Papers by Margaret Mackey
At some point, successful interpreters step inside the make-believe world of the text before them... more At some point, successful interpreters step inside the make-believe world of the text before them, whether in film, novel or game format. No matter how we configure the question of narrative, the gamer, or the viewer or the reader ‘engages in an act of imagination’ (Ryan, 2007, p. 13), and my study explores similarities and differences in how this act of imagination is performed with different media. I suggest that exploring overlaps and contradictions in the invoking of make-believe in fictions presented in different media can enhance our understanding of all these media, and of the act of make-believe itself.
Taylor & Francis eBooks, Feb 16, 2010
IASL Annual Conference Proceedings, 2021
Today's young people are used to moving in a world of multiple media and formats; they take t... more Today's young people are used to moving in a world of multiple media and formats; they take the ability to move from one platform to another completely for granted A qualitative study enlisted a small number of students in fifth and eighth grades (all with a background of domestic computer ownership and use) for intensive work with texts in different media. This report on part of that study demonstrates that those who have grown up with domestic access to video, computers, and the Internet are often relatively neutral when it comes to platform, preferring to judge texts by issues of personal salience and fluency of access.
Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel genuinely excited about your vocation. These are bo... more Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel genuinely excited about your vocation. These are books that matter. Mapping Recreational Literacies: Contemporary Adults at Play by Margaret Mackey falls into the category of books that matter. The book let me take stock of the articles, chapters, and books that I have read over the past few years, and it extended how I feel about them, the field of multimodality and "new" literacies more generally. As Turkle (2007) observes, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with" (p. 5). Mackey lets us see how texts make us learn in varying ways while at the same time analyzing what it is about them that absorbs our attention. With eloquence and measured analysis, Mackey offers a detailed picture of nine individuals and their textual worlds and how they interact with other textual worlds. The book serves as compelling evidence of how much we think and exist through objects in our worlds. To keep the concept of mapping fluid, Mackey structures her book around genres of texts and participants' relationships to these genres. She artfully explores this landscape of textual networks by mapping (note the double meaning here) the stories of Ben, Courtney, Seth, and others and the tacit principles of their meaning-making onto the text content and design. Each of the nine meaning-makers carries his or her own unique cultural agency that is foregrounded with particular texts, and the case studies work well as a collective in discussion/implications sections. In the book Mackey takes account of the world of games, of picture books, of novels, of graphic stories-and she does so not cursorily, but rather fixes her gaze on what these texts do and, to return to Turkle, how we think with texts that we love. By invoking Rabinowitz's four rules of reading, Mackey shows us that there are ways of connecting other research frameworks to multimodal theory. Mackey describes the "distinctive individuality of each participant," and like Mackey, I would have expected some repetition in responses, but Mackey's thick description of their textual worlds teased out how different their worlds were.
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2017
International Research in Children's Literature, 2013
Critical Approaches to Children's Literature is an innovative series concerned with the best cont... more Critical Approaches to Children's Literature is an innovative series concerned with the best contemporary scholarship and criticism on children's and young adult literature, film, and media texts. The series addresses new and developing areas of children's literature research as well as bringing contemporary perspectives to historical texts. The series has a distinctive take on scholarship, delivering quality works of criticism written in an accessible style for a range of readers, both academic and professional. The series is invaluable for undergraduate students in children's literature as well as advanced students and established scholars.
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 2016
When the Disney movie of Mary Poppins was released in 1964, I was a teenager and far too cool to ... more When the Disney movie of Mary Poppins was released in 1964, I was a teenager and far too cool to watch it under the aegis of my own identity. But as a long-term devotee of the books I was keen to see what Disney had made of this adaptation, so I borrowed the children of some family friends as camouflage and headed for the cinema. To my dismay, Julie Andrews was too pretty, too sweet, too twinkly, and too insipid to suit my sense of the stern nanny, and I found the story diminished as a consequence.
This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we atten... more This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we attend to the life story of an author, we might gain a very different understanding of children's literacy. It explores the literate approaches of a single child exploring a single theme the settler culture as represented in a variety of materials accessible to her in the 1950sacross the discourses of television cowboy shows, school and recreational texts featuring settlers and indigenous people, and a British children's novel about claiming the land. The article suggests that this kind of miscellaneous intertextuality is a larger feature of early reading than we sometimes assume.
... Iveson, Ken Jacknicke, jan jagodzinski, Ingrid Johnston, Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Tom Kieren, Jan... more ... Iveson, Ken Jacknicke, jan jagodzinski, Ingrid Johnston, Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Tom Kieren, Janet and Sunny Marche, Elaine Masur, Jill McClay, Bruce and Anna McCurdy, Lillian Macpherson, Joe Norris, Hope Olson, John and Bev Oster, Pat Payne, Teya Rosenberg and ...
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Jan 17, 2013
Indiana University Press eBooks, May 3, 2022
Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel genuinely excited about your vocation. These are bo... more Sometimes you read a book that makes you feel genuinely excited about your vocation. These are books that matter. Mapping Recreational Literacies: Contemporary Adults at Play by Margaret Mackey falls into the category of books that matter. The book let me take stock of the articles, chapters, and books that I have read over the past few years, and it extended how I feel about them, the field of multimodality and "new" literacies more generally. As Turkle (2007) observes, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with" (p. 5). Mackey lets us see how texts make us learn in varying ways while at the same time analyzing what it is about them that absorbs our attention. With eloquence and measured analysis, Mackey offers a detailed picture of nine individuals and their textual worlds and how they interact with other textual worlds. The book serves as compelling evidence of how much we think and exist through objects in our worlds. To keep the concept of mapping fluid, Mackey structures her book around genres of texts and participants' relationships to these genres. She artfully explores this landscape of textual networks by mapping (note the double meaning here) the stories of Ben, Courtney, Seth, and others and the tacit principles of their meaning-making onto the text content and design. Each of the nine meaning-makers carries his or her own unique cultural agency that is foregrounded with particular texts, and the case studies work well as a collective in discussion/implications sections. In the book Mackey takes account of the world of games, of picture books, of novels, of graphic stories-and she does so not cursorily, but rather fixes her gaze on what these texts do and, to return to Turkle, how we think with texts that we love. By invoking Rabinowitz's four rules of reading, Mackey shows us that there are ways of connecting other research frameworks to multimodal theory. Mackey describes the "distinctive individuality of each participant," and like Mackey, I would have expected some repetition in responses, but Mackey's thick description of their textual worlds teased out how different their worlds were.
This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we atten... more This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we attend to the life story of an author, we might gain a very different understanding of children's literacy. It explores the literate approaches of a single child exploring a single theme the settler culture as represented in a variety of materials accessible to her in the 1950sacross the discourses of television cowboy shows, school and recreational texts featuring settlers and indigenous people, and a British children's novel about claiming the land. The article suggests that this kind of miscellaneous intertextuality is a larger feature of early reading than we sometimes assume.
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, Sep 1, 2017
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Papers by Margaret Mackey