Mairéad Jordan

Mairéad Jordan holds a B.Ed (Hons) from DCU, a Postgraduate Diploma in Special Educational Needs (DCU), a Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Leadership (Maynooth University) and an M.A. in Children’s Literature (DCU). She has over twenty years’ experience as a primary teacher in Ireland and abroad and has worked as an Assistant Principal and education course facilitator in Wexford for over five years. Her research is funded by a DCU Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship, jointly affiliated to the School of English and the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS). It interrogates the perceived binaries of nature and culture, as a central preoccupation of ecocriticism, in a selection of visual narratives for children and young adults and asks whether the material turn can be identified in this literature, signalling a departure from a more Anthropocentric/human-centred approach. The texts to be analysed include both Anglophone and non-Anglophone texts. This research interrogates how matter and meaning constitute the fabric of our storied world, what complex narratives are communicated and how the signs and meanings of storied matter might communicate with the unique semiotics and aestheticism of multimodal texts, across languages and cultures.