CFP: The Child of the Future

“…the symbiont children developed a complex subjectivity composed of loneliness, intense sociality, intimacy with nonhuman others, specialness, lack of choice, fullness of meaning, and sureness of future purpose.”

(Haraway, 2016, Staying With The Trouble, p.149)

After living through a once-in-a-generation pandemic, whilst in the midst of a slowly-evolving climate crisis, our expectations about what the future of humanity will look like have been called into serious question. These disruptions have impacted the world of children perhaps more than that of adults. In the wake of lockdowns and school closures, children’s development, interpersonal connections, and engagement with media, learning and play have become increasingly unstable and unpredictable. More concretely, populations are declining around the world, calling into question how many children of the future there will be and where we might find them.

Correspondingly, the ways in which we conceptualise the child are shifting. In parallel to world events, theoretical discourse in the fields of childhood studies have experimented with viewing children as ontologically fluid. Scholars are increasingly thinking outside of the temporal binary implied by the words “adult” and “child”, instead refiguring childhood and the wider spectrum of age as complex assemblages and entanglements; the child with greater time left (Beauvais, 2018 p.77), the child enfolded in matter and meaning across time (Barad, 2007), the human and the nonhuman inextricably linked (Haraway, 2016).

This shift can be seen in children’s literature and media studies’ more recent interest in posthumanism, new materialism, spectrality and other adjacent theories which read childhood through the more abstract complication of animals, plants, objects, texts and technologies.

This conference aims to bring together these burgeoning conversations that are increasingly evident across disciplines at a time where these connections are more relevant than ever before. We are looking to explore the many and varied ways that scholars may conceptualise the idea of ‘the child of the future’. We hope to hear papers that interpret the topic in many different ways, those that consider the ‘child of the future’ as both real and imagined, actual and fictional.

In addition to a focus on the child of the future, proposal topics may include (but are in no means limited to):

  • Posthumanism
  • The Anthropocene and/or Chthulucene and/or Capitalocene
  • New Materialism
  • Nonhuman modes of being (animal, plant, microorganism, robot, etc.)
  • Spectrality and hauntology
  • Environments, bodies and spatiality
  • Spirituality/religion
  • Engaging with the past/ theorising the future
  • Adaptation and transformation
  • Memory
  • Sci-fi, fantasy and non-mimetic media
  • Technology and materiality
  • Intergenerationality
  • Pedagogy

We welcome papers of a duration of 20 minutes that will be arranged into thematic panels. Papers that blend the creative and the critical will be considered, and interdisciplinary papers and panel proposals are also encouraged. We particularly wish to offer opportunities for graduate students and other early-career scholars. If you fall into this category, please indicate in your application if you wish to be considered for one of our funded conference bursaries.

Please send an abstract of 300 words, a short biography (100 words) and 5-8 keywords in a Word document to thechildofthefuture2022@gmail.com with the following subject line: ‘The Child of the Future abstract’.

Submissions must be received by 5th January 2022. Notification of acceptance will be sent out at the start of February 2022.

University of Cambridge, St John’s College | Thursday June 30th – Friday July 1st, 2022

In line with COVID-19 guidance and regulations, we anticipate that this conference will go ahead as planned in person at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. However, we are conscious of the safety of all speakers and attendees and as such will update you of any changes should they arise.

Thank you for considering this CFP, and we look forward to hearing from you!

NEWS: Invitation to Lectures by Marnie Campagnaro and Anastasia Ulanowicz

On behalf of the members of The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Wrocław, members are invited to two online lectures, Professor Marnie Campagnaro’s Architecture and Interior Design in Picturebook, and Professor Anastasia Ulanowicz’s Bloodlands Fiction, the fifth and sixth talks in the “International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies” series.

Professor Campagnero’s lecture will be held on December 1, 2021, at 6 p.m. Warsaw time.

If you are interested in taking part in the lecture, please contact us by email by 29 November at the following address: mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl

Professor Ulanowicz’s lecture will be held on December 8, 2021, at 6 p.m. Warsaw time.

 

NEWS – Seminar: PiCoBoo: A Research Project and an Open-Access Database with Dr. Francesca Tancini

Date: Thursday 11 November
Time: 5:00pm GMT
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/picoboo-a-research-project-and-an-open-access-database-tickets-181644602897

Dr. Francesca Tancini, University of Newcastle, will be speaking to the University of Reading’s Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing Research Seminar on her project: “PiCoBoo: a research project and an open-access database”

The PiCoBoo project aims to assess the significance of 19th-century European picture books, printed in colour for children, as a catalyst for major cultural and social changes.

