Ploughing the Field: (Inter)disciplinary Approaches to YA Studies

Abstract

The categories of ‘book people’ and ‘child people’ identified by John Rowe Townsend to demarcate the key players in children’s literature studies might also be applied to YA studies, where scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines – including literary studies, book studies, creative writing, library sciences, and education studies – engage with the same source material but from different vantage points and with divergent priorities. “Book people” are those whose interests lie in literature, and who are perhaps “bound to look first at the book, because that is their job” (Townsend 407), while “child people” are concerned with the pedagogical, moral, and social functions of children’s literature and focus, instead, on its “non-literary standards” (407). The distinction is perhaps simplistic and has certainly been critiqued, but the “turf wars between these factions” (Hunt 19) have shaped the development of the study of texts for young people ever since they were first introduced. In our third edition of “Ploughing the Field”, we disrupt the disciplinary borders and boundaries of our field to unpick the current state of play and consider some of the future possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration. We do so by bringing together the perspectives of 10 scholars from a range of disciplines with stakes in YA and YA studies.

Keywords

• interdisciplinary approaches
• interdisciplinarity
• ya studies
• ya scholarship