{"id":2822,"date":"2025-11-25T17:54:34","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T17:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing\/?p=2822"},"modified":"2026-01-28T17:12:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:12:49","slug":"call-for-papers-special-issue-of-the-bulletin-of-contemporary-hispanic-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing\/call-for-papers-special-issue-of-the-bulletin-of-contemporary-hispanic-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Papers: Special\u00a0Issue of The Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Issue Title:<\/strong> Beyond \u2018bringing books and children together\u2019: Critical approaches to reading promotion and literacy in Latin America<\/p>\n

Call for Papers:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s cultural influence across Latin America (Arribas, 2022). This turning point marked the beginning of a new period in the complicated history of \u2018reading promotion\u2019 in Latin America. Since the arrival of Colonial-era Catholic missionaries in the Americas, through radical Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire\u2019s Pedagogy of the Oppressed <\/em>(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.<\/p>\n

Today, across Latin America, children\u2019s \u2018appropriation of written culture\u2019 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 (Garc\u00eda-Gonz\u00e1lez, Munita, and Arizpe 2024). No longer reduced to the ability to decode and write, reading and writing have become\u00a0intertwined 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.\u00a0Despite these widely acknowledged benefits, the promotion of standardized reading has been widely criticised for being \u2018cruelly optimistic\u2019, promising and yet often failing to deliver individual upward mobility and happiness in general (Dernikos and Johnson Thiel, 2020). \u2018Reading for pleasure\u2019, 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 \u2018practice of happy futures\u2019, one that also promotes \u2018inclusion and ideal citizenry\u2019 (Err\u00e1zuriz and Garc\u00eda-Gonz\u00e1lez 2021). Reading for pleasure has also become a \u2018technology of affect\u2019, 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 (V\u00e9liz, Garc\u00eda-Gonz\u00e1lez, 2022).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s books and practices of \u2018reading for pleasure\u2019 across the Latin American region. We seek to re-politicise reading and literacy, situating Latin American children\u2019s books and reading promotion within a broader structural context, recognising their ambivalent, \u2018politically pluripotent\u2019 nature (Pace and Devenot, 2021) and highlighting potential alternatives to the existing hegemonic approaches.<\/p>\n

We are particularly interested in articles that address the following topics:<\/strong><\/p>\n