"Man får arbeta med det som finns" : en studie kring barnbibliotekariers förutsättningar för att arbeta normkritiskt

Sammanfattning: This master’s thesis examines the norm-critical awareness among children librarians in Swedish public libraries and how the practical everyday work with current literature for children function with this awareness. By adopting a norm-critical approach you have the ability to observe the different types of norms that you can find among us and that effects the way we see the world. Some of these norms can be seen as stereotypical and offensive to a lot of people, and in some cases even racist. During the last couple of years, in Sweden there has been debates concerning racist stereotypical images in children books, among others Lilla Hjärtat and Tintin in the Congo. With these debates discussions has been raised concerning how public libraries should act in this kinds of situations. Parallel with these discussions there has also been debates concerning the low reading comprehension among children and young adults. Some scientific research has found a connection between this reading comprehension and children’s need of identification. The aim with our study is to examine how different norms is represented in popular children literature and also how children librarians relate to these norms in their work in supplying this literature to children. The study is based on text analyses of four of the most borrowed titles for children in the age nine to twelve, and interviews with children librarians. In our analyses we have taken a queer theoretical approach, when this gives us the tools we need to examine norms in a larger scale. Some of the norms we have examined are gender, sexuality, race and class. Our study shows that the selected books contains reoccurring stereotypical images of several of these norms and in the interviews with the children librarians some of them confirm these results as representative of the publication of childrens literature. The publication has been altered in the latest years, but the range is still far from good. All of the informants do feel that identification has a great impact on childrens reading, but the norm-critical awareness differs among the informants. The ones that do have an awareness finds it challenging because of external power structures, and that they have to make the best out of the situation. They say that different books can be useful in different situations, and that they have to find methods to work with these in a norm-creativity way.