Erotic capital, popular pedagogy, and healthy adolescent female sexuality

The sexualization of the female body in contemporary media has created considerable anxiety about its impact on girls. Much of the resulting research focuses on the influence of visual media on body image and the flow-on effects for girls\u27 health. Rather less attention is paid to the pedagogical role of popular romance fiction in teaching girls about their sexuality. Given the pronounced increase in eroticized fiction for girls over the past decade, this is a significant oversight. This article applies Hakim\u27s (2010) concept of erotic capital to two chick lit novels for girls. The elements of erotic capital&mdash;assets additional to economic, cultural and social capital&mdash;are used to explore the lessons these novels teach about girl sexual subjectivities and sociality in a sexualized culture. <br /

Power of darkness : narrative and biographical reflexivity in "A series of unfortunate events"

This paper investigates the high-earning children\u27s series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children\u27s textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children\u27s exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children\u27s fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.<br /

A Sporting Chance: Class in Markus Zusak’s The Messenger and Fighting Ruben Wolfe

The final decades of the twentieth century saw a shift in popular attitudes to class. Class location came to be viewed as a product of individual merit and self-responsibility, obscuring the role played by social structure and power. As a consequence, social disadvantage has come to be variously attributed to a poverty of civic values in poor communities, or to the failures and flaws of character of individuals. This ideological inflection of class promotes a culture of blame by endorsing the notion of an undeserving poor and a perception of the working poor, the unemployed and never employed as 'Other' to the middle class. As such, class oppression is not simply a question of economics, but class prejudice and its effects. The question this paper asks is, to what extent do Markus Zusak's young adult novels, 'Fighting Ruben Wolfe' (2000) and 'The Messenger' (2002), reflect and contest such understandings of those living on the social margins? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the interrelationship between the characters' class consciousness and the potential for individual agency

Risk and resilience, knowledge and imagination: the enlightenment of David Almond\u27s Skellig

In what Ulrich Beck calls &quot;risk society,&quot; and Anthony Giddens a &quot;runaway world,&quot; a climate of fear and insecurity has been created by scientific progress, leading to a loss of confidence in the ability of experts to manage risk. Resilience is at the forefront of psychology research informing child-rearing strategies (Luthar, et al.); it entails an approach to child welfare that focuses on fostering internal (psychological) and external (cultural) assets that develop a child\u27s ability to triumph over adversity in the form of individual, familial, and cultural stresses.<br /

Cultural orienteering: a map for Anthony Browne`s into the forest

Bullen and Parsons identify Anthony Browne\u27s picture book Into the Forest as a re-gendered retelling of \u27Little Red Riding Hood\u27 that expresses recent assumptions about childhood, risk and the resources children need to survive in today\u27s world. In Browne\u27s version, the forest is the terrain in which a young male protagonist imaginatively explores his anxiety about his father\u27s unexplained absence.<br /

Dual audiences, double pedagogies : representing family literacy as parental work in picture books

Narrative for a dual audience of children and adults is a field of expanding interest among children&rsquo;s literature scholars. A great deal of the extant research is implicitly or explicitly informed by longstanding anxieties about the status of children&rsquo;s fiction, a context that shifts the parameters of the analysis to questions of literary sophistication. Whilst some attention is paid to the readersubject position of the child reader, rather less is given to the positioning of the adult reader in relation to the pedagogical agendas of such texts. This article examines picture books featuring parents reading to preschool children. In the context of family literacy, it is an instance in which the pedagogical address to the adult reader is as significant as the address to the child. Drawing on distinctions between double and dual address, the article examines the ways in which representations of parents

Self-representations of international women postgraduate students in the global university \u27Contact Zone\u27

This article explores some aspects of the role of race and gender in shaping women postgraduate students\u27 experience of intercultural study. It focuses on various social and cultural aspects of their sojourn. These were suggested by data from two small pilot research projects investigating the experiences of two cohorts of international women postgraduate students, the one studying in an Australian university and the other, a Canadian. The authors focus particularly on the intersections between the students\u27 representation of themselves as women and the way they see themselves represented by their host cultures. In other words, they are interested in the students\u27 understandings of themselves as \u27other\u27, and how this impacts on their representations of \u27self\u27. The authors suggest that these representations reflect a process of negotiation of identity that occurs in what they call the globalising university \u27contact zone\u27. The concept of contact zones derives from post-colonial theory. A further goal of this article, then, is to examine how such data appear when viewed from a post-colonial perspective. <br /

The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberflâneur as global citizen

Contents: Introduction: youth, mobility, and identity / Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi -- New times, new identities -- The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberfleneur as global citizen / Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen -- Shoot the elephant: antagonistic identities, neo-marxist nostalgia, and the remorselessly vanishing past / Cameron McCarthy and Jennifer Logue -- New textual worlds: young people and computer games / Catherine Beavis -- Diasporic youth: rethinking borders and boundaries in the new modernity -- Consuming difference: stylish hybridity, diasporic identity, and the politics of culture / Michael Giardina -- Diasporan moves: African Canadian youth and identity formation / Jennifer Kelly -- Popular culture and recognition: narratives of youth and Latinidad / Angharad Valdivia -- Mobile students in liquid modernity: negotiating the politics of transnational identities / Parlo Singh and Catherine Doherty -- Youth and the global context: transforming us where we live -- The children of liberalization: youth agency and globalization in India / Ritty Lukose -- Youth cultures of consumption in Johannesburg / Sarah Nuttall -- Identities for neoliberal times: constructing enterprising selves in an American suburb / Peter Demerath and Jill Lynch -- Disciplining &quot;Generation M&quot;: the paradox of creating a &quot;local&quot; national identity in an era of &quot;global&quot; flows / Aaron Koh -- Marginalization, identity formation, and empowerment: youth\u27s struggles for self and social justice / David Quijada