It makes accessible a large corpus of picture books, so far dispersed across countries and institutions, only partially retrievable through local catalogues, not always correctly described and in a not-uniformed way. The database now provides almost 600 books, with hundreds of digitised images included and not retrievable elsewhere on the web.

PiCoBoo project has been hosted by the Children’s Literature Unit at Newcastle University, in partnership with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books, and with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/picoboo-a-research-project-and-an-open-access-database-tickets-181644602897

NEWS: Modernity, Memory, and Asian Childhood International Conference

Dear IRSCL colleagues,

You are cordially invited to join an international conference to be held on November 20, 2021 at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. It is now organized as a virtual conference for all English sessions.

For more details, please visit the conference website: http://english.scu.edu.tw/tclra/2021conf/

Registration is free, but is required to attend the conference.  Register by November 10, 2021 at:  http://english.scu.edu.tw/tclra/2021conf/index.php/registration/

CFP: Dreams

In past years, the International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association has organized a special panel focusing on children’s and young adult literature from a specific country at the conference. This year, we are hosting a themed panel at the ChLA annual conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia from June 2-4.

To that end, we seek paper proposals on the topic of “Dreams” that approach this theme from an international, non-Euro-American perspective. Preference will be given to papers that examine texts originally written in languages other than English and/or created by authors and illustrators from communities beyond Anglo-American children’s and YA publishing traditions, including global indigenous communities. Topics could include but are not limited to the following:

  • Dreams as the vision of what is possible, including political / social change
  • Children’s dreams, aspirations or nightmares (literal and figurative)
  • Adults’ dreams or visions about childhood
  • Dreams as expressions of cultural desires, aspirations or fears
  • Dreams as a narrative device (“it was all just a dream”)
  • Dreams and storytelling as imaginative work
  • Freudian understandings of dreams as “wish fulfillment” as well as other interpretive paradigms that come from non-western traditions
  • Symbolism and meanings of dreams in various cultures (e.g. Dreamtime)
  • Dreams of other places, spaces, and opportunities
  • Dreams as a way of memorializing/recovering the past
  • Dreams as a way to make sense of or to re-imagine selfhood
  • Dream worlds vs lived realities
  • Inter-generational dreams/visions
  • Dreamers and visionaries

Since there might be an option to present at the conference virtually, we encourage scholars and students who are based outside of North America to submit proposals.

Please submit a 350-word abstract and a 200-word biographical statement with the subject line, “ChLA 2022 Themed Panel Submission” to nithya.s@txstate.edu by 11:59 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) September 30, 2021.

Two abstracts will be selected, and the authors will receive “The ChLA International Honor Award,” which includes a grant of $500 each to cover expenses related to the conference (such as the membership and registration fees). Those papers selected for the International Focus panel will accompany a presentation by the Distinguished Scholar who will be invited by the committee to present at the conference.

Authors of proposals selected for the panel will be notified by October 10, 2021.  The International Committee encourages those scholars who are not selected for the Themed Panel to submit an abstract through the general Call for Proposals so that international children’s literature will become part of other panels at the conference.

The deadline for general submission to the ChLA 2022 Annual Conference is October 15, 2021.

CFP: “City in a Forest”

Atlanta holds any number of monikers—Hollywood of the South or the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, for example. Indeed, local residents also refer to Georgia’s state capital as the “City in the Forest.”

And so, for ChLA 2022: Atlanta, the first in-person meeting of the Children’s Literature Association since 2019, we’d like to grapple with the questions, contradictions, and possibilities that arise in considering the concept of a “City in a Forest” within the context of young people’s literature and media.

Children’s literature scholars have long grappled with the ways in which young people have been associated with the natural world, whether that be to nostalgize an idyllic, pastoral past or to emphasize youth’s wild, untamed behavior. But children are also used in culture as markers of the future, which is often conflated with progress, industry, and metropolitan spaces.

As Rebekah Sheldon notes, “The child became legible not only as a record of the past but as the recipient of a specific biological inheritance freighted with consequences for the future.” The figure of the child, in other words, becomes a site of promise, possibility, and protection.

Critics have explored the implications of an ideological nexus between city and nature on many fronts, from perspectives of environmentalism to that of hybridity. As we ponder relationships between the city and the forest within and beyond children’s literature, we can also look to and learn much from Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and other frameworks that explore the ecosystems of individual and social identity.

