Professor of English Katharine Kittredge and Paige D'Encarnacao (IC 2023) have published an essay in Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature (Lexington, 2024), edited by Mark West.
Their essay, "Asian Americans Find Liminal Spaces to Combat Erasure" looks specifically at recent realistic books aimed at middle grade and YA readers, which deal directly with friend-group conflicts, bullying, intra-generational conflict and collaboration, and both microaggressions and overt acts of racism. Kittredge contributed knowledge of recent trends in children's literature and analyses of individual texts while D'Encarnacao discussed the ways in which these texts reflected her own experiences growing up as a biracial Asian teen in the San Francisco area. A number of the novels, such as Ellen Oh’s Finding Junie Kim (2021) and Tae Keller’s Jennifer Chan is not Alone (2022), highlight the stresses placed on biracial Asian students and those in schools that are overwhelmingly non-Asian. Kittredge discussed the books' pragmatic scripts for dealing with racism, and their wide variety of solutions for social isolation—from strengthening family bonds, to creating alliances with other non-white students, or looking at class identity as a uniting feature in forming more diverse friend groups. D'Encarnacao was able to comment directly on both the strategies and the situations they addressed.