Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction

Macarena García-González is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at University Pompeu Fabra University, where she directs the interdisciplinary research group JOVIS, on childhood and youth studies. Her publications include two monographs —Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (2017), and Enseñando a sentir: Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (2021)—, as well as several articles and book chapters on children's literature, reading promotion, culture and education. She is the Associate Editor at the Children’s Literature in Education journal.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 The Uses of Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education2 Stories about Death and Adult Anxieties3 Necropolitics in the Picturebooks by Armin Greder4 Testimonies of Border Crossing 5 Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction6 The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo7 Climate Crisis, Water Wars, and Post-Anthropocentric Narratives8 Entanglements of Social Marginalisation and Reading Promotion9 The Arts of Noticing Children’s WritingFinal ThoughtsIndex

"In returning to the much-debated question (and the pedagogical and aesthetic assumptions it entails) of whether and how children’s fiction fosters empathy, García González offers an incisive critique of the facile beliefs and expectations held by adults that teach, produce and write about it. She shows how new epistemologies and empirical approaches can help reimagine emotional engagement with narrative to allow for more ethical collaborations to take place between children and adults. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in taking children’s literature and childhood studies forward but also for anyone concerned with better understanding what children know and do with texts and other media."--Professor Evelyn Arizpe, The University of Glasgow