The rationale for organizing this session lies in the growing recognition that science and literature are not separate domains in texts for young readers. Children’s literature has long served as a primary site where scientific discourses are introduced, popularized, and critiqued. Yet the cultural work performed by these texts, namely how they encode assumptions about race, gender, empire, labor, and ecological ethics alongside botanical, zoological, and evolutionary knowledge, remains underexamined in literary studies. By bringing together scholars working across different national traditions, historical periods, and methodological frameworks, this panel offers a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to a topic of increasing urgency.
The session builds on and extends existing scholarship in several key areas, including the history of science education and its relationship to children’s literature (Lightman, Secord), environmental humanities and ecocriticism in children’s literature (Gaard, Dobrin and Kidd), material culture studies and the history of playful learning (Hoiem), settler colonial studies and the cultural politics of nature writing (Miller), and ecomedia theory and oceanic studies (Jue). The panel also draws on emerging work in affect theory and the concept of “affective epistemology”, that is, the inseparability of knowing and feeling in pedagogical encounters with the natural world and a framework central to the co-presentation by Dema and Petríková.
The session will operate as follows within the allotted seventy-five minutes. Each of the four presentations (one co-presented) will last approximately fifteen minutes, for a total of sixty minutes of formal presentation. The presider will offer brief introductory remarks contextualizing the panel’s concerns and will moderate at least fifteen minutes of open discussion, inviting questions from the audience and encouraging dialogue among the panelists about shared themes such as pedagogy, classification, affect, and ecological ethics.
Ella Campopiano’s paper examines Anna Botsford Comstock’s influential manual for the American Nature Study movement, arguing that Comstock’s rhetoric of tree-centered placemaking cultivated settler-colonial conceptions of intimacy with the land, connecting scientific pedagogy to nationalist identity formation. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s paper examines how authors adapted the genre of the “evolutionary epic” for children in the early twentieth-century United States to teach civic values and shared kinship among a diverse immigrant workforce, tracing divergent ideological positions on labor, immigration, race, and environmental preservation. Caylee Weintraub’s paper surveys how children’s literature and media structure epistemic and affective encounters with deep-sea ecologies, arguing that children’s media cultivate imaginative frameworks increasingly urgent in an era of deep-sea mining and ecological precarity. Alma Dema and Martina Petríková co-present a comparative reading of Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson, Angela Nanetti’s My Grandfather Was a Cherry Tree, and Peter Sís’s The Tree of Life, arguing that pedagogical encounters with nature in children’s literature operate through an “affective epistemology” that challenges reductive models of scientific authority.
Together, these presentations demonstrate that the natural sciences in children’s literature are never merely informational but are shaped by cultural values, institutional power, and social hierarchies, and they participate in broader debates about who counts as a credible observer of nature and how literary engagements with science shape young readers’ understanding of the living world.