Representing trauma and the refugee experience : applying RefugeeCrit to recent Canadian picture books about refugees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Along with unceasing refugee crises, the last few decades have seen a rapid growth of refugee experience depiction in children’s literature. Refugee stories for children, as “an emergent genre” (Hope, “One Day We Had to Run” 296), have attained increasing scholarly attention. Given the inclination to focus the portrayal of refugee experience mainly on “refugee flight” in many children’s picture books (Strekalova-Hughes 24), scholars have underscored the importance of more diverse and nuanced representations of the lives of refugee children that transcend the mere refugee flight to reflect their cultures, histories, agency and tenacity, as well as explain the reasons causing the flight (Tomsic and Deery; Strekalova-Hughes; Darragh and Kelley; Hope). This thesis examines the representations of refugee experiences depicted in three recently published Canadian picture books: The Doll (Tran-Davies and Puth), Salma the Syrian Chef (Ramadan and Bron) and The Paper Boat (Lam). Drawing on the RefugeeCrit framework (Strekalova-Hughes), I perform a close reading of the selected picture books, taking into consideration words and images, to examine the refugee experience representations, while situating it within the larger body of “children’s literature of atrocity” (Baer 382; Kidd, “‘A’ is for Auschwitz” 120). The goal of this study is to add to the relatively limited scholarship drawing on the RefugeeCrit framework in analyzing children’s picture books about refugees, especially in the context of Canadian children’s literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".