An Exploration of Displacement in Children's Fantasy Fiction
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Faculty of Education
Abstract
My doctoral research will fill a gap in critical explorations of displacement in children's fantasy fiction. I would like to research the rich and complex presentation of displacement in children's fantasy, utilising a postcolonial theoretical framework, to illuminate a multiplicity of textual parallels with contemporary social issues. As Feingold informs us, 'postcolonial children's fantasy has received relatively little critical attention...inviting further probing' (Feingold, 2016, p.130). Currently, postcolonial concepts operate on the peripheries of research into children's fantasy. My PhD will examine children's fantasy fiction as a conceptual space for considering an array of social issues, examining the intersection between two expanding research areas and highlighting their literary, social and cultural importance. Fundamental to the research is an identification of the parallels and resonance the chosen fantasy texts have with
modern, social issues of international conflict, xenophobia and the refugee crisis. Subsequently, this scaffold has substantial impact both in the children's literature field and as a "socialisation vehicle" (Nikolejeva, 2012, p.61) in wider society. My textual analyses will aim to 'reorient' a selection of broadly canonical texts through a postcolonial lens to
identify the ways in which fantasty figures these tropes and engages readers with displacement in contemporary life.
modern, social issues of international conflict, xenophobia and the refugee crisis. Subsequently, this scaffold has substantial impact both in the children's literature field and as a "socialisation vehicle" (Nikolejeva, 2012, p.61) in wider society. My textual analyses will aim to 'reorient' a selection of broadly canonical texts through a postcolonial lens to
identify the ways in which fantasty figures these tropes and engages readers with displacement in contemporary life.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Zoe Jaques (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Stella Pryce (Student) |
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/J500033/1 | 01/10/2011 | 02/10/2022 | |||
| 2098262 | Studentship | ES/J500033/1 | 01/10/2018 | 31/08/2022 | Stella Pryce |
| ES/P000738/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 2098262 | Studentship | ES/P000738/1 | 01/10/2018 | 31/08/2022 | Stella Pryce |
| Title | 'Fissure' - a poem included in Lucent Dreaming, Issue 8. |
| Description | I had a poem of mine featured in the poetry journal Lucent Dreaming Issue 8. |
| Type Of Art | Creative Writing |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Impact | The publication of this poem led me to work further on my poetry writing and run workshops with my theatre company later that year. |
| URL | https://lucentdreaming.com/product/preorder-issue-8/ |
| Title | Heritage Theatre Cymru |
| Description | I am the founding member and co-director of Heritage Theatr Cymru, a Welsh theatre company based in South Wales. I did not necessarily foresee my PhD work crossing over with this aspect of my creative life, however, I was involved in a series of performances relating to Alice in Wonderland, a text in my PhD which proved to be a very interesting connection. |
| Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Impact | I hope to be able to take this connection further and combine my two fields of interest in relation to my postdoctoral studies. |
| Title | Home Again, a short story in Horrifying Tales published by Greenteeth Press |
| Description | Exploring the creepy television of our childhoods, Horrifying Tales: An Anthology was a book which I contributed a piece of creative writing to, along with 14 other new and existing writers for a collection of horror that readers are sure to want to read with the lights on. |
| Type Of Art | Creative Writing |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Impact | I have been asked to write more for this publisher and am in talks regarding publishing a full piece of creative writing. |
| URL | https://www.greenteethpress.com/books-1/horrifying-tales |
| Description | There have been several key findings that have emerged from this PhD project to date. It should be noted that my research has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and I am not in a position to speak definitively of summative findings or by way of a conclusion yet. Even so, I will state the central contribution to knowledge, the significant research methods and research questions that have emerged as central to this project over the last year. Since the early stages of my PhD, I have been interested in the ways in which children's literature engages in the sociological and philosophical notion of childhood. However, in the earlier stages of my PhD, I was primarily invested in the process of examining one particular experience of childhood: displacement. The first major finding that has emerged from my desk based research, coding and analysing of children's books, has been a shift from displacement as a singular focus, to construct a far more theoretically supported critical framework. This is to ensure a clearer and wider understanding of childhood. This has extended this year beyond a Literature Review to some interesting and new perspectives. The establishment of a critical framework was a task which needed a great deal of reading within the field to establish a methodology which would be versatile and robust enough to examine the core texts of the canon using a desk-based analyses. While my initial research asked a number of interesting questions about how we might view the child and their place in relation to contemporary social issues in children's literature; what it did not do was generate any new knowledge/ new ways of engaging in these research questions. Subsequently, drawing on some of the groundwork I had done in my Masters year where I examined spectrality theory in adult literature, I discovered a new field of vision for Children's Literature, particularly a framework which Avery Gordon terms "haunting and the sociological imagination".