The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of ...

Literature, and children’s literature specifically, helps instill value and humanity in times of crisis, as portrayed in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom. Both adults and children find it challenging to handle chronic diseases, such as sickle cell, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis B. Focusing on one of these lethal diseases, sickle cell anemia, this study argues that, even with great innovations in medical science, society is the main killer and not the disease itself. Since disease forms ...

How might Indigenous scholars theorize with stories from our childhoods while enacting the Indigenous critical theory and praxis of refusal? This talk engages the Inupiaq haunting story of the Berry People along with North American histories of Indigenous family separation to examine Catholic political theologies of children. In doing so, it illustrates the ongoing necessity of Indigenous political savviness in defending communities and nations from the haunted whistlings of Christian religious institutions for Indigenous children ...