The photo collage consists of a photo of a wood to the left, a drawing of a wood where a girl and a boy is on therir way into the wood and a big city with skyskrapers in the background.
Photo collage: Jon Hoem

Energy perspectives on children’s and YA literature

You are hereby invited to submit an abstract for a paper to a conference / works in progress seminar on “energy perspectives on children’s and YA literature” in Bergen, Norway, hosted by the research group NaChiLitCul, at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL).  

The seminar takes place on 26-27 November 2026, in Bergen, with an opening for online papers.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr. Rikke Frøyland, HVL, and Professor Reinhard Hennig, University of Agder.

Deadline for abstract submission is June 1st 2026. For more details, see the CfP.
 

Keynotes

bilde av Catherine Lammert

Catherine Lammert

Assistant Professor

Abstract - Critical Love of Place: Energy Imaginaries, children’s Literature, and the Ethics of Inheritance

Children often encounter place through affection before they encounter it through critique. They learn to love the smell of rain on dry ground, and they learn the names of rivers, animals, farms, and coastlines. Before they ever question its impact, they watch the sunrise with awe. However, the places children love are also shaped by our energy systems. The uneven distribution of environmental risk in society makes it so that children may or may not find oil fields, wind farms, dams, or pipelines as part of their encounters with place. The central question this lecture asks is this: What does it mean to love a place in a time of ecological crisis? This lecture develops the concept of Critical Love of Place (CLP) as a framework for reading and teaching children’s and young adult literature about energy and environmental justice. CLP begins with the premise that children deserve stories that help them value where they are from. The everyday attachments to landscapes, labor, and language are what make a place feel like home. However, love of place becomes ethically incomplete when it asks children to inherit only pride or nostalgia without also noticing the ecological harm of energy extraction and their responsibility to future generations. Drawing across my previous and current work, I argue that children’s literature can help readers hold together two ideas often treated as opposites: affective love of place and critical accountability.
bilde av Rikke Frøyland

Rikke Frøyland

Assistant professor

bilde av Reinhard Hennig

Reinhard Hennig

Professor

Abstract - Fossil Fuel Extraction and Energy Transition in Norwegian Children's Literature

Norway is increasingly criticized internationally for the contradiction between its claims to leadership in sustainable development and green transition and its continued expansion of fossil-fuel extraction. This talk argues that Norwegian children's literature has played an important role in shaping the energy imaginaries through which petroleum extraction has been understood by successive generations of young readers. Drawing on fiction and nonfiction, including comics, picturebooks, informational books, and school textbooks published from the 1960s to the present, I examine how narratives about oil and gas have contributed to popular understandings of Norwegian petromodernity, prosperity, and national identity. Many of these works portray petroleum extraction as exciting, adventurous, and socially beneficial, often drawing on familiar narrative patterns and cultural traditions, including Norwegian folktales. At the same time, while acknowledging the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the need for energy transition, they frequently contrast an impoverished pre-oil past with an idealized fossil-fuelled present. I argue that such representations normalize continued petroleum dependence and limit the imaginative space available for envisioning desirable post-petroleum futures. By tracing changing representations of fossil fuels and energy transition in literature for young readers, the talk highlights children's literature as a significant cultural arena in which competing energy imaginaries are produced, negotiated, and contested.

Contactinformation

Lykke Harmony Alara Guanio-Uluru
Professor
Department of Language, Literature, Mathematics and Interpreting