Macarena García-González

Drawing upon Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of epistemic injustice, which refers to one’s being wronged in their capacity as a knower, this presentation opens some questions about epistemological challenges in teaching-learning encounters with children’s literature and culture in higher education. It explores in particular three deeply entangled epistemological exclusions: how children’s knowledge is overlooked and misvalued; how the desire for (canonical) literary cultures privileges the book excluding other textual forms; and how certain ideas about universal aesthetics still organise ways of knowing. I take a posthuman materialist perspective to think through these exclusions to address some of the ethical implications raised by feminist pedagogies in higher education contexts. I propose to see teaching as a commitment to produce non-hierarchical laboratories in which the categories of the incompetent learner and the experienced knower become blurred and are catalysed by the encounter between texts, sensing bodies, desire and other materialities,

Macarena García-González is Principal Researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Educational Justice of the Catholic University of Chile, where she investigates the shifting relationships between literature, cultural materials and childhoods. She has authored two monographs —Origin Narratives. The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (Routledge, 2017) and Enseñando a sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (Metales Pesados, 2021)—, as well as several articles and book chapters. She leads the research line Challenging Homogeneity in Educational Spaces and the intergenerational cultural platform @estotbn. Macarena García-González has recently convened the 25th congress of the IRSCL and is a member of its executive board.