The article builds upon work carried out through a Children’s Literature in Critical Contexts of Displacement (CLCCD) network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council–Global Challenges Research Fund. The network brought together academics as well as government and non-governmental organisations with expertise in children’s literature, migration, and education who were actively working in Egypt and Mexico. They collaboratively designed workshops that examined the use of children’s literature as a cultural tool for post-crisis interventions that could contribute to creating a safe space for children and their families to reimagine and restore their self and group identities. This article begins by unravelling the concept of hope, arguing for a critical understanding of hope for transformative use within contexts of flux. Using a critical content analysis approach, five picturebooks used by Egyptian and Mexican mediators were analysed in order to develop an understanding of how critical hope developed within the texts. The emerging themes have been expanded into a set of guiding questions that will enable mediators and educators to use children’s literature in contexts of displacement or precarity.
Inclusive Young Adult Fiction might have preceded the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020, but the points Melanie Ramdarshan Bold raises in this book resonate on many different levels with experiences that authors of colour have been sharing this year, as well as with conversations that have been taking place for decades about racism in publishing, including in the fields of children's and YA literature. This book is part of the broader social and political project of documenting racial inequalities in publishing by way of pushing the industry to reexamine its practices so that real, substantive change can finally take place. Ramdarshan Bold focuses on the representation of the British authors of colour who still form a very small percentage of published YA authors in the UK. In an earlier quantitative study, Ramdarshan Bold found that British authors of colour represented only 1.5% of authors who had YA books published between 2006 and 2016 ("The Eight Percent Problem"). In Inclusive Young Adult Fiction, Ramdarshan Bold draws on semi-structured
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.