Royal Society Edinburgh Susan Manning Workshop
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh: 21 June 2016
Children’s reading is a topic of constant debate, not only in contemporary education and social policy, and in teaching practice, but also in society more generally. The benefits of reading, for the individual child and for society, have at various points in history been bound up with the dangers that reading has been seen to potentially pose.
How should children read, and what, and why? These questions have been raised, for example, in connection with concerns over whether or not the book is an effective means of learning (issues relating to perception and comprehension), the physiological, psychological, and moral effects of reading upon the individual reader, and society as a whole.
Today, similar questions are emerging in the context of the ‘digital turn’, which also challenges traditional concepts of ‘reading’, ‘readers’, and ‘books’.
This workshop will reflect on how children’s reading has been mediated historically, and in contemporary society – by parents, teachers, librarians, writers, publishers, medical professionals, governments, and others – and on the assumptions and convictions about how the child reader is affected by reading which underpin this mediation.
Given that scholars from a wide range of disciplines are focused on children’s reading, it is the aim of this workshop to bring together perspectives from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences to hold an interdisciplinary discussion. In addition to assessing historical perspectives on ‘mediation’, the workshop will also consider recent developments in the current landscape of reading research and the possible future practices of ‘the history of reading’. To that end, the workshop will also address questions regarding assumptions made about child readers and the relationship between the reader and the book that inform and influence our own research. In particular, the workshop will ask how we can develop and apply methodologies for interdisciplinary research on children’s reading.
The workshop invites presentations which engage with ‘mediation’ in this wide perspective. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Censorship
- The impact of new technologies for production and dissemination
- Authority and modes of speaking/writing about reading (psychological/medical, pedagogical, legal, religious/moral)
- Print culture and the literary marketplace
- Forums of ‘mediation’: newspapers, journals, and magazines; blogs; professional/parenting/religious networks; education/health policy authorities/committees/programmes/documents
Please email abstracts of up to 250 words for individual 20-minute papers to Dr Anne Marie Hagen by 20 March. The abstracts should be in Word format and be accompanied by a short biography, affiliation, and e-mail address. Successful contributions may be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed conference volume.