Overview

The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction centres the question of how reading fiction develops our moral imagination and our capacities to think and feel with others. The question is approached with a good dose of scepticism, revising tensions between ethical, aesthetical, and pedagogical dimensions when certain books, films, and other cultural materials are recommended for children. This volume examines how texts addressed to children are meant to assist socioemotional education and whether we put forward adultist assumptions around such conceptualisations of the emotional. The book is organised into nine chapters, with some of them focusing on ""difficult"" themes —such as violence, xenophobia, death, migration, as well as gender and social exclusions— and some others on more general relationships between emotions, media, and education. The chapters combine a textual analysis of recommended cultural materials for children with insights from empirical research and ethnographic approaches to children’s cultures. A common thread throughout the book is the open question about the epistemic injustices in knowing children and childhood and how this may be overcome by shifting our research practices with posthumanist philosophies.

Full Product Details

9781032854458

Table of Contents

Reviews

""In returning to the much-debated question (and the pedagogical and aesthetic assumptions it entails) of whether and how children’s fiction fosters empathy, García González offers an incisive critique of the facile beliefs and expectations held by adults that teach, produce and write about it. She shows how new epistemologies and empirical approaches can help reimagine emotional engagement with narrative to allow for more ethical collaborations to take place between children and adults. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in taking children’s literature and childhood studies forward but also for anyone concerned with better understanding what children know and do with texts and other media."" --Professor Evelyn Arizpe, The University of Glasgow

Author Information

Macarena García-González is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at University Pompeu Fabra University, where she directs the interdisciplinary research group JOVIS, on childhood and youth studies. Her publications include two monographs —Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (2017), and Enseñando a sentir: Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (2021)—, as well as several articles and book chapters on children's literature, reading promotion, culture and education. She is the Associate Editor at the Children’s Literature in Education journal.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available