Browsing by Author "Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena"

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    "An Evil Text": Chilean National Writing Plan and Students Becoming Writers with Villainy
    (2023) Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena; Errazuriz, Valentina; Concha, Soledad; Saona, Ignacia
    This article examines high school students' responses to an exercise from the Chilean National Writing Plan which invited students to "write an evil text." The data was analyzed through a diffractive reading using affect theory. We asked the texts: What do affective repertoires related to villainy do to students becoming writers? We describe the affirmative potential of these affects and strategies used by students becoming writers to contest normative childhood and youth relations with cultural products and affective repertoires in education. Based on our findings, we posit that the entanglements between writing exercises, student writers, and villainy produced non-normative affects related to evilness, which in turn assembled into cultural zones of exception in which children and youth could speculate around complex topics such as the pleasures related to violence.
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    Think difference differently? Knowing/becoming/doing with picturebooks
    (2020) Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena; Veliz, Soledad; Matus, Claudia
    In this article, we explore ways in which arts-based approaches may be deployed to educate ways of knowing/becoming/doing difference differently, particularly when issues of racism and xenophobia come to the front. We present a school research intervention with students and in-service teachers in Santiago, Chile. In this study, we use The Island, a picturebook that produces a narrative of exclusion and fear, instead of promoting tolerance and conviviality. From a new materialist approach, we show engagements or makings of children and adults, sketching out how they defy simplistic ways of thinking and feeling about normative difference. We frame this study as a diffractive research-intervention in which the intertwined and productive relation 'books and readers' allow us to problematize rather than simplify what knowing/becoming/doing with arts may do to the production of difference within school contexts.
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    Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies
    (2023) Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena
    In this article we share our reflections on how childism has enabled us to navigate theoretical assumptions shaping our field and develop new positions and research practices fostering child-adult interdependencies. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak has relied on childism as a framework for the introduction of participatory research with young readers as a way for advancing child-adult collaboration. Macarena Garcia-Gonzalez has deployed childism to think about adultism and its analogies to sexism. Although we offer a critique of childism as an essentializing concept, we also show how for both of us it has served as a gateway towards other approaches, and especially post-anthropocentric understandings both of texts, readers and the world and of our critical engagements. Finally, we argue that childism may remain a productive starting point for further openings in children's literature and culture studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a better future as defining children's lives.
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    Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism
    (2022) Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena
    A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and new materialist epistemologies could reorient our critical practice in and with children's literature. Using the concept of childist criticism (Hunt 1984, 1991) and Maggie MacLure's (2013) notion of the "wonder of data," I follow different encounters between children (and researchers) and the book La madre y la muerte/La partida (Laiseca et al., 2016). This book tells a macabre story about a mother that cannot bear to have her child taken away by Death. By following the book's agency (Garcia-Gonzalez & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020) in the research assemblage of different projects, I propose possible affective methodological orientations to post-representational research for children's literature criticism.