How might Indigenous scholars theorize with stories from our childhoods while enacting the Indigenous critical theory and praxis of refusal? This talk engages the Inupiaq haunting story of the Berry People along with North American histories of Indigenous family separation to examine Catholic political theologies of children. In doing so, it illustrates the ongoing necessity of Indigenous political savviness in defending communities and nations from the haunted whistlings of Christian religious institutions for Indigenous children ...

Literature, and children’s literature specifically, helps instill value and humanity in times of crisis, as portrayed in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom. Both adults and children find it challenging to handle chronic diseases, such as sickle cell, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis B. Focusing on one of these lethal diseases, sickle cell anemia, this study argues that, even with great innovations in medical science, society is the main killer and not the disease itself. Since disease forms ...

Historical Memory in Narrative is the third annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Isabella Williams and research on Writing and Literature by Tia Trinh in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Historical Memory in Narrative ...

This talk explores how modern adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for young readers reshape the poem’s theology of violence. In Inferno, punishment reflects divine justice and the consequences of disordered love; in contemporary picturebooks, illustrated editions, and comics, this moral framework is often softened, secularized, or inverted. Through examples from Italy, the United States, and Japan, the talk shows how artists translate Dante’s violence into abstraction, irony, or spectacle, transforming divine retribution into aesthetic or ...

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 ...

Are you interested in: – children’s media, literature, and culture – historical childhoods – children’s rights – education – child pyschology – sociology of childhood The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes graduate and undergraduate students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Free food and drinks provided. Learn about our on-campus Childhood Studies community (courses, affiliated faculty, and graduate students), research and conference opportunities offered by ...

This trilingual reading of writings by Indigenous writer Kseniia Bolshakova will include portions from her autobiographical novel All the Frost Melts, which was recently translated into English after being published in Dolgan and Russian in 2024. It will feature writer Kseniia Bolshakova reading in Dolgan, linguist Karina Sheifer (UC Santa Barbara) reading in Russian, and translator Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego) reading in English. The reading also will include imagery from life in the Russian ...

The symbol of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in public memory in Russia and abroad has been the tragedy of the Romanovs’ family in which five children of Nicholas II and Alexandra had been executed by the Bolsheviks, along with their parents. What is less salient in public commemoration is the fact that thousands of ordinary children died in the years after the Revolution from hunger, diseases, and overall neglect as direct causes of the turbulent ...

This undergraduate showcase will feature a research presentation by Fiona Boborci, titled “Translating Childhood: Untranslatability, Linguistic Hospitality, and Reader Perception in The Little Prince.” In her talk, Fiona explores the linguistic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of translation in children’s literature, examining how different English translations of Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince produce distinct understandings of childhood, imagination, and moral responsibility. Drawing on both French and English traditions, the presentation highlights translation as an active and transformative ...