Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young People
Reading Images

Extending the discussion of critical content analysis to the visual realm of picturebooks and graphic novels, this book provides a clear research methodology for understanding and analyzing visual imagery. Offering strategies for "reading" illustrations in global and multicultural literature, chapter authors explore and bring together critical theory and social semiotics while demonstrating how visual analysis can be used to uncover and analyze power, ideologies, inequity, and resistance in picturebooks and graphic novels. This volume covers a diverse range of texts and types of books and offers tools and procedures for interpreting visual images to enhance the understandings of researchers, teachers, and students as they engage with the visual culture that fills our world. These methods are significant not only to becoming a critical reader of literature but to also becoming a critical reader of visual images in everyday life.

Research Methodology and Analytical Tools

Chapter 1 Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images

Kathy G. Short with the Worlds of Words Community

Chapter 2 Image Analysis Using Systemic-Functional Semiotics

Clare Painter

Visual Images in Counter-Narratives

Chapter 3 Drawing Humanity: How Picturebook Illustrations Counter Antiblackness

Desiree Cueto and Wanda Brooks

Chapter 4 Examining the Visual in Latinx Immigrant Journey Picturebooks

Janine M. Schall, Julia López-Robertson, and Jeanne G. Fain

Chapter 5 A Visual Analysis through the Eyes of an Apache

Angeline P. Hoffman

Chapter 6 Developing Agency and Socialization through Interpretive Play

Janelle Mathis

Visual Images and Positioning

Chapter 7 The Power of a Gaze: Inviting Entrée into the World of a Picturebook while Positioning a Lived Reality

Holly Johnson

Chapter 8 De(MIST)ifying Depression: Dark Clouds and the Construction of Disability

Desiree Cueto, Susan Corapi, and Megan McCaffrey

Chapter 9 Grandma and the Great Gourd: A Comparison of Image in an App and a Picturebook

Deanna Day

Visual Images and Ideologies

Chapter 10 Holy Molé! and the Reproduction of a Colonialist Perspective

Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, and Denise Dávila

Chapter 11 Postwar Images: Japanese Ideologies of National Identity in Picturebooks

Junko Sakoi and Yoo Kyung Sung

Chapter 12 Immigrant Memoirs as Reflections of Time and Place: Middle Eastern Conflict in Graphic Novels

Seemi Aziz

Chapter 13 The De-Queering of Heather Has Two Mommies

Mary L. Fahrenbruck and Tabitha P. Collins

Chapter 14 A Picturebook as a Cultural Artifact: The Influence of Embedded Ideologies

Hee Young Kim and Kathy G. Short

Final Reflections

Chapter 15 Extending a Critical Lens into Our Classrooms

Kathy G. Short with the Worlds of Words Community

Holly Johnson is a professor at the University of Cincinnati, USA.

Janelle Mathis is a professor at the University of North Texas, USA.

Kathy G. Short is a professor at the University of Arizona, USA.