(Ghostly Matters, 2008) For Gordon, subjectivity is always and inevitably haunted by the social and most especially by those repressions, disappearances, absences and losses enforced by the conditions of modern life. (Ibid, p.xi) In this sense, I wanted to change the focus of my PhD, away from simply the ways in which children are presented as displaced, and rather orient ideas of absence, disappearance and loss at the heart of children's literature and specifically, the presentation of childhood therein. As such, my research questions opened up and moved, from a simple consideration of the ways in which displacement may feature in texts, to wider questions about the way childhood and childhood experiences in children's literature are haunting, and/or spectral for the reader. How does this act as a methodology you might ask? Because, as Gordon tells us "haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or empirical evidence if you like that tells you a haunting is taking place" (Ibid, p.8) That being so, it was clear to me that I found myself operating in this discourse, I realised that spectrality has become the means by which I was able to "read" many of the issues that I had initially wanted to research. As spectrality theory became the means by which I am able to "read" the issues I had initially sought to research, during the last year I have been able to identify key aspects of place and displacement within childhood. I found I was able to give a new voice to spectrality theory itself within Children's Literature and to delineate some key issues of the construction of childhood and its relationship with literary readers. The focus has also been sharpened so it is relevant to educationalists of middle grade readers, as my texts have been selected for the age range of 8-12 years. This choice of age range is linked again to consideration of childhood development. It has enabled me to not only focus on certain ages of literary characters but also to their situations. It has also led me to consider the legacy and future threads of theoretical discovery in specific texts which have led to a methodological journey that positions the child within society. For instance, my final chapter utilises critical race theory to reveal "the margins [] between the remembered and the forgotten", considering the ghostly and impermanent identity of a child refugee, Alem, the protagonist of Benjamin Zephaniah's novel Refugee Boy. |
| Exploitation Route | It is difficult to speak of outcomes and forward trajectories when this research is still active and will be for longer than expected due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is evidential that this research will be taken forward and used by others in an academic sense. It is also my sincere hope my findings it can expand to be used by external stakeholders such as teachers, educators and children's publishers. While I am not in a position to speak definitively regarding conclusions, it is clear that my methodological framework is entirely new and unique in the field of children's literature and, even, in a wider sense, education. Thus, I believe that academics in this field will benefit from engaging with my conclusions when they are completed. I do believe there will be much more research to be done in this area of study and I hope I will be able to extend my research interests (that I have been fortunate to explore due to this funding) for publication via a postdoctoral fellowship in 2022. |
| Sectors | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| Description | It is a commonly held misconception in qualitative data research, that desk based and largely literary or textual analyses produce less meaningful non-academic impact. I would argue, that the mode of research I am situated in has produced different and often diverse influence on a number of non-academic collaborations and projects with which I have been involved. The economic impact of my research, at present (bearing in mind I am still undertaking the research at present) has been limited. However, the knowledge and skills that I have produced in my PhD research has certainly benefitted individuals and organisations. It has been a personal commitment of mine to engage my research with a wider non-academic audience as well as the academic focus. This is essential to the progress of the research because it is inextricably linked to children and the concept of displacement which are very real aspects of our current society. My chosen theoretical lens is spectrality and my methodology is a new approach when applying it to children's literature. I am not engaging with real ghosts but it is a project about real issues not just academic ones. Its application in the real world has therefore needed to be explored concurrent with the academic and a good example is my recent work which featured in the publication: Spectral Cycles: Children's Literature, Trauma and Memory in the Time of COVID-19 published in Issues in English - Issue 15, 2021. This was a culmination of a collaborative project with the University of Warwick which was evidenced in a conference and the above publication, where contemporary societal issues have been connected meaningfully to my research. The project was entitled 'Childhood in the time of Corona', and with the diversity of being a conference and subsequent publication,it was a useful context in which educators, policy makers and academics internationally, came together to consider the ways in which children and educational institutions were being negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I was able to use my focus of haunting and spectrality to consider how we may use extant children's books about past pandemics to help connect children of today with protagonists in similar positions. This was a particularly important project to take part in during the earliest part of the pandemic when trying to find texts with which children could connect was proving particularly challenging, for students who were isolated, displaced from their usual routines. It is important too to engage the ways this discipline can engage with educationalists, so an example of this can be seen in my article in: "The Ghost of that Garden": Hauntology and Spectrality in the BBC's 1989 Adaptation of Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. which will be published in an edited collection for Bloomsbury later this year. Furthermore, I am also currently in the process of designing and organizing an interdisciplinary conference entitled "Children of the Future" for the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. This conference will take place in Spring 2022 and will be a large, international conference at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. This project is particularly impactful as many of the methodological and thematic findings that have arisen from my current research have been instrumental in designing this conference, which will utilise a lens of spectrality, post-humanism and new-materialism as the basis for the framework design. Using these methodologies, we have designed "mini-ruptures" that will move the conversation away from an academic one to include practitioners in the children's publishing and education sectors. Ion addition, I am acting President of the Faculty of Education, Research Students' Association where I represent nearly a thousand graduate students that operate out of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. In this role I have also established a Faculty wide network of PhD and MPhil students to support them during the pandemic. I have designed and led all sessions for this new "Mini-Networks" initiative. By way of professional development, this is essential for all students involved. However, this has also proved extremely relevant to me gaining an understanding of displacement, memory and trauma as these students have been displaced from the university and the network supports many in different locations nationally and internationally during the coronavirus pandemic. In terms of my consideration of the process of