Search

Delhi at Eleven, a compendium of four short films made with video cameras by eleven-year-old Indian schoolchildren in 2012, is filmed from a child's perspective – literally, in the low positioning of the single camera, and mentally, in the nature of the close attention paid to the details of events and relationships. The films create strikingly individual images of the filmmakers' world and offer sharply observed comments on the restrictions upon subjective agency and well-being in children's lives. The children were given limited training in how to make a film and completed some exercises designed to encourage them to think about the nature of a shot, framing, sequence, order, and structure. They received some mentoring in selecting footage to include and exclude. My discussion here explores the interrelationship of cognitive mapping, social ecology, and cinematic space in these films. These four films offer perspectives on urban livelihoods, marginality, class, gender, kinship, household economy, poverty, and modernity, and are thus particularly informative about how children can map their society.

Adaptation is often a transcoding into a different set of conventions, and here we argue that print to film adaptations introduce and depend upon a bundle of conventions and techniques which are already globalised and hence facilitate cross-cultural understanding more than print media might do. Films for children and young adults seldom reach a cross-cultural audience, but we contend that this is a consequence of uni-directional globalisation rather than any barriers constituted by the films themselves. In an analysis of narrative conventions and cinematic techniques in film adaptations from China, South Korea and Japan we show that cinematic features enable boundary crossing and ensure childhood experiences are intelligible cross-culturally. These features are broadly of two kinds: elements of narrative, especially global scripts, and cinematic techniques of cognitive and technical kinds. Scripts, whether of general types such as a children's film structure or cause-and-effect structure, or thematic types such as the triumph of the underdog, are widely recognisable. We examine conceptual metaphors, which are intrinsic to human cognition, the visual strategy of emotional mirroring, and film as a metonymic mode which sustains a deeper significance while requiring minimal decoding activity on the part of viewers and promoting mutual understanding between cultures.

The nexus of the conceptual domains of cognitive mapping and social ecology offers a constructive methodology for examining some aspects of Young Adult fiction, and in this article I explore what I see as the possibilities of this conjunction. On the one hand, social ecology (also referred to as ecocultural theory or the bioecological model) impacts upon representations of subjectivity within YA fiction, and on the other, the literal and metaphorical interpretations of space and place enabled by cognitive mapping function as a framework to structure discussion of the relationship between ecology and subjectivity. Because mapping is an activity performed both by characters within the text and through narrator–narratee transactions, it has a narrative function that mediates the core social ecology foci of proximal processes, characterisation, ecocultural orientation and the experience of temporality. Taking examples from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, David Almond's The Fire-Eaters and John Green's Paper Towns, the article explores some of the interactions between key cognitive and social processes and the narrative structures within which they are expressed.

Social movements taken up in children's literature since the 1960s have foregrounded the ethical concerns of changing societies in a range of areas that includes environmental and ecological issues. While philosophers align ethical responsibility with a need to be impartial, fiction will routinely violate impartiality because of social and emotional attachments deemed desirable for personal and general well-being. Such attachments are rendered strongly in children's fiction because of the textual dominance of heavy character focalisation in both first person and third person narratives, and thence a basis for reader response analogous to an interpersonal relationship. Questions of ethics, attachment and representation come together in a recent strand, or sub-genre, in environmental literature in which issues in environmental ethics are explored by constructing a parallel between ecoconsciousness and interpersonal human relationships of various types according to the age of the participant characters. A common narrative strategy in such texts is to construct parallel narratives underpinned by a metonymic interrelationship, whereby threatened or damaged nature is matched by threatened or damaged lives. The thematic outcome blends an interweaving of nature and culture with a more pragmatic environmentalism than usually pertains in children's texts.