Strolling through the (post)modern city: Modes of being a flaneur in picture books

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children’s literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction’s textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children’s literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom’s Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space

No Place Like...: Home and School as Contested Spaces in Little Soldier and Idiot Pride

See articl

Picture Books as Performative Texts: Or How to do Things with Words and Pictures

See articl

The challenges of participatory research with 'tech-savvy' youth

This paper focuses on participatory research and how it can be understood and employed when researching children and youth. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded discussion of participatory research methodologies with respect to investigating the dynamic and evolving phenomenon of young people growing up in networked societies. Initially, we review the nature of participatory research and how other researchers have endeavoured to involve young people (children and youth) in their research projects. Our review of these approaches aims to elucidate what we see as recurring and emerging issues with respect to the methodological design of involving young people as co-researchers. In the light of these issues and in keeping with our aim, we offer a case study of our own research project that seeks to understand the ways in which high school students use new media and network ICT systems (Internet, mobile phone applications, social networking sites) to construct identities, form social relations, and engage in creative practices as part of their everyday lives. The article concludes by offering an assessment of our tripartite model of participatory research that may benefit other researchers who share a similar interest in youth and new media

Editorial

In this issue of Papers we publish essays based on a selection of conference papers at the Seventh International Conference of the Australasian Children&rsquo;s Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) held in Melbourne on 13-14 July, 2006. The cover of this issue replicates Kathryn James&rsquo;s design for the conference programme, with its clever image of the &lsquo;undercover child&rsquo; reading a comic. The theme of the conference emphasised newness: new texts, technologies, readings and readers, and the essays we present here traverse a variety of concepts and texts within this framework.<br /

Editorial

In this issue of Papers we publish essays based on a selection of conference papers at the Seventh International Conference of the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) held in Melbourne on 13-14 July, 2006. The cover of this issue replicates Kathryn James’s design for the conference programme, with its clever image of the ‘undercover child’ reading a comic. The theme of the conference emphasised newness: new texts, technologies, readings and readers, and the essays we present here traverse a variety of concepts and texts within this framework

Editorial

We commence this editorial with two announcements. The first is that Professor John stephens (Macquarie University) has been awarded the 11th international Brothers Grimm Award. this prestigious biennial Japanese award is given to a scholar who has made an outstanding international contribution to research in children’s literature. in addition to being a longstanding member of our editorial Board and a staunch supporter of Papers, John has been President of the international research society for Children’s Literature and is currently the ACLAr President. the award is worthy recognition of John’s influential scholarship and publications, particularly Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992). He is the first Australian to receive the Brothers Grimm Award and will travel to Japan later in the year for the presentation ceremony. We congratulate John and invite all readers of Papers to join us in wishing him well

Editorial

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: When The Who sang about teenage angst in the 60s, their rock anthem ‘Talking about my Generation’ captured the divide between youth and beyond. Today, another divide – the digital divide – speaks to the issues of access, capital, and input that follow digital technologies. Like the earlier ‘me generation’, the new millennium D(igital) generation remains enigmatic, its members variously praised for their technological wizardry, criticised for their self-absorption, and pathologised for their unsociability. The D generation does not comprise youth alone, but the young are more exposed than others to the influence of new media and digital technologies. And like previous youth generations, they are often viewed as degenerate. A cybernetic degeneration symbolising society’s fears and cultural anxieties concerning the dehumanising prospects of technology appears most vividly in arguments about youth (Green &amp; Bigum’s ‘aliens in the classroom’ [1993] is an apt description in this respect). Such negative rhetoric presents a dystopic view that tempers the more utopian, but equally reductionist visions of new technologies

Editorial

The cover of this issue of Papers features an image which appears in the First Book of the Victorian Readers, originally published in 1928. As Jane McGennisken demonstrates in her essay on Australian mythologies of childhood in the Tasmanian and Victorian readers, the literary texts selected for these readers represent Australian children as innocent inhabitants of a young country, a conceit also proposed by Ethel Turner at the beginning of Seven Little Australians: ‘the land and the people are young-hearted together’. McGennisken argues that these imaginings of an innocent Australian childhood are analogous with mythologies of an innocent nation, which act to divert attention from the (less innocent) histories of imperialism fundamental to the nation’s foundation. Another preoccupation of the readers is the idea of the child as leader, in stories about courageous children like Grace Bussell, who in rescuing the victims of a shipwreck demonstrates the qualities of Australian girlhood by exercising a motherly concern. The readers constitute an important component of reading material for Australian children from the late 19th century until the 1940s; the online database AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource now includes a section on the Victorian Readers and the Victorian School Papers, at: http://www.austlit.edu.au/ (go to ’research Communities’, ‘Australian Children’s Literature’ and ‘the Victorian Classroom’)

New social orders: reconceptualising family and community in utopian fiction

A study focusing on family and community as they are represented in seven utopian/dystopian fictions written for children and young adults by Australian, American, Canadian, and British writers is illustrated. These novels depict reflections of how various notions of new social orders have impacted on children\u27s literature and how this affects the utopian/dystopian strain, present in children\u27s literature.<br /