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02 Jun 2025Exploring freedom of expression with children in Malta, Germany, and Poland: A multi- and transcultural perspective
Tuesday, 10 June 2025, at 10:00 CEST on YouTube
Children’s literature and culture scholarship is a fully established international field, encompassing a rich array of cultures, genres, modalities, and methodologies. Its interdisciplinary nature invites, among others, perspectives from literary studies, media and film studies, education, and cultural theory, making it a vibrant academic inquiry that addresses both diverse storytelling and literary traditions and the transculturality and multiculturality of childhoods worldwide. In their daily lives, marked by hyperconnectivity and viral entertainment, children experience various cultures blending global and local elements, which results in their increasingly complex cultural identities and agencies. These phenomena are reflected in the rise of transnational children’s books which depict intricate social networks and the everyday experiences of communities existing between and across nations, states, cultures, and languages – spanning diverse physical, cultural, linguistic, and gendered spaces.
In this webinar, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak will present an example of a research project informed by the cross-cultural layeredness and plurality of scholarship, societal conceptualisations of childhood, children’s lifeworlds, and children’s literature. Seen and Heard: Young People’s Voices and Freedom of Expression – a three-year EU-funded collaboration of the University of Malta, University of Wrocław, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Amnesty International Poland – explores the role of literature in the understanding of and exercising freedom of expression as one of children’s fundamental rights. The project’s goal is to nurture a social movement of children and adults who believe that freedom of expression is a basic human right for all.
When presenting the progress, findings, and outcomes of the project, Justyna will focus on the dynamics of multiculturality and transculturality that has enabled and shaped our inter- and intragenerational collaborations across three European countries ultimately engaging participants from as many as 48 nationalities. She will discuss research design, the selection of children’s books used in the project, and the child participants’ interactions and creativity aimed at self-expression. Justyna will conclude with a proposition of children’s literature and culture scholarship as a field actively promoting young people’s freedom of expression through attention to fluidity, hybridity, and mobility of childhoods that emerge in and often transcend geopolitical and cultural borders.
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław (Poland). She is the author of Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression: Radical Fantasy Fiction and Its Young Readers (2016). Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film (2021), which she co-edited with Zoe Jacques, was awarded the 2023 Edited Book Award from the IRSCL. She also co-edited (with Irena Barbara Kalla) Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children’s Literature (2021) and Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind (2021), (with Macarena García-González) Children’s Cultures after Childhood (2023), and (with Terri Doughty and Janet Grafton) Children’s Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene: Multidisciplinary Entanglements (forthcoming in 2025).
In 2017-2021, she served on the board of the IRSCL. In 2018-2024 she was the University of Wrocław coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus International Master’s: Children’s Literature, Media, & Culture. Since 2023, she has been the University of Wrocław coordinator and academic lead in Seen and Heard: Young People’s Voices and Freedom of Expression. Since 2024, she has also been involved in COREM: Collective Remembrance: Engaging Youth Through Curatorial Practices, an international research project funded by the EU and coordinated by Macarena García-González at Pompeu Fabra University.
9 Months, 9 Universities is a series of guest lectures that focus on specific topics related to language and culture and target mainly graduate and postgraduate students as well as Early-Stage Researchers and lecturers interested in these topics. The lectures are intended to generate awareness and appreciation for the topic of multilingualism as well as an understanding of the many areas of our lives that are influenced by language.
This will be the last webinar of the “9 Months, 9 Universities” series of the academic year 2024-25, you can watch all lectures here. The series will resume in October 2025.
