Geraldine Massey Geraldine Massey i(A141041 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Picturing Sustainable Futures Geraldine Massey , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Picture Books and Beyond 2014; (p. 25-40)

This chapter considers how children’s picture books represent the contemporary environmental position of sustainability to socialise young readers into becoming environmentally aware adults, who appreciate the interconnectedness of natural systems, recognise that sustainability has local and global implications, and identify actions that support sustainable futures.The chapter directly aligns with the cross-curriculum priority (sustainability) and suggests ways for engaging with texts in the classroom that draw on the general capabilities of critical and creative thinking.
1 Children as Ecocitizens : Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts Geraldine Massey , Clare Bradford , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Contemporary Children's Literature and Film 2011; (p. 109-126)

This chapter provides an overview of ecocriticism, discussing the extent to which children's environmental texts mobilise concept and approaches from this field.
1 y separately published work icon Reading The Environment : Narrative Constructions Of Ecological Subjectivities In Australian Children's Literature Geraldine Massey , Kelvin Grove : 2009 Z1792849 2009 single work thesis Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, Massey contributes new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.
X