Social Spheres: Information, Medium & Society
(Asynchronous Session - Online)
Pedagogy and Publishing in Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Engel
In a September 2020 New York Times op ed, activist-authors Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Mónica Ramírez called on the USA media and publishing industry to step up their inclusion of Latinx editors and contributors stating plainly that across the board, “we must transform media and cultural power structures and amplify and defend Latino storytellers…[and] we also have to deconstruct the cultural context that got us here.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture was founded with the mission to provide an accessible, digital platform for scholarly analysis and critique of historical and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art and visual culture. Since the University of California Press started publishing LALVC in winter 2019, the new academic journal is rapidly acquiring a reputation as an essential resource for a range of interdisciplinary scholars, students, activists, and artists to engage in the productive cultural deconstruction called for by Méndez Berry and Ramírez. In this paper, I consider how LALVC has also become a critical pedagogical platform with the unique potential to provide students and their instructors with access to contemporary debates in the short-form dialogues sections that accompany each issue of the journal. As the days of quarantine, lock-down, and coronavirus continue to spiral out into the future, LALVC Dialogues provide academic content to students in a shape and space that not only feels manageable, but engages their participation in the field by providing them with a pioneering tool with which to reconsider Latin American and Latinx cultural capital in the twenty-first century.
Featured Journals as Gatekeepers: Structures, Policies, and Practices to Build Trust View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lyzette Hoffman
Publishing endorses research and therefore allots journals a gatekeeper function in the knowledge economy. Which structures, policies, and practices can assist a journal in this gatekeeping function? In a case study measures taken by a journal to strengthen its position among similar journals, distinguishing itself as a gatekeeper to be trusted and supported, is examined. The measures taken include, among others, the diversifying of reviewers and restructuring of the editorial board. Comparing the new measures implemented within the journal structures, policies and practices with other journals and results found in the literature, recommendations could be made regarding best practices for improving the gatekeeper function of a journal.
The Ubiquity and Obsolescence of Papercuts in Books View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pamela See
This paper questions the continued agency for movable books during the post-digital era. During the thirteenth century the first movable books, featuring volvelles, emerged in Spain. Able to make calculations, they were considered precursors to computers. During the Renaissance, 'turn-up' books were integral to medical education due to a shortage of cadavers. It was not until the nineteenth century that the genre was applied to children's literature. Lothar Meggendorfer was a pioneer of movable books. In 1850, he was only three years of age when Fredrich Froebel introduced "papier-falten" as an "occupation" to his kindergartens. The term "pop-up" was coined by Blue Ribbon Publishing in New York during the 1930s. They would remain a mainstay of early childhood education for several decades. Reflective of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, "haptic" has become a dirty word. In the preceding decade, parents and teachers alike began to prefer e-books. They presented both a corpus of literature and read out loud. Notices of completed tasks were automatically sent. This study explores the question: Have computers supplanted their medieval counterparts?
“Post-Truth" Childhoods : Newer Editions of Familiar Texts Adjust to Contemporary Reader Expectations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wendy Stephens
With the advent of twenty-first century Caldecott winners like The Hello Goodbye Window and the Newbery award-winning Next Stop on Market Street, the literature used to construct childhood in the U.S. increasingly reflects the multicultural realism of the republic. The We Need Diverse Books movement has organized around changing representations accessible to young readers and stressing authorial voices from potentially marginalized populations. Simultaneous with this has an exclusion of problematic authors, most publicly manifest in the 2018 ballot decision by the membership of the American Library Association’s Association for Library Services for Children (ALSC) to expurgate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name and reinaugurate its honor for lifetime achievement in children’s literature as “the Legacy Award.” More insidious are the changes to text and image themselves, as subsequent generations of editors have reacted to shifting public sentiment and altered the original editions to make them more palatable. This paper focuses on Caddie Woodlawn by Carole Ryrie Brink, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the text and illustrations of Abraham Lincoln by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. In the current politicized American climate, parental and professional nostalgia keep these problematic representations around in sanitized form. From alteration of original lithography to shifting emphases in illustration, the discussion focuses on the evolving editions of these works and postulates how some of the design and production decisions publishing houses have made to update older works sometimes goes well beyond reflecting changing social norms to create an ought-world challenging historicity.
