Children's Literatures, Cultures, and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene

Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, this book explores how children’s literature, and cultural experiences tailored to them, afford young people new ways of navigating a world facing impending environmental crisis.

With chapters from researchers in Europe, North America, Australasia and Asia, and working in fields such as literary, cultural, childhood and education studies, it provides multidisciplinary perspectives, visions and practices on, and models for, how children might embrace hope rather than fear as they confront today’s environmental issues. Starting and then moving out from stories to imagining and putting into practice more ethical ways of engaging with and being in the world, Children’s Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene examines various forms of storytelling, learning, thinking, and teaching that ask what children can learn from each other, from intergenerational and interspecies engagement, from human and more-than-human teachers. The chapters cover a huge variety of topics including: eco-pedagogy; depictions of food and malnutrition; engaging nature through graphic narratives; using indigenous children’s stories to navigate the Anthropocene; how children’s literature can enable eco-literate young people; social and environmental justice in Latinx literature; and how (re)reading popular dystopian workscan help youth readers identify eco-critical hope in seemingly end-of-the-world narratives.

A model for how humanities scholarship can have an impact greater than itself, Children’s Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene demonstrates how children’s texts and cultures might encourage ways of living more ethically in a world constantly changing.