Assistant Professor, Department of English, Birsa Munda College, North Bengal University, completed her PhD on Taboos in 21st Century Indian English Children’s Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Also, a children’s author, published with Scholastic and DK, she challenges some of the very taboos in her writings that her doctoral thesis hoped to expose. Her talk “The Heads Behind Tales in (Indian English) Children’s Literature” will attempt to decode these “heads” that go into moulding the “ideal consumer” within children’s literature, based on her experiences with the genre both as a theorist and practitioner.

PhD student at the University of Chicago, working on post-independence Indian children’s fiction in Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. She has taught at schools and helped organise workshops for tribal children in Birbhum district of West Bengal as part of Sayambharataa. Her talk “Reading-Listening-Viewing: Picturebooks in a Shut Library During the Pandemic” will problematise the changing format of the picture book in the post-pandemic era where growing digitisation of content has become a norm. Her main point of reference for this purpose will be “Duniya Sabki”, the digital wing of The Community Library Project, Delhi, which reaches kids via their parents’ WhatsApp to bring them picture book read-alouds by celebrated Indian

Recently began her PhD on children's literature and graphic design from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, IIT Hyderabad. A pandemic post-graduate, her favourite memories from her gap-year include sharing stories and storytelling with middle-grade children. Building upon her experiences of consuming children's literature with children as a former middle school English teacher, her talk “Kidding in the Classroom: Reading Stories, Telling Lies” will look at the experiences of sharing fiction and fictionalising with children. Reviewing from the perspective of viewing with children - the “real”, not the imagined “ideal consumer” - her attempt will be to understand reading and making stories/storytelling as well as reading across generic, aesthetic and experiential categories with children, thereby piecing together patterns and contemporary trends in fiction consumption in children and young adults.

A PhD scholar at The Pennsylvania State University working on disability, education and ethnography focusing on the voices of marginalized children. Her talk “What role does children’s literature play in children’s literacy practices in Indian schools?” will look at the role of story-telling and children’s stories within Indian pedagogy and their contribution to the child’s learning and development experiences. Given the recent changes in the the nature of these stories, with mediums becoming more inclusive, it becomes interesting to note how they help adults discuss ‘uncomfortable’ issues with children. For this purpose, the talk will use contemporary stories to explore their potential in building better classroom environments and literacy practices for children in India.

A PhD student and Senior Research Fellow at Jadavpur University. Her doctoral research looks into mental health in contemporary Indian middle grade fiction and her work is largely preoccupied with issues of power, silence and infantilization in Children's Literature. Her talk “Infantilizing through Consumption: The Role of Silence in the Politics of Constructing Childhood” will examine the manifestations of silence within the power dynamics that mark the Adult/Child binary, considering the infantilization of childhood by using the Harry Potter series as an example text. Whether by financial, legal power that adults wield over children or adulthood/childhood demarcating maturity/immaturity, silence becomes a crucial tool in exercising this power. By looking at both the popularity and the text itself of the Harry Potter series, her paper will meditate on how childhood is defined and controlled by a consumption imposed by adults who largely create, read, and purchase literature for children.