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The purpose of this paper is to review an existing graphic novel collection in the curriculum materials center of an academic library. The review would result in a clear identity for the collection and guide the creation of revised collection development, management and cataloging processes.

The physical and bibliographic identities of each individual graphic novel were reviewed and compared with collection development tools.

The review revealed a mismatch between the physical and bibliographic markers applied to some graphic novels and inconsistencies in the assignment of items based on audience and literature type. At the completion of the project, 43% of the graphic novels were reassigned based on audience, literature type or both.

There is limited research about the collection challenges and needs of graphic novels in juvenile and curriculum materials collections within academic libraries. This research details the process used to evaluate the collection and create a physical and bibliographic identity that fits the needs of the library’s users.

This paper aims to trace how Asian American girls engaged with civic learning in a virtual out-of-school literacy community featuring a curriculum of diverse literary texts.

The researcher used practitioner inquiry to construct a virtual literacy education community dedicated to the civic learning of Asian American girls.

The paper explores how participants mobilized critical practices of textual consumption and production rooted in their intersectional identities and embodied experiences to make meaning of the civic constraints and affordances of marginalized identities and to read and (re)design author choices for civic purposes. These findings – examples of youths’ critical civic meaning-making – indicate how they claimed space for Asian American civic girlhoods in literacy education.

This paper foregrounds how Asian American girls mobilize critical processes of text consumption and production to assert civic identities in literacy education – a significantly under-examined topic in literacy studies. This work has implications for how literacy practitioners and scholars can prioritize Asian American civic girlhoods through pedagogy and research.

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

Public information campaigns (PICs) have increasingly become part of global migration deterrence projects. Australia’s No Way campaign has been widely publicised for its harsh messaging, declaring to would-be asylum seekers that ‘you will not make Australia home’. In this chapter, the author argues that in addition to targeting potential asylum seekers throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the No Way campaign is directed towards multiple audiences, including diaspora communities in Australia, the Australian voting public, and a wider network of anti-immigration political figures. The No Way campaign represented one of the largest and best-funded Australian deterrence campaigns to date, with the distribution of materials ranging from billboards and social media advertisements to street theatre performances and graphic novel storyboards between 2014 and 2016. In the sections that follow, the author situates this argument within the context of the rise of PICs throughout the globe, as well as their use within Australia. Through the lens of this campaign, the author considers the question: for whom is this deterrence messaging? How does it target multiple audiences? The author concludes by considering the future of information campaigns as deterrence projects around the world.

Some fairy tale characters have transcended their original fairy tale genre and their influence can be perceived in other fictional genres. One illustration of this is the character of Blue Beard. This story, written by Charles Perrault, was first published in 1697 (Hermansson, 2010, p. 2). It moved through several themes or topics from anxiety to money to the right of the husband and wives (Warner, 2014, p. 82). In Perrault's story, Blue Beard is conceived as a serial killer and a jealous husband. ‘Whatever the medium, whatever the date: in opera, cartoon, X-rated film or graphic novel, he is an archetypal serial murderer, terrifying and yet alluring’ (2015, p. 76).

The influence of this character and examples that carry, at the very least, remnants of Blue Beard can be clearly identified in several contemporary narratives. In the BBC television series The Fall (Cubitt, 2013), Jamie Dornan portrays a serial killer named Paul Spector. Alternatively known as the Belfast Strangler, Spector, like Blue Beard, has a wife and children who are unaware of his murderous spree. Another example of the attempted enforcement of extreme patriarchy can be seen in Cult, the seventh season of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story anthology series. The season is dedicated to the 2016 US election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (Raddish, 2017). In this fictional narrative Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) symbolises toxic masculinity and models patriarchal archetypes to create a cult and become a senator.

Through a contextual post-structuralist analysis of the aforementioned characters, this chapter intends to examine the representation and evolution of male character under the umbrella of the fairy tale ‘man’.

In the midst of the pandemic, the American Library Association (ALA) Rainbow Round Table (RRT) celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall Book Awards, which recognize books of exceptional merit relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and plus (LGBTQIA+) community experience. In tandem, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) reported record numbers of book challenges, mostly based on texts written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community. This chapter considers these seemingly divergent issues within a broader social and historical context – and serves as a testament to the steadfast resolve of librarians to resist censorship and promote the freedom to read during turbulent times. The first section provides an overview of pandemic complexities. The second part of the chapter centers around professional milestones and some recent award-winning literary works. The middle section briefly reviews issues related to challenges over time. This is followed by an exploration of the recent surge in censorship with emphasis on LGBTQIA+ content in public libraries as well as aspects of resistance. The final section offers some ideas for moving forward.

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for undergraduate Ecuadorian polytechnic students.

This research followed a mixed method design to obtain quantitative information through a researcher-made survey and paired T-test, which would be corroborated by the qualitative data obtained from semistructured interviews.

