Exploring intersectionality and critical multimodal literacy through a children’s picture book about forced displacement and child refugees

This paper explores how children’s picture books (PBs), through multimodal resources (MRs) of visuals, words, social semiotics, and colour, represent child refugee experiences and foster critical multimodal literacy (CML) in early childhood (EC) education. It argues that PBs are ideological texts where MRs construct meanings around identity, power, and belonging. Through this multimodal ensemble, representations shaped by intersecting identities - marginalised sociocultural, historical, and political contexts - invite young readers to reflect on their social positioning. This paper presents a case study from a broader research project that analysed three Australian PBs about child refugee experiences. The focus text, Out, is a Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year winner for EC (3-5 years). Guided by Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and Social Semiotics, this paper examined how MRs depicting interpersonal and ideational semiotic patterns, and colour construct intersecting identities and emotional meanings. Findings reveal that visual and textual choices produce ambiguous or contradictory meanings that simultaneously humanise and obscure refugee identity. The study presents a transferable analytical framework demonstrating how recognising intersectionality in multimodal meaning-making informs CML pedagogies, enabling young readers to question whose stories are told or silenced and how social positioning is visually constructed.