(Fullmetal) alchemy: the monstrosity of reading words and pictures in Shonen Manga

Shonen manga (Japanese comics aimed at an audience of teenage boys) are often teeming with monsters, but the texts themselves are more monstrous still. The monstrous combinations of words and picture dispersed across the manga page seem to expose and challenge a fissure within representation itself-but productively so. Through reading a short section of Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist, this paper explores the ways in which words and pictures can be combined to produce monstrous composite texts, which remain open-ended even after they have been recognised and 'domesticated' through the practices of reading

Block play, the sand pit and the doll corner: the (dis)ordering materialities of educating young children

Recent reconceptualisations of preschool education have tended to treat its role in ordering and subjectifying children with some suspicion. This paper is an attempt to produce a less determined and thereby more hopeful, or at least ambivalent, account of the processes of subjectification by reexamining the peculiar materiality of the nursery. I attempt to redeploy nursery education’s traditional emphasis on experiential and environmental learning towards thinking in terms of a performative and affective pedagogy of the event (largely inspired by Deleuze). In so-doing, I conceive of a different kind of ‘interactive pedagogy’ which enacts myriad encounters and becomings. This reconfigures the relationship between subject and object such that both are understood as continually emergent and constitutionally indeterminate. Thinking in this way is to embrace the disordering that lurks within the very processes of ordering. In this sense, subjectification may not be ‘innocent’. but it is necessary nevertheless

Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action

Despite its rightful concern with childhood as an essentialist cultural construct, the field of children’s literature studies has tended to accept the endemicity of asymmetrical power relations between children and adults. It is only recently, under the influence of children’s rights discourses, that children’s literature scholars have developed concepts reflecting their recognition of more egalitarian relationships between children and adults. This essay is a result of the collaboration between child and adult researchers and represents a scholarly practice based on an intergenerational democratic dialog in which children’s voices are respected for their intrinsic salience. The presence of child researchers in children’s literature studies confirms an important shift currently taking place in our field, providing evidence for the impossibility of regarding children’s literature only as a manifestation of adult power over young generations

Spatialising narrative: ‘irresponsible pictures’

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin called for more than textual ways of writing to more adequately record the passing of the present into the past. Jared Gardner (2006) contends that the form Benjamin sought was the 'comic book' or 'graphic novel', in which the present becomes its own 'archive'—its past always in the process of becoming. Indeed, graphic narrative might be characterised by a refusal to choose, such that it operates in the interstices between present and past, word and image, presence and absence, writer and reader. Influentially, Scott McCloud (1993) has argued that graphic narrative spatialises time through the rhythms of presence and absence in its frames and gutters. He argues that comics enlist their readers as active collaborators in the meaning-making process of 'closure' as they fill in the gaps between frames. Yet, the alliance between writers and readers is always uneasy. In rendering time as space, graphic narrative serves to fracture both. In the liminality of the gutters tensions are never neutralised, but put to creative use; 'we' are moved to see, feel or think differently through an active process of imaginative production (Whitlock, 2006). Setting aside any controversy over the literary merits of graphic narrative, this paper explores affect and performativity in popular, 'shonen' (boys) manga, specifically Tite Kubo's 'Bleach' (2001-present), Hiromu Arakawa's 'Fullmetal Alchemist' (2001-present), Masashi Kishimoto's 'Naruto' (1999-present) and Kazuki Takahashi's 'Yu-Gi-Oh' (1996–2004)

Children in and out of place

This chapter is concerned with the spaces and places in which children and young people live their lives, and the role that these spaces and places play in shaping their experiences. This is a growing area in the sociocultural study of childhood and youth, which has been particularly associated with the emergence of "children's geographies" as a distinctive subdiscipline within the broader field of geography. This is not to say that the spatial contexts of children and young people's lives are only of interest to geographers: researchers in a range of disciplines - including anthropology, sociology and education - have attended to what might be called the "geographies" of children and young people's lives. We will begin by discussing definitions of space and place. We will be asking where do children and young people fit in, where are they seen as in or out of place? And we will explore such terms as "children as weeds" and ideas about "adult-only" or "child-free spaces". Moving from thinking about how adults define space, we will explore examples, from literature and practice, of children's agency in creating spaces. We will end by focusing on the tensions that can arise between adults and children, and among peers, in negotiating space

Sleep of reason? The practices of reading shônen manga

In this thesis, I explore the practices of English-speaking readers of shônen manga (Japanese comics written primarily for an audience of teenage boys). I concentrate on three series in particular: Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist (2001–2010), Tite Kubo’s Bleach (2001–ongoing), and Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto (1999–ongoing). I argue that, although it may appear to be inherently imbued with (authorial) meaning, the shônen manga text emerges from a curious ‘alchemy’ through which the practices of readers transform the ‘raw’ materials provided by manga creators to produce a text that appears to have always been inherently meaningful in itself. I argue that this is always an impossible and monstrous transformation. In the first chapter, I introduce the monstrous combinations of words and pictures, panels and gutters known as shônen manga and argue for the importance of taking the practices of ‘ordinary’ (or, at least, non-scholarly) reading seriously. In the second chapter I explore the idea that reading is an ‘alchemy’ through which the disparate elements readers encounter on the page are transformed into a meaningful text. In the third chapter, I discuss the ways in which time and narrative are braided as readers assemble the disparate elements they encounter on the shônen manga page. In Chapter 4, I explore the visceral thrills of reading shônen manga, which are often expressed through notions of the awesome and the epic. Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine the ways in which a group of shônen manga readers known as ‘shippers’ find love and romance amidst the fighting in shônen manga and demonstrate the legitimacy of these readings by locating them in the material text through the concept of ‘canon’. By attending to reading as an embodied and material practice in this way, the thesis contributes to debates about the relationships between creators, texts and audiences and ongoing attempts to imagine new ways of being critical within cultural and literary studies. Within cultural geography, these kinds of attempts have often been aligned with what might broadly be described as nonrepresentational theories. As such, this thesis attempts to draw out the geographies through which manga texts are realised as manga texts at all