This is a guaranteed panel sponsored by the GS Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, January 9-12, 2025 in New Orleans, LA. In conjunction with the 2025 presidential theme, ‘Visibility,’ this panel aims to highlight how global hurricane narratives explore storytelling within children’s literature and media as a methodological tool to highlight how ‘personal’ experiences with hurricanes are a sociopolitical reflection of the larger system supporting inequality and injustices. In an era marked by climate change and environmental crises, this panel seeks to offer unique insights into the structural responses to racial and spatial disparities, the power of resilience and transformation, empowering empathy and ethics of care, and the global interconnectedness of environmental challenges. 

Scholars such as Lawrence Buell (1995), Ursula K. Heise (2006), and Robert Nixon (2011) have explored environmental crisis narratives and offered frameworks of analyses that reveal conditions of ‘slow violence’ on the precarious existence of the affected populace. Carolina Grego (2017) mentions how there is nothing ‘natural’ about natural disasters. Rather, she frames these catastrophes as anthropocentric instances of environmental injustices and results of the failure of larger systemic and crisis management. The precarity is not just informed by economic and food instability but is also underlined by structural racism and classism where politics have helped create the conditions of a hurricane to become more than personal tragedy. Marginalized communities have faced unfair spatial displacement and inequitable restoration opportunities. Children’s books such as Tsunami! By Kimiko Kajikawa and Ed Young (2010), When the Storm Comes by LindaAshman and Taeuun Yoo (2020), Maxy Survives the Hurricane (2021) by Ricia Anne Chansky and Yarelis Marcial Acevedo, Hurricane by John Rocco (2021), and Weather and Storm (2023) by Vanessa Godard and Paddy Donnelli are literary examples on how authors address both their lived experience of surviving hurricanes, as well as respond to the failed political structure that lead to experiences of collective trauma. 

Keeping in mind the personal, social, and structural aspect of experiencing hurricanes, this panel seeks abstract submissions related to, but not limited to, the following questions/ideas: 

• How can hurricane narratives act as an intersectional tool to explore and amplify sociopolitical, cultural, communal, personal, and geographic vulnerabilities? 

• What role does form and style of storytelling, in both anglophone and vernacular texts,  play in narrativizing the disparities and inequities of racial and spatial injustice? 

• How can children’s youth literature and media be used to have conversations about solidarity, trauma, and precarity within the context of hurricane narratives? 

• How can hurricane narratives help and support children and youth in their understanding of climate change, empathy, and social-emotional development?

• What is the role of disasters in shaping narratives of resilience and transformation?

• How can global hurricane narratives challenge problematic and privilege notions of childhood?

Please send a 300-500 word abstract and 100 word bios to Sayanti Mondal (smondal@ithaca.edu) and Edcel J. Cintron-Gonzalez (ejcintr@ilstu.edu) by 10 March, 2024. Accepted panelists must be current members of MLA by 1 April 2024.