The Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature 2019 conference explores the theme of ‘Young People’s Radical Literature and Culture’. The keynote address will be given Professor Kimberley Reynolds of Newcastle University. The conference will occur during Friday 29th and Saturday 30th March 2019 in the Marino Institute of Education, Dublin 9, Ireland. You can view the programme and register for the conference at https://issclblog.wordpress.com/. It is now over ten years since Kimberley Reynolds highlighted the importance of radical dimensions of children’s literature inher book, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Texts for young people have always been embedded in norms, concepts and systems regarding socialisation, education, and enculturation and offer empowering and disempowering possibilities for everyone who engages with them. Concepts of childhood, youth literature and youth culture are situated and operate within diverse contexts and contested spaces which are negotiated by readers, audiences, publishers, creative industries, authors, librarians, teachers, families, gate keepers, institutions, cultural movements, and political and religious groups. Radical youth literature challenges dominant expectations and norms about childhood, society, socialisation, and young people’s reading, acts as a force for change and encourages children and young adults to question the authority of those in power. […]

Robert Upshur Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is an American investigative journalist. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter and is now an associate editor there. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time” by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate. He has since written 18 books on American politics, 13 of which topped best-seller lists.