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The Program

The conference program >>>

The conference lecture abstracts >>>

Registration

To register for the hybrid conference and receive the Zoom link,

please contact Tamar Neugarten, at picturebooks2021@gmail.com

The Conference

The genre of picturebooks is universally recognized as a unique artistic platform that draws first-rate artists and an enthusiastic readership of all ages. At the same time, it is a relatively new artistic platform, intimately tied to the past two centuries, especially to the cultural and artistic challenges associated with modernism and postmodernism.

The 8th International Conference of The European Network of Picturebook Research focuses on the juncture connecting the dimensions of time and history with picturebooks, on three main levels:

• The poetic level: the discursive advantages of the picturebook genre in the construction of awareness of time and history; in clarifying terms such as hours of the day, seasons of the year, life-span (birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, old age and death), and epochs, and of the tension between objective and subjective time.
• The interpretational and cognitive level: the cognitive impact of age on the way we read and understand the multimodality of picturebooks; the question of anachronistic or nostalgic readings of picturebooks.
• The cultural-historical level: milestones in the development of the picturebook genre in various cultures – its historical circumstances, histories of publication and acceptance; local and global changes; critical junctures and present directions of development; the examination of how the picturebook could serve as a historical document teaching us about the daily life and material culture of a certain time and place, its values, ideological beliefs, intergenerational relations and the cultural needs of the genre’s writers and original readership.

The Organizers

The Program in Research of Child and Youth Culture at Tel Aviv University

The MA program in Research of Child and Youth Culture is a multidisciplinary program that provides students with a conceptual foundation in child and youth culture research and knowledge of this culture’s various facets in their historical, social and contemporary contexts. The program includes the following areas of specialization: childhood and its place in society; histories of children and youth; institutions and their influence on the lives of youth; intergenerational cultural discourse including children’s textbooks, literature, newspapers and television; and youth platforms of discourse, particularly digital media.

The program is the only one of its kind in Israel, and its faculty consists of renowned scholars who are pioneers in the field of childhood and youth studies.

For further information about the program >>> 

The European Network of Picturebook Research

The European Network of Picturebook Research was established during the first picturebook conference in Barcelona in September 2007. Since then, biennial picturebook conferences have been held in different European countries:

The aim of these conferences is: to foster international picturebook research; to promote scholars and young researchers who are focusing on the investigation of picturebooks; and to publish selected papers presented at the conferences with international publishers or in peer-reviewed journals.
 

• 2007 (Spain): New Impulses in Picturebook Research: Aesthetic and Cognitive Aspects of Picturebooks
• 2009 (United Kingdom): Beyond Borders: Art, Narrative and Culture in Picturebooks
• 2011 (Germany): History and Theory of the Picturebook
• 2013 (Sweden): Picturebooks as Meeting Places: Text, Image, Ideology
• 2015 (Poland): Picturebooks, Democracy and Social Change
• 2017 (Italy): Home and Lived-In Spaces in Picturebooks from the 1950s to the Present
• 2019 (Norway): Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks