Naomi Lesley – författare

This book examines how children’s and young adult literature addresses and interrogates the legacies of American school desegregation. Such literature narrates not only the famous battles to implement desegregation in the South, in places like Little Rock, Arkansas, but also more insidious and less visible legacies, such as re-segregation within schools through the mechanism of disability diagnosis. Novelizations of children’s experiences with school desegregation comment upon the politics of getting African-American children access to white schools; but more than this, as school stories, they also comment upon how structural racism operates in the classroom and mutates, over the course of decades, through the pedagogical practices depicted in literature for young readers. Lesley combines approaches from critical race theory, disability studies, and educational philosophy in order to investigate how the educational market simultaneously constrains how racism in schools can be presented to young readers and also provides channels for radical critiques of pedagogy and visions of alternative systems. The volume examines a range of titles, from novels that directly engage the Brown v. Board of Education decision, such as Sharon Draper’s Fire From the Rock and Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane, to novels that engage less obvious legacies of desegregation, such as Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, Sharon Flake’s Pinned, Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown, and Louis Sachar’s Holes. This book will be of interest to scholars of American studies, children’s literature, and educational philosophy and history.

This book examines how children’s and young adult literature addresses and interrogates the legacies of American school desegregation. Such literature narrates not only the famous battles to implement desegregation in the South, in places like Little Rock, Arkansas, but also more insidious and less visible legacies, such as re-segregation within schools through the mechanism of disability diagnosis. Novelizations of children’s experiences with school desegregation comment upon the politics of getting African-American children access to white schools; but more than this, as school stories, they also comment upon how structural racism operates in the classroom and mutates, over the course of decades, through the pedagogical practices depicted in literature for young readers. Lesley combines approaches from critical race theory, disability studies, and educational philosophy in order to investigate how the educational market simultaneously constrains how racism in schools can be presented to young readers and also provides channels for radical critiques of pedagogy and visions of alternative systems. The volume examines a range of titles, from novels that directly engage the Brown v. Board of Education decision, such as Sharon Draper’s Fire From the Rock and Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane, to novels that engage less obvious legacies of desegregation, such as Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, Sharon Flake’s Pinned, Virginia Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown, and Louis Sachar’s Holes. This book will be of interest to scholars of American studies, children’s literature, and educational philosophy and history.

Contributions by Anna Bugajska, Dayna Campbell, Dallas Ducar, Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, Melanie Goss, Joseph Holloway, Jeremy Johnston, Manjushri Karthikeyan, Jenise Katalina, Sarah Layzell, Naomi Lesley, Anna Macdonald, Vanessa E. Martínez-Renuncio, Nichole Mayweather-Banks, Madison Miner, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Farriba Schulz, Carrie Spencer, Antje Tannen, Valerie A. Ubbes, and B.J. WoodsteinHealthcare in Children’s Media, edited by Naomi Lesley and Sarah Layzell, is a collection of essays and interviews from scholars, activists, and practitioners grappling with crucial questions about representations of healthcare systems, both formal and informal, in children’s media. The volume focuses on systems of healthcare rather than individual narratives of illness. It examines how children are socialized into knowledge about healthcare. Essays explore critiques of existing systems embedded in children's literature, analyze how children’s books might be used for health literacy education, and examine children’s film and television for visions of alternative systems and solutions to ethical dilemmas.Contributors in Healthcare in Children’s Media draw upon interdisciplinary approaches including disability studies, gender studies, public health, bibliotherapy, and posthumanism. Essays examine care systems in the US, the UK, Germany, India, and Iran, and also offer a breadth of historical perspective ranging from the turn of the twentieth century through our present times and into projections of future bioethical and posthuman dilemmas. This volume adds fresh works to archives of health literacy books, with analytic perspectives on race and disability that medical writers might not consider.