis explores some of the roles and functions that trees have in works of imaginative literature, as symbols, as structural elements, and as representations of real trees in the physical world. Whereas most other studies treat trees only as symbols, or, which is often the case, do not treat them at all, this study aims to show that it is worthwhile to pay more attention to the role of trees in books, and that they are as important as suggested by the linguistic connection between the words ‘book’ and ‘beech’, and the fact that both trees and books have ‘leaves’. Through close reading, this study shows the importance of trees in selected works by: William Shakespeare (1546-1616), with a particular focus on The Tempest and As You Like It; J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), focusing on ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (1945) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55); and Margaret Atwood (1939 –), giving particular attention to the MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) and Up in the Tree (1978). The study is indebted to ecocriticism, especially in those parts that deal with the relationship between literary trees and trees in the physical world.

Czech architect-scenographer František Zelenka was a well-known pre-war designer for the National Theatre in Prague, deported by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt ghetto, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where he participated extensively in the inmates’ theatrical activity. Among his works in the ghetto, the children’s opera Brundibár, designed and directed by Zelenka, stands out. Brundibár was originally created in 1938 by the Czech Jewish composer Hans Krása and the librettist Adolf Hoffmeister in Prague. Despite the harsh living conditions, 55 performances are known to have been held in Theresienstadt between 1943 and 1944. The staging of Brundibár consisted of visual statements that were an integral part of the scenography and acquired meaning in the context of the ghetto. This article analyses Zelenka’s scenography by focusing on the visual metaphors embedded in the stage images he created, and offers an insight on the multiple roles of Brundibár’s original scenography and its impact. The aim is to underscore the power in creating and reading scenographic images under coercive conditions, with Brundibár as a paradigmatic example. It demonstrates the ways in which scenography may serve as a reminder of normality for children dealing with issues that cannot otherwise be confronted. The article concludes with a brief commentary on contemporary adaptations of the opera.