Former Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Anne Marie Hagen, currently an associate professor in English at the Norwegian Defence University College, writes about the journey to publication for her new edited collection.
Earlier this year, Lehigh University Press (LUP) published Mediation and Children’s Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present in its “Studies in Text and Print Culture” series. This edited collection explores the cultural significance of children’s reading as a phenomenon with broad influence on both individual readers and society: childhood reading is a site where values are consciously and unconsciously transmitted. The collection invokes the theoretical concept “mediation” to investigate the complexity of children’s reading as interaction – between individuals, material texts, and wider social and institutional networks. What became a volume of essays which cohere around this concept, started as an event generously hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in 2016.
During my postdoctoral fellowship at IASH (2015-16), I was delighted to have the opportunity to organise a workshop on children’s reading in the Royal Society of Edinburgh Susan Manning workshop series. The inherently cross-disciplinary topic drew a diverse crowd of speakers from across Scottish universities and from the public policy and charity sectors. The papers explored the paradox that due to assumptions about reading’s transformative capacities, children’s reading is associated with many benefits yet has also at various points in history been believed to potentially pose a danger to both the individual child and to society.
The lively discussion the papers generated was then moved to the pages of an edited volume of essays, as I was encouraged to put together a proposal for publication. From initial proposal and peer review to published book, I was fortunate to work with LUP director Dr Kate Crassons and her insightful and experienced team. The result is a volume which demonstrates the potential of using the single theoretical term “mediation” to focus inquiries into children’s reading. Not least, it foregrounds the role of adults in children’s reading and how also research on children’s reading is affected by the narrative of the cultural value of reading.
“Mediation” also transcends disciplinary boundaries, and the volume brings together experts in literature, education studies, graphic communication and design, social policy, and library and information science. The contributors and I would like to thank IASH for having provided us with the vibrant intellectual space to begin this interdisciplinary exploration.