Sarah Caré presented at the IRSCL 2025 in Salamanca, Spain
Sarah Caré presented her research at the 27th International Research Society for Children‘s Literature Conference (IRSCL) in Salamanca, where she also received an award for her live visual reporting.
How is our scholarly work influenced by the places we inhabit? How do we move through borders and walls, from one discipline to another? How can we reflect on our own positionality? How do picturebooks erase explicit boundaries between the story world and the readers’ reality? What does it mean to be an exile from your own land? How does research in children’s literature create togetherness? Where does children’s literature even stand in academic research?
These are some of the many questions that were raised at the 27th IRSCL conference in Salamanca, Spain, on the topic of borders, migration, and liminality in children’s literature. With over 400 participants from 50 countries, the conference was filled with joy, fruitful conversations, stimulating presentations, thought-provoking keynotes, meetings and re-encounters, emotion, and encouragement.
Our colleague Sarah Caré attended the conference with a talk titled Third Places in Nonfiction Picturebooks: Where Do Children Go? In a corpus of 46 nonfiction picturebooks nominated for the three most important Czech literary prizes from 2020 to 2024, she was looking for groups of children in third places. With home being the “first” place and work or school being the “second” place, third places are locations where people meet, exchange ideas, have fun, and strengthen their sense of community.
Third places for children additionally foster independence, socialisation, exploration, and rebellion, and they play a crucial role in children’s development and growth as individuals and as part of a community. That is why it is important for young readers to see third places represented in the books they read.
At the closing ceremony, Sarah had the immense honour to be given a special Visual Conference Reporter award for the comics she drew throughout the conference. These illustrations will become part of the IRSCL archive and will be shared publicly very soon!
