Session Information
07 SES 14 C, Literary Research in Times of Crisis
Symposium
Contribution
One of the foundational arguments for literary study has been the promise of literature to change lives and offer students new ways of seeing themselves, their communities, and the future. The three papers in this panel engage with English literary pedagogy and ‘literary linking’ (McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott, 2021) methodology to consider how literary texts can be activated to address pressing contemporary concerns globally including the climate crisis, environmental racisms, and gender equality.
Recent years have seen global wildfires and floods, a international #MeToo movements highlighting ongoing violence against women and girls in schools and beyond. The three papers in this symposium investigate how literature may be mobilized in diverse settings including contemporary classrooms and the street to activate discussions around these crises and beyond. The papers engage with a variety of literature including Indigenous Australia literature (paper 1); texts that center issues of consent, particularly those written by women and non-binary authors (paper 2); and children’s literature on climate justice (paper 3).
Methodology
Each of the symposium’s research projects engages with literary linking methodology which asks teachers to reimagine the potential and purpose of literature through animating the relations between texts, contemporary social issues, and critical theory. Literary linking as a methodology goes beyond notions of a text-based intertextuality and considers teachers’, researchers’, and students’ situated understanding of their own pedagogical spaces, and intersectional contexts and environmental concerns as vital in the creation of literary understanding in contemporary life.
Significance
The three papers in this panel draw from interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of affect theory, feminism, anti-colonialism, speculative fiction, and embodied learning in combination with empirical research in schools and the community to demonstrate the affordances of engaging with literature to make sense of a world in crisis.
Structure: The panelists will attend in person from Australia and the UK. Each will give a 20 minute paper followed by a discussion.
References
McLean Davies, L., Truman, S. E., & Buzacott, L. (2020). Teacher-researchers: a pilot project for unsettling the secondary Australian literary canon. In GENDER AND EDUCATION. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1735313
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