RFG Talk: Images of War for Children in Ukrainian Picturebooks: Aesthetic, Political, and Emotional Strategies

Parents and authors across the world are dealing with the question of how to talk to children about war. Ukrainian writers and illustrators in particular have to find narrative and visual techniques to address children who are growing up under circumstances of war and displacement. In this talk, Svetlana Efimova will analyze Ukrainian picturebooks created during two stages of war: since 2014 and especially since 2022. First, she will focus on the relationship between representation and abstraction, between references to real events and symbolic images of war as such. Second, she will discuss the interplay between visuality and emotions, looking at the intended therapeutic effect of children’s books in wartime, emphasized by several Ukrainian authors.

Dr. Svetlana Efimova is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literatures and Media Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. In 2024, she was elected to the Young Academy at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities with her current research project “Aesthetics and Politics of Picturebooks in Contemporary Eastern European Children’s Literature.”

Zoom attendance link

Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies

Image: a visual fragment from the book Vijna, shcho zminyla Rondo (2015) by Romana Romanyshyn and Andrij Lesiv