Research Focus Group Talk: Domesticating the Future: Egyptian Children’s Publishing, Generation Z, and the Neoliberal Ideology of the New Wave

The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Dr. Yasmine Motawy. In this talk, Motawy will examine the Egyptian child reader as a historically produced subject shaped by two decades of neoliberal transformation. Drawing on her new book, Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society, which examines a new wave of Egyptian picturebooks published in Egypt since the early 2000s, she will trace the historical development of Egyptian children’s literature until the neoliberal context, marked by changing cultural aspirations. Her talk will focus in particular on a cluster of picturebooks that socialize children into emerging neoliberal spaces, showing how these texts normalize new forms of childhood, domestic life, and mobility, and how they translate broader political-economic shifts into everyday narratives addressed to young readers.

Yasmine Motawy is a scholar, critic, translator, editor, and consultant specializing in children’s literature. She has served on major regional and international award juries, including the 2021 Bologna Ragazzi Award, the 2016 and 2018 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2017 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, and chaired the 2025 Sawiris Cultural Award. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2018). In 2022, she received AUC’s Excellence in Research and Creative Endeavors Award. Her latest book is Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (2025). She currently serves on the board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (2025–2027).

Zoom attendance link here

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group, Comparative Literature Program, and Department of Religious Studies