"Cancel culture" can be used in punitive ways to withdraw financial or intellectual support from those whose perspectives are deemed offensive. Some suggest disengaging from authors, artists, donors, institutional founders, and others whose histories and perspectives are problematic. However, what do student affairs professionals do…

Romanticized rural storytelling creates difficulties for rural children in finding mirrors, seeing people like themselves and places like their homes as principal characters and settings in picturebooks. The same romanticism likewise makes it unlikely for picturebook readers in cities and suburbs to find realistic windows into rural life. Despite…

This article presents a small case study of two childhood readers of Enid Blyton's Famous Five series, who meet in a research project devoted to a different but related topic. One is Indian by birth and background, the other, Canadian. Their experience of this series is separated by distance (many thousands of miles), time of reading (nearly fifty…

Even though student-led small-group book discussions about fiction have been a curricular staple, teachers still contend with surface-level discussions and students who have difficulty with creating meaning together. Based on their previous findings, the authors explore building a foundation for discussions (for teachers new to literature study)…

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel "Dracula" went "viral" as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized re-reading and discussion of the text through the hashtags #dracula and #dracula daily. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use a…

Media depictions of autism have the potential to have either positive or detrimental impacts on the lives of autistic people. This systematic review aimed to examine (1) the accuracy and authenticity of fictional media portrayals of autism (Part A) and (2) the impact of viewing such portrayals on knowledge about autism and attitudes towards…

This paper proposes a didactic design that is centered around an immersive, multilinear narrative in virtual reality as a means of illustrating human life on the edge of technological singularity. It explores the potential of narrative scenarios to trigger a discourse from users' perspective. Affective Computing is taken as a use case. It is a…

This essay uses a narrative -- in this case a fictional dialogue -- to explore how neoliberalism and managerialism is taken forward in unexpected ways in the contemporary university. In order to make sense of zombie academic leadership, I turn my attention to how it is cultivated in the academy by using the "case of J," which is taken…

The buoyant shift from form and structure to the fluid constructs of meaning turned discernible in Jacques Derrida's "Deconstruction." Meaning or reality that had so long been enjoying a fixed and definite status was worn out with the advent of the theory of deconstruction. The turnaround of what was considered real or true became…

The paper seeks to unpick and examine a number of related claims for the role of the arts or, more specifically, the creative arts, in educational research. It considers and evaluates ways in which artistic creativity might itself be thought of as either based on research or itself a form of inquiry which might claim to be research. Such claims…

U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical…

HBO's "Lovecraft Country" is a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies, which are forms of meaning making aimed at helping students conceive of a more equitable democratic society. Speculative civic literacies and "Lovecraft Country" both center the tension between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism in the…

Previous research has established relationships between reading fiction and increased empathy levels, an effect amplified by reading young adult fiction and by feeling transported by, or wholly immersed within, one's reading. Given the established correlation between increased empathy and decreased intolerance levels, reading fiction may decrease…

An allegorical thought experiment occurring in a pseudo Huxleyean world in the future is conducted, in which "Euclidean" geometry has been forgotten and can only be retrieved by traversing backward in time, physically and virtually by two protagonists, Alpha and Beta, inspired by the challenge issued by their teacher Aleph 1. In the year…