From the descriptive and T-test results and the interview answers, it is concluded that students have a favorable view of the effectiveness of using comics to improve their writing skills. They also expressed their engagement and motivation to work with comics.

First, the research sample, comprised of 109 students, may restrict the generalizability of the findings beyond the specific context of this study. This constraint suggests caution in extrapolating these findings to broader student cohorts, emphasizing the need for larger-scale studies to validate the robustness and applicability of the outcomes. Second, the study’s focus solely on students from a polytechnic state university introduces a potential limitation concerning the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool. Consequently, the findings might be limited in their applicability and may not fully encompass students’ varied responses and attitudes from other educational backgrounds.

The scaffolding afforded by comics aligns with genre-based literacy perspectives, valuing instruction in textual genres and social purposes. From a practical pedagogical point of view, this paper’s results suggest the potential of comic narratives and storyboarding. Comics writing could be added to classroom activities to vibrantly aboard brainstorming, drafting and peer reviewing before dealing with higher-stakes assignments. Legitimizing alternative mediums like comics for academic writing tasks has social implications for promoting literacies in a multimedia world.

Writing comics nurtures multiliteracies aligned with participatory digital cultures by expanding traditional linguistic-centric norms. This multimodal composing can potentially increase access and representation and amplify voices across identities and cultures.

Although the paper addresses a topic that is not entirely novel in research, its originality lies in its focus on data originating from Ecuador, where specific cultural nuances and educational contexts may influence the effectiveness of using comics to enhance EFL writing skills. Thus, it fills a gap in the existing literature on this subject.

This study evaluates the architectural status of circular prototype mosques in Kuwait. The argument is that the once dominant and powerful image of mosques is now merely a repetitive reproduction through the prototype scheme. The study focuses on the circular prototype design, which has been constructed in many of Kuwait's recent residential areas. It evaluates qualitatively the worshipers' experiences of these mosques.

The research methodology is qualitative. The main question is how well the circular prototype mosques are received by worshipers and local communities. Various research methods were used, including walk-through survey and group interview with worshipers and semi-structured interview with key informants in Public Authority for Housing Welfare and Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs. Purposive sampling was chosen to select for key informants. Time-location sampling was selected for worshipers' group interview.

Circular prototype presents several weaknesses. The community did not receive the circular design well as it deviates from the traditional and modern rectangular mosque design prevalent in Kuwait. This research highlights the importance of considering traditional design principles, community preferences and functional requirements while designing a mosque. It also emphasizes the need for an extensive evaluation of prototype designs to identify potential weaknesses before proceeding with the final design.

It is recommended that future mosque design projects in Kuwait consider traditional design principles; community preferences; and financial, functional and sustainability requirements. In addition, the findings of this study can be used to inform future mosque design projects in Kuwait and to ensure that they are functional, cost-effective and well received by the community.

This research provides an informative and comprehensive analysis of Kuwait's prototype mosque designs from the 1950s to the present day. It focuses on the current circular prototype, critically examining its advantages and disadvantages. This research is the first to evaluate the history and design improvements over the years. As such, this research offers invaluable information to those interested in Kuwait's religious architecture and cultural history.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the impact of White Supremacy and Christian hegemony on the educational system. By highlighting interconnectedness across targeted groups, the authors assert that through coalition building, groups are stronger than they would be working alone. Solidarity gives hope to combating hatred of all kinds. Learning that there is a long history of antisemitism is an important component of fighting bias. With book banning and controversy over teaching critical race theory in schools, it is important that educators reflect on their social justice education.

The authors analyze the definitions and enactment of multicultural, culturally responsive and anti-bias education as well as critical theory. They then investigate how antisemitism is of concern to all identities targeted by White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism (LGBTQIA+, minoritized races, non-Christians, etc.) and the importance of education in fighting hate and influencing policy and practice.

Although 2 % of the US population identifies as Jewish, 11% of incidents educators reported were classified as antisemitic. Education is the key to fighting antisemitism and Holocaust denial (Greene et al., 2021; Stanton and Marcus, 2019). The authors make recommendations for addressing antisemitism, including addressing antisemitic incidents, the importance of Holocaust studies, the need for religious literacy, fighting the banning of books and narrowing the school curriculum. The authors ended by reinforcing the need for Jewish people to be included in multicultural, culturally responsive, anti-bias education and the need for “Heb-crit” as a sub-study of critical race theory.

Anti-bias education must include antisemitism and show how connected hatred is rather than having groups compare their struggles. The authors explained the diversity among Jewish people to highlight the complexity of an identity group that is often inaccurately oversimplified.

There is a need for scholarship on modern-day antisemitism and internalized antisemitism and reflective narratives as commonly used in Black and Latinx studies (Rubin, 2020). With the rise in Holocaust denial and antisemitic groups (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2024), it is important to advocate and teach about these topics, which are not often discussed in PK-12 or Schools of Education (Muller, 2022).