Elisa M F Santos is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, and the University of Bologna. Her research uses an interdisciplinary methodology that draws from queer theories, graphic design, literature and childhood studies to investigate roles that children’s literature can assume in historical, political and social processes, as well as in the knowledge production around them. Departing from the notion of children’s literature as a genre located at a double bind — tending to be surveilled due to its pedagogical functions and deemed “innocent” because of its target public —, the research investigates how picturebooks published in Brazil and Argentina around military dictatorships (1964-1985 and 1976-1983, respectively) produced social and political discourses that conversed with/criticized life under authoritarian regimes.
