Representation and Belonging in Children’s Literature: A Ronning Centre Conversation

Whose stories make it onto the shelf and whose don't? The books children grow up with quietly teach them who matters, whose experience is worth telling, and where they themselves fit in.

Join us for a conversation with Professor Karen Sands-O'Connor, on how the stories we hand to children shape who they understand themselves and their neighbours to be. Karen is an internationally recognized scholar of Black British children's literature, and she'll draw on that work to explore questions of belonging, community, and public life- questions children's literature often works out first, long before we're aware it's happening.

Karen has spent her career tracing the history of Black representation in British children's books and how it has been absent, distorted, and gradually, reclaimed. In this conversation, she'll talk about what that history reveals: how children's publishing has responded (and resisted responding) to shifting ideas of race and community, and what it means, practically, for educators, librarians, and parents to notice who is and isn't on the page.

Professor Sands-O'Connor is a Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield. In 2022, she created Listen to this Story!, the UK's first exhibition on children's literature and Black Britain, which has since toured the country. She is currently developing the Every Voice, Every Story Resource Library, and consults with the British Library, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education on its annual Reflecting Realities reports.

The evening will be an informal, moderated conversation, followed by audience questions.