Translating spatiality in children’s books on climate change

Description

Climate change has little regard for human-made borders, whether these are national, linguistic, or otherwise socially constructed. It is a phenomenon that encompasses the entire planet while producing concrete events (such as storms or droughts) that affect specific parts of the world. This spatial paradox makes climate change a difficult topic to communicate to young readers. In order to relate story of the “borderless” phenomenon of climate change, books for young readers will often pin it down by linking it to existing, bordered off places (such as countries or national parks). In this presentation we discuss the spatial representation of climate change in a corpus of translated and non-translated books about climate change for young readers. We do this by drawing on insights from digital humanities and adopting a mixed-methods approach that combines close and distant reading. After presenting a visual mapping of the locations referred to in the books in the translated and non-translated subcorpora, we zoom in on some key locations to analyse the role played by these locations in the different stories about climate change. This exploration demonstrates that these books link the planetary story of climate change to specific spaces and explores how it is subsequently enclosed in a more restricted, homogenous manner that can be communicated to young readers.

Period	2025
Event title	International Research Society for Children’s Literature Conference 2025: Borders, Migration and Liminality in Children’s Literature
Event type	Conference
Conference number	27
Location	Salamanca, SpainShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International