Issue Title: Beyond ‘bringing books and children together’: Critical approaches to reading promotion and literacy in Latin America

Call for Papers:

In 1964, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) arrived in Latin America with the establishment of National Sections in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as part of a wider programme by Spanish scholar Carmen Bravo-Villasante to consolidate Spain’s cultural influence across Latin America (Arribas, 2022). This turning point marked the beginning of a new period in the complicated history of ‘reading promotion’ in Latin America. Since the arrival of Colonial-era Catholic missionaries in the Americas, through radical Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and into the activities of the 15+ IBBY sections which exist in the region today, literacy and literature have long been implicated in the dynamics of oppression and liberation that shape Latin American societies.

Today, across Latin America, children’s ‘appropriation of written culture’ is treated as an urgent cause and a social panacea by institutions and individuals operating in a wide variety of contexts and by governments from across the political spectrum (García-González, Munita, and Arizpe 2024). No longer reduced to the ability to decode and write, reading and writing have become intertwined with a number of vital capacities, to the point of becoming inseparable from economic, cultural and social subsistence (Oxenham, Katahoire, Petkova-Mwangi, & Sall, 2002). Literacy is widely seen as a vital issue: research has shown positive associations between reading and critical and creative thinking (Crawley, Ditzel, & Walton, 2012; Hayik, 2015), theory of mind (Kidd & Castano, 2013; Lysaker & Tonge, 2013), reasoning about the natural world (Waxman, Hermann, Woodring, & Medin, 2014), resignification of traumatic experiences (Cerlalc & Unesco, 2018) and financial success (Mol & Bus, 2011), not to mention all the research on its benefits for the acquisition of vocabulary and expressive language, executive functions and, obviously, reading comprehension. It is no wonder, then, that reading is often presented as essential for the development of human capital. Despite these widely acknowledged benefits, the promotion of standardized reading has been widely criticised for being ‘cruelly optimistic’, promising and yet often failing to deliver individual upward mobility and happiness in general (Dernikos and Johnson Thiel, 2020). ‘Reading for pleasure’, the mantra of reading promotion, positions itself as an alternative to a standardized, relentless and instrumental educational system that has narrowed what counts as literacy (Kuby et al., 2019). However, reading promotion has created its own ‘practice of happy futures’, one that also promotes ‘inclusion and ideal citizenry’ (Errázuriz and García-González 2021). Reading for pleasure has also become a ‘technology of affect’, with focus on reading engagement and the construction of long-lasting relationships with books through the management and expulsion of negative, uncomfortable, strange and unusual emotions and feelings (Véliz, García-González, 2022).

This issue seeks to challenge the apparent neutrality of the reading promotion framing, through an interdisciplinary and critical examination of the historical and contemporary production, promotion and reception of children’s books and practices of ‘reading for pleasure’ across the Latin American region. We seek to re-politicise reading and literacy, situating Latin American children’s books and reading promotion within a broader structural context, recognising their ambivalent, ‘politically pluripotent’ nature (Pace and Devenot, 2021) and highlighting potential alternatives to the existing hegemonic approaches.

We are particularly interested in articles that address the following topics:

  • Historiographic analyses of IBBY and other institutions that promote reading and writing in Latin America
  • (Neo)colonial and postcolonial relations in children’s book production and promotion
  • Alternative affects, emotions and phenomenologies of reading promotion
  • Critical or alternative approaches to “reading for pleasure”
  • Subversive, radical or counter-hegemonic approaches to reading promotion and children’s books production
  • The translation and cross-border flows of children’s books from decolonial and postcolonial perspectives
  • Radical and disruptive methodologies for the study of children’s books and reading promotion
  • Experiences and applied contributions to the (re)politicisation of literacy through critical theories, activism or participatory, collaborative approaches

This special issue is proposed as part of an ongoing project to develop an informal research network of scholars interested in examining the political and social impacts and entanglements of the International Board on Books for Young People and the other actors, spaces and institutions that form the transnational children’s book field. Selected contributors will be invited to participate in a virtual work-in-progress symposium in Spring 2026, with more details to come.

Submissions: Please send an abstract (max. 400 words) and brief author bio (max. 150 words) to criticalreadingcfp@gmail.com with ‘BCHS Abstract Submission’ in the subject line by 30 January 2026.

Guest Editors: This special issue will be edited by Soledad Véliz, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile & Emma Page, University of Reading & Cardiff University

Editor Bios:

Soledad Véliz is an Assistant Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Faculty of Education. Her research focuses on censorship and biblioclastía in reading promotion and school reading systems, and on hegemonic reading in schools. She works with posthumanist perspectives and new feminist materialisms.

Emma Page is an SWW DTP-funded PhD candidate based at the University of Reading and Cardiff University. She is currently researching the field of contemporary British translated children’s literature advocacy, applying a combination of analytical frameworks drawn from the sociology of translation, book history and ethnographic studies of book cultures and publishing. Her PhD includes several case studies of recent British English translations of Latin American children’s books. She has a particular interest in the international profile of Latin American writing for children, and the relationship between Latin America and Europe within the children’s book field. She also translates professionally from French and Spanish into English.

Works Cited:

Arribas, D.G. (2022). ‘From Campaigns to Improve the Moral Standards of Children’s Books to their Literary Consecration: The Emergence of an International Sub-Field’, Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods.

Cerlalc & Unesco (2018). La fuerza de las palabras. Protocolo para una intervención cultural en situaciones de emergencia. Bogotá: CERLALC.

Crawley, J., Ditzel, L., & Walton, S. (2012). Using children’s picture books for reflective learning in nurse education. Contemporary Nurse, 42, 45–52.

Dernikos, B., & Johnson Thiel, J. (2020). Literacy learning and cruelly optimistic: recovering possible lost futures through transmedial storytelling. Literacy 54(2).

Errázuriz, V,. & García-González, M (2021) “More person, and, therefore, more satisfied and happy”: The affective economy of reading promotion in Chile, Curriculum Inquiry 51, 229-60.

García-González, Macarena, Felipe Munita, and Evelyn Arizpe. 2024. ‘Introduction: Latin American Children’s Literature and Culture’, International Research in Children’s Literature, 17: 1-5.Freire, Paolo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Continuum International Publishing Group. NY, USA.

Hayik, R. (2015). Diverging from traditional paths: Reconstructing fairy tales in the EFL classroom. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 9, 221-236.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377-380.

Kuby, C., Spector, K., & Thiel, J. J. (2019). Cuts too small. An introduction. En C. Kuby, K. Spector, & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education. knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 1-17). Nueva York y Oxon: Routledge.

Lysaker, J. & Tonge, C. (2013). Learning to understand others relationally oriented reading. The Reading Teacher, 66, 632-641.

Mol, S. E. & Bus, A. (2011). To read or not to read: A Meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137, 267-296

Pace, B. A. and N. Devenot (2021). “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency.” Frontiers in Psychology 12

Véliz, S., & García-González, M. (2020). Becoming abject: Testing the limits and borders of reading mediation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1786355

Waxman, S., Hermann, P., Woodring, J., & Medin, D. (2014). Humans (really) are animals: picture-book reading influences 5-year-old urban children’s construal of the relation between humans and non- human animals. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.