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A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and new materialist epistemologies could reorient our critical practice in and with children's literature. Using the concept of childist criticism (Hunt 1984, 1991) and Maggie MacLure's (2013) notion of the "wonder of data," I follow different encounters between children (and researchers) and the book "La madre y la muerte/La partida" (Laiseca et al., 2016). This book tells a macabre story about a mother that cannot bear to have her child taken away by Death. By following the book's agency (García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020) in the research assemblage of different projects, I propose possible affective methodological orientations to post-representational research for children's literature criticism.

We analyse a corpus of 99 recent Spanish-language picturebooks, based on converging recommendations of prestigious reading promotion institutions in different countries. Focusing on the books that feature non-human characters, we inquire into how animals and other creatures may open possibilities to present diverse and intercultural worlds narrating difference differently. Using critical content analysis with an intersectional lens, we give an overview of the predominant narratives about groups and societal organisations in recommended children's books. Most of the books in this sample (re)produce a desire for a social homogeneity, depicting communities of similar creatures threatened by those of a different kind and/or by the destabilisation of hierarchical orders. We highlight a few books that open up possibilities to narrate shifting identities and social positionings, as well as dynamics of exclusion and propose to look at the potential of non-representational stories for intercultural education.

Reading mediation is a concept used in Latin America and Spain, referring to the nurturing role played by adults in forging relationships between children and books. In this article, we conceptualize reading mediation as a 'technology of affect'. We propose 'mediation-as-usual', a normative becoming of this technology, tasked with producing categories and identities regarding readers. Within this technology, adults are produced as empathetic, caring, and providers of safe spaces for reading. We report on literary encounters at a school in Santiago, Chile, with a 'challenging' picturebook. We were involved in the emergence of what we term 'abject mediation', a figuration that produces the limits and boundaries of mediation-as-usual, and, we argue, has transformative potential. However, this is an ephemeral figuration, as reterritorialization works to assimilate the border elements, actualizing mediation-as-usual. We discuss how these figurations may help to question normative ways of producing readers.

Reading is often regarded as a public good and an essential part of developing almost every aspect of human potential. In this article, we survey the "affective economies" of literary reading through a textual and visual analysis of documents issued by Chile's Ministry of Education. Through a critical and diffractive reading of these documents with Ahmed's (2004, 2010) and Braidotti's (2018) conceptualizations of the affective, we claim that when reading is presented as beneficial, pleasurable, and promising, an assemblage of exclusion is set into motion. We describe how the affective repertoires in these documents reinforce oppressive and exclusionary neoliberal values under the guise of the promise of future happiness. The pleasure and happiness that can be achieved through literary reading, however, is only accessible to those who are willing to orientate themselves in the "right ways." In this orientation, the cognitive is privileged over the emotional, and readers are supposed to learn to postpone any current demands for the promise of future happiness.

This article analyses texts intended for child audiences--picturebooks, a poetry book, and a film--that deal with the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990). The memorialization practices within children's media appear to be modelled on the difficulties of finding a national consensus regarding the events that transpired during the dictatorship and the appropriate ways of rendering them for children. Lydia Kokkola's work on the Holocaust as a "motif" shows that gaps of information are left to be picked up by the adult reading alongside the child. Children's literature that refers to state violence is described as elusive or circumventive. This article approaches these texts as complex materialities, suspending the paradigm of representation and interpretation. Inspired by Ulrich Gumbrecht's call for a post-hermeneutic literary theory and by new materialistic approaches to the humanities and education, it is argued that these texts are more profitably read and experienced as artworks that escape pedagogic domestication. Accordingly, this article examines these selected texts as pieces that may smuggle meanings and intensities into educational settings if their complexity is not reduced by mediation practices.

In this article, we explore ways in which arts-based approaches may be deployed to educate ways of knowing/becoming/doing difference differently, particularly when issues of racism and xenophobia come to the front. We present a school research intervention with students and in-service teachers in Santiago, Chile. In this study, we use "The Island," a picturebook that produces a narrative of exclusion and fear, instead of promoting tolerance and conviviality. From a new materialist approach, we show engagements or makings of children and adults, sketching out how they defy simplistic ways of thinking and feeling about normative difference. We frame this study as a diffractive research-intervention in which the intertwined and productive relation 'books and readers' allow us to problematize rather than simplify what knowing/becoming/doing with arts may do to the production of difference within school contexts.

In 2022, the Chilean literary award Premio Medalla Colibrí had a children's jury for the first time. This article has been written by four researchers, two adults and two children, who participated in this process and then studied the experience. We did interviews with different people involved and an analysis based on the notion of wonder. Here, we present some reflections on the criteria used by the children's jury and some findings that surprised us during the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article inquires into what sort of socioemotional education and conviviality are produced when pleasurable literary reading is encouraged in neoliberal cultures. We critically explore the celebration of reading for socioemotional education as it is produced in official government documents distributed to schools in Chile. Assisted by Sara Ahmed's conceptualisation of the cultural politics of emotions and Chantal Mouffe's agonistic theory, we highlight how literary reading is promoted as a tool to manage difference and resolve conflict. We relate the hopes set on reading to a celebratory cult of happiness in which structural injustices are erased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the development of research in Latin America on children's and young adult literature, known as LIJ. The research in this field is closely related to pedagogical practices and the promotion of literary reading. Latin American LIJ studies are characterized by their intersections with literature didactics and reading promotion. The article also highlights the political component of children's literature in Latin America, as well as the growing interest in critical approaches and the revisiting of traditional tales. The authors hope that this special issue will encourage new conversations and critical theories in the field of LIJ in Latin America. [Extracted from the article]

In this article we share our reflections on how childism has enabled us to navigate theoretical assumptions shaping our field and develop new positions and research practices fostering child–adult interdependencies. Justyna Deszcz‐Tryhubczak has relied on childism as a framework for the introduction of participatory research with young readers as a way for advancing child–adult collaboration. Macarena García‐González has deployed childism to think about adultism and its analogies to sexism. Although we offer a critique of childism as an essentializing concept, we also show how for both of us it has served as a gateway towards other approaches, and especially post‐anthropocentric understandings both of texts, readers and the world and of our critical engagements. Finally, we argue that childism may remain a productive starting point for further openings in children's literature and culture studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a better future as defining children's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]