creative writing of aspects of the themes of my thesis, I have published a short story in York's Creative Centre's publication of Horrifying Tales- this is listed in my publications Horrifying Tales - short story named "Home Again", Published by Greenteeth Press in 2021. This story is centred on exploring the feelings of loss and displacement in memory and grief. I learned a great deal in the creative writing about ways literature can demonstrate feelings. Similarly, I have had a few poems published such as .and a few monologues in the play, Now and Then which explores stories of families impacted by the 1918 pandemic. Although these creative writing pieces are not directly included in my PhD, they are very much part of my development as a writer and have provided opportunities for exploring uses of multiple methods of research and ways of enhancing meaning and engaging with a varied audience for my work. This year has also enabled me to research theories of childhood which feature in my Literature Review and as such are academic but the engagement with other researchers, educationalists and publishers is also relevant and can be seen in my current work to be published in 2021:"Childhood and its Afterlives: Spectrality and the Haunting of Children's Literature", in an edited collection called Children's Culture Studies After Childhood to be published by Palgrave. Finally, I have also taken part in a teaching at the University of Cambridge. I have supervised two dissertations and four papers: children's literature, poetics, performance and society and Shakespeare. Furthermore, I have also consolidated the research methods I have been trained in since undertaking my doctoral programme at Cambridge, to be able to facilitate/teach a graduate seminar series this year for Part-Time students who are based in industries outside of academia. This has been a very meaningful opportunity for me to directly impact and bolster the relationship between practitioners and academics. *Here follows a list of my publications to which I refer in the body of this summary, these are listed here as they due to be published: • Spectral Cycles: Children's Literature, Trauma and Memory in the Time of COVID-19 to be published in Issues in English - Issue 15, 2021 • "The Ghost of that Garden": Hauntology and Spectrality in the BBC's 1989 Adaptation of Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, to be published in an edited collection for Bloomsbury - later in 2021. • "Childhood and its Afterlives: Spectrality and the Haunting of Children's Literature". TO BE published in an edited collection called Children's Culture Studies After Childhood to be published by Palgrave, 2021/22. • Horrifying Tales - short story named "Home Again", Published by Greenteeth Press, 2021. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2018 |
| Sector | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | Building New Communities in UK Children's Literature Research: A Colloquium |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This fantastic opportunity was a collaborative event between several UK universities and Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books. This networking opportunity was organised by my fellow first year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Andy McCormack, and it was generously funded by the AHRC. PhD students from the University of Cambridge, Glasgow, Newcastle and Roehampton united to discuss our research interests, which were varied and diverse, ranging from empirical work, to literary analysis and creative writing. Unlike many events of its kind, this colloquium was invigorated by a lack of intimidating hierarchical structure and a collaborative tone that suggested a genuine sense of community within the field of Children's Literature research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://cambridgechildrenslit.co.uk/2019/06/18/building-new-communities-in-uk-childrens-literature-r... |
| Description | CRCLC Blog Entries |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I have written a series of articles platforming my research for the Children's Literature at Cambridge blog. I have received really interesting and meaningful impact on these articles from fellow scholars as well as school teachers, authors and publishers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019,2020 |
| URL | https://cambridgechildrenslit.co.uk |
| Description | Childhood in the Time of Corona, Conference at Warwick University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 'Childhood in the time of Corona' was a conference and subsequent publication, in which educators, policy makers and academics internationally, came together to consider the ways in which children and educational institutions were being negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I was able to use my focus of haunting and spectrality to consider how we may use extant children's books about past pandemics to help connect children of today with protagonists in similar positions. This was a particularly important project to take part in during the earliest part of the pandemic when trying to find texts with which children could connect was proving particularly challenging, for students who were isolated, displaced from their usual routines. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Newnham College Cambridge, Rebellious Women Conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I gave a paper about my research at the "Rebellious Women" Conference based at Newnham College in October, 2019. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Spatiality Reading Group, University of Cambridge |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I gave a paper for the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education "Spatiality Reading Group" in which I discussed the haunting spatial dynamics of children's literature. This was a meaningful opportunity to share my research with fellow postgraduate students at my institution. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education Research Students Association (FERSA) President, Vice-President and Communications Officer |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Since undertaking my PhD I had taken on a number of roles University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education Research Students Association (FERSA) from Communications Officer, Vice-President and now President. In this time I have given talks for hundreds of graduate students, worked with faculty members on course design and most recently, I have created a new networking initiative for Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project has involved creating a series of 'mini-networks' and associated events for 110 students that have chosen to sign up to the initiative. As president, I am in charge of running academic and social events, as well as overseeing all 32 roles on the committee who represents a further 1000 graduate students at the faculty of Education. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019,2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/courses/graduate/cambridgeexperience/fersa/ |