BAAHE Conference 2025 - Language and literature across the lifespan

Session

Generational approaches

Dec 12, 2025, 4:00 PM

PA21

Conveners

Generational approaches

• Vanessa Joosen

13. Far from Innocent: Children’s ‘Vitality’ and Empire in Mulk Raj Anand

Beau Serrus (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

12/12/25, 4:00 PM

The turn of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of a widespread challenge to early developmental theories of childhood as an imperfect, transitional phase leading to adulthood. Progressive educationalists such as Rabindranath Tagore and John Dewey emphasised children’s situational and embodied experiences, rather than seeing them merely as vessels for future potential. This paper will...

3. The Poetics of Childhood: Gabriela Mistral and José Martí on Education, Memory, and Race

Oleski Miranda Navarro (Emory & Henry University)

12/12/25, 4:30 PM

In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin America, positivist and scientific racist discourse prescribed rigid social hierarchies based on gender, race, and ethnicity, effectively excluding women, children, and indigenous populations from formal projects of nation-building. This essay argues that the Cuban intellectual José Martí and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral mounted a...

23. Contesting the Mythic Mother. Ageing, Reifung and the Critique of Dominant Narratives in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

Prof. Ewa Rychter (Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences, Poland)

12/12/25, 5:00 PM

This paper will focus on The Testament of Mary (2012)—a novella by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whose protagonist-narrator is the ageing mother of Jesus, depicted as spending her last days in exile in Ephesus, remembering her past and reflecting on the events both preceding and following her son’s crucifixion. In her old age, Tóibín’s Mary finds the courage to establish her own mature...

21. Medical Authority and Age in Conspiracy Discourse: a Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

Ewa Konieczna (University of Rzeszów)

12/12/25, 5:30 PM

This presentation investigates the conceptualisation of medical staff in conspiracy theories surrounding childhood vaccination and organ cancer treatment in mature/old age, situating the analysis within the theme of language across the lifespan. Conspiracy narratives (in the sense of Introne et al. 2020) in English-speaking contexts—particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom—have...