Picturebooks, Democracy and Social Change 17th-18th September 2015

Picturebooks, Democracy and Social Change

International Conference at the University of Gdańsk, Poland 17th-18th September 2015
(in combination with a PhD-Workshop on 16th September 2015)

Picturebooks as multimedial art forms have always been used to convey political, social, and cultural ideas on different levels. Even more so, when societies are rapidly changing and political events influence cultural and social movements in a national or even international context. It might be asked, then, how these issues not only impact on the content, but also on the visual, narrative, and formal properties of picturebooks.

The topic of the fifth biannual picturebook conference is inspired by the location of the conference venue, Gdańsk – a specific historical place, where the social changes of new democratic countries in Europe emerged in 1989. Gdańsk is also an important place considering contemporary East European history and culture, as well as because of the political and social attitudes of these countries towards freedom and democracy. The conference will take place in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Gdansk, which is distinguished for its research tradition that investigates social change and resistance, education policy, and social exclusion in education, including such issues as gender, cultural minorities, disability, and the educational construction of differenciation.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together scholars from different countries and different fields, (i.e. children’s literature research, picturebook theory, cognitive and aesthetic features of picturebooks, social sciences, history of art, linguistics, book history, and pedagogy), who explore various aspects of this newly developed field and who are interested in the conference’s main topic.

conference organization:
Małgorzata Cackowska
caca@univ.gda.pl
Uniwersytet Gdański
Instytut Pedagogiki, Zaklad Filozofii Wychowania i Studiow Kulturowych
Bazynskiego 4
80-952 Gdansk, Poland

Preliminary Programme

Registration for the conference