This exhibition has been inspired by the PhD thesis of Kumarasinghe D. Mudiyanselage titled: The Role of Picture Books in Developing an Empathic Response towards Cultural Difference. While researching his thesis Kumara was an HDR student in the Faculty of Education at QUT. His supervisors were Professor Kerry Mallan and Associate Professor Karen Dooley.

While the possibility of moral persuasion through fiction has long been proposed, the study of the empathic potential of narratives is only now emerging as a major interest in the field of cognitive narratology and to a lesser degree in children’s literature studies. It was not until recently that academics paid much attention to cognitive aspects, such as empathy, in children’s picture books. Kumara investigated the use of narrative empathy in the fictional constructions of migrants’ experiences in Australian multicultural picture books. The study explored the ways in which picture book narratives attempt to engage readers to empathise with fictional ‘others’, in this case, voluntary migrants and forced migrants (refugees and asylum seekers), whose plights and predicaments are reimagined and narrated from different perspectives within a changing social and political landscape in Australia. In order to answer the research question: ‘How do contemporary Australian multicultural picture books draw on empathic narrative techniques to encourage readerly empathy towards cultural difference?’, this study used cognitive narratology, narrative empathy and semiotics to conduct the textual analysis of a selection of 16 migration-themed Australian picture books published from 1990 – 2014. The study found that a common strategy employed by the texts to encourage empathy was through reader positioning. Texts attempted subjective engagement of the reader with the plight of the migrant/refugee character by drawing on familiar scripts and schemas to affirm or disrupt ideas about migrants and cultural difference. The study also demonstrated how picture books furnish readers with accessible means to investigate the complex issues of migration. A desired outcome is that these texts promote children’s ethical understanding and intercultural understanding through imaginative interpretations of the migrant experience in picture book narratives.~