Workshops

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To what degree are ideas concerning childhood transnational in children’s literature, and what happens to them when they travel? Scandinavian children’s literature has a reputation for being ‘challenging’ and difficult to sell to publishers outside the Nordic countries. However, translations of author-illustrator Jakob Martin Strid’s Den fantastiske bus (2023, The Incredible Bus) were quick to appear in many languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Ukrainian, French, Faroese, Norwegian, German, and more coming up. This is even more surprising, given that the book is a very long, very heavy, and quite expensive book. Furthermore, the book addresses the complicated lives of liminal characters, including homeless children, children with mental and physical illnesses, and alcoholics, all living in a post-war and post-natural disaster context.

At the workshop, based on analyses of the characteristics of this book as a medium, the dystopian and utopian elements of the narrative, and the characteristics of liminal characters, we will discuss questions such as: To which degree does the popularity of the book reflect a new kind of ‘transnational’ child and transnational ideologies concerning reading and the book as a medium? And/or to what degree does the book balance between Western ‘universal’ ideas of childhood and influence from especially Asian cultural contexts, thereby perhaps also presenting new ideals of childhood and children’s literature, also based on ‘epistemologies of the South’?

Required reading list

Jakob Martin Strid’s picturebook Den fantastiske bus/ Le bus fantastique/Der fantastische Bus (The Incredible Bus, 2023)

García González, Macarena. (2022). Cultural Diversity and Social Justice: Readings form the South. In A Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. Karen Coats et al. NY Wiley & Sons, 287-298

Arizpe, Evelyn (2021). Transnational. In Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, & Nina Christensen (Eds.), Keywords for Children’s Literature, Second Edition (p. 187). NYU Press, 187-190

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

First read Jakob Martin Strid’s book and the required reading. Then choose one of the following statements or questions and write a 500-word essay about it. Send it to nc@cc.au.dk before 20 June 2026.

1.         The characters In Jakob Martin Strid’s picturebook represent different age groups and characters on the margin of society. Analyze at least two characters including their relationships and discuss why such characters have been able to ‘travel’ to a variety of transnational contexts.

2.         In “Transnational” (2021) Evelyn Arizpe accounts for different meanings and uses of the term “transnational”. Discuss these in relation to Jakob Martin Strid’s Den fantastiske bus/ Le bus fantastique/Der fantastische Bus (The Incredible Bus, 2023). Which of Arizpe’s perspectives do you find most relevant or interesting in relation to the book and why?

3.         Account for the reception of Strid’s Picturebook in one cultural context/country, for instance referring to reviews in print or on social media such as Instagram. Which elements of the book does the reception highlight and downplay, and what is your opinion about these priorities?

The concept of a ‘global’ children’s literature is not new. As early as the 1930s, French scholar Paul Hazard put forth the idea of a ‘universal republic of childhood’. Meanwhile, in the United States, advocates of internationalism touted children’s books as a path towards world peace: through children, and the books they read, they believed that different nations could overcome their differences. Contributors to a ‘global’ children’s literature later recognized that the idealism surrounding both global childhood and global children’s literature was problematic and fraught with many tensions: in the words of Polish American educator Anne Pellowski, the circulation of global children’s literature was often a ‘one-way passage’ which ‘stifle[d] the creative impulse to search for new and better forms’ of transnational exchange.

Our workshop begins from these various premises, using the example of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival to explore the conceptual underpinnings of a global children’s literature. We will ask questions such as, ‘how has the academic study of children’s literature contributed to the formation of a global children’s literature?’, as well as consider the hybrid forms and stylistic techniques and approaches used by children’s literature authors and illustrators as a means of raising global issues with young readers. While our content will engage heavily with key terms such as ‘diasporic’, ‘multicultural’, ‘transnational’ and, of course ‘global’, which are essential to any such conversations, our exploration of The Arrival will allow for a more experiential approach to these critical concepts. We will employ, as one example, the popular ‘seminar walk’ approach from Antwerp University’s Children’s Literature Summer School to see, hear, smell, possibly even taste, parts of the city of Antwerp and relate these experiences to our own understanding of Tan’s wordless picturebook.

Required reading list

• Tan, Shaun. The Arrival.
• Bradford, Clare. ‘Children’s Literature in a Global Age: Transnational and Local Identities.’

Preparatory task for all participants

Read Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and Clare Bradford’s ‘Children’s Literature in a Global Age’, and make notes useful for analysing the Tan’s text (e.g. you might bring in pictures of historical images or art work that you associate with the illustrations in The Arrival), paying close attention to the techniques Tan employs to create a bridge across and between both language and culture. I encourage you to do multiple readings of Tan’s text, in order to take in the detail of the illustrations in his book.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Referring to secondary source(s) from the reading list, do a close reading of one illustration in Tan’s text and compare it to a real-world image (as above, this could be a historical photograph, an artwork, or other image from your visual repertoire).  You are welcome, and even encouraged, to select images specific to your culture or country. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include any number of images. Send the Word or Pages file to emily.murphy@newcastle.ac.uk before 1 June.

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This workshop explores how schools and classrooms serve as “Third Spaces” in children’s historical fiction, emphasizing the experiences of immigrant and diasporic children who navigate liminal identities. Using selected chapters from Gabriele Goldstone’s Waltraut (2024), participants will examine how classrooms – both literal and metaphorical – become what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation”: a place where cultural meanings are negotiated rather than inherited, and where the idea of a fixed national identity is questioned. We will discuss how children’s historical fiction reflects and challenges Canada’s image as a tolerant and diverse nation, and how it portrays the classroom as a synecdoche of Canadian multiculturalism – where mimicry, adaptation, and resistance coexist. The session will feature close reading, theoretical framing, and collaborative analysis to examine how young diasporic characters navigate the complexities of belonging, identity, and cultural translation.

Primary sources

Goldstone, Gabriele. Waltraut. Heritage, 2024. (selected chapters)

Secondary sources

Pultz Moslund, Sten. “Cultural Hybridity and Migration: From Extraordinary States of In-Betweenness to Everyday Phenomenon.” The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, edited by Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, and Carly McLaughlin. Routledge 2024, pp. 23-34.

Nyman, Jop. “Cultural Identity: Toward Spatiotemporal Processes of Identity Formation in Migration Literature.” The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, edited by Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, and Carly McLaughlin. Routledge 2024, pp. 35-45.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read the assigned chapters of Waltraut and the secondary sources.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Create a five-minute video explaining how the concepts of diaspora, cultural hybridity, and cultural identity can be applied to your analysis of a recent children’s or young adult book of your choice. Submit the paper to mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl by July 1.