We see this in Melissa Jenkins’s study of the flying motif in Black picture books. Jenkins identifies how characters make sense of the divides between country and city, past and future in the ways that they “map, mark, and delineate as part of pointed socioeconomic critiques, responding to the difficulties of urban life by expanding the accepted geographies of black experience and politicizing projects of urban ‘uplift.’” While in The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis Council), the central characters travel through trees surrounding dystopian urban spaces, finding and creating renewal most profoundly amid a type of Indigenous “city in the forest” where they join like-minded resisters, explains Patrizia Zanella.

Such narratives exist within and around Atlanta, a city marked by contradiction, trauma, and prosperity. It wrestles with how to negotiate its past with its present, and continues to experiment with future paths that will both support a diverse metropolitan area and embrace its natural environs. For instance, Clarkston, a suburb of Atlanta, has the highest number of refugees per capita in the United States, and many local refugee organizations focus their efforts on creating community spaces that take advantage of Atlanta’s “forest”—community gardens, co-ops, and summer camps for children. But stories of the refugee experience also take into account the hardships of landscape, such as Linda Sue Park’s Long Walk to Water or Fabio Geda’s In the Sea there are Crocodiles. Nature can be a source of terror and solace in stories of refugees, and we encourage papers that explore this unique Atlanta population.

We invite proposals that examine, from any number of angles or interpretative lenses, this concept of “City in a Forest” within children’s and young adult literature, media, and culture. Papers might address:

  • Utopian and dystopian spaces
  • Trees as characters or central story locations
  • Nature and nostalgia
  • Literature or media about or set in Atlanta
  • Atlanta as liminal space
  • International and farmer markets within cities
  • Afrofuturism
  • Migrant experiences in urban and rural settings
  • Steampunk
  • Food justice and accessibility
  • Reproductive futurity
  • Racial and queer ecologies
  • Ideas of hybridity
  • Nature as an idyllic past or future
  • Fantasy as a space that explores/complicates nature
  • Garden and greenery landscapes in the city
  • Post-apocalyptic landscapes and cityscapes
  • Stories of the displaced or refugee populations
  • Posthumanism and ecopoetics
  • Relationship between urban and rural in Civil Rights Movement

Additionally, given the welcome response to the introduction of pedagogy posters at ChLA 2021, we invite proposals for these for ChLA 2022 as well. Pedagogy poster proposals may be submitted in addition to or instead of paper proposals. They should focus on specific approaches to teaching children’s / YA literature or media and provide take-away ideas for adoption/adaptation into the classroom.

Proposals may be submitted here.

Deadline for proposals: October 15, 2021

The 49th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference, “City in a Forest,” will take place June 1 – June 4, 2022 in Atlanta, GA.

Please note that papers previously accepted for Seattle 2020 may be presented in Atlanta or may be held over for Seattle 2023, which retains the same 2020 CFP.

CFP: 53rd Annual Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature

We are excited to be organizing a face-to-face conference for March 18–19, 2022 after having had an online conference last year. Our 53rd Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature will have a great line-up of authors and illustrators, as well as an exciting list of sessions.

The two-day conference will be held at the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel and is organized by the Department of Language and Literacy Education.

But we need you to make it happen!

We are now accepting proposals for breakout sessions at our 2022 conference. We welcome submissions from teachers, school library media specialists / librarians, graduate students, college faculty, authors, illustrators, and others with knowledge and enthusiasm to share about the field of children’s / young adult literature.

Abstract is limited to 50 words (this is what will appear on the conference program).

Paper or presentation description is limited to 250 words.

All papers must be original.

While breakout sessions are open regarding theme, they usually address one of these four areas:

  • Children’s / YA literature in the classroom
  • Children’s / YA literature as life inspiration
  • Public libraries and children’s / YA literature
  • Inquiry into children’s / YA literature

NOTE: Acceptance notification will be available early December 2021. If your proposal is accepted, all presenters and co-presenters are required to register for the conference (including registration cost) by the early registration deadline (date TBD) in order to be included on the program and present at the conference.

Please submit your proposals here.  We look forward to receiving your proposals!

Deadline: October 31, 2021

NEWS: IRSCL Congress Aesthetic and Pedagogic Entanglements

We are happy to announce that registrations for the upcoming congress of our research society, Aesthetic and Pedagogic Entanglements, are now open.

Those of you who are IRSCL2021 delegates will receive an announcement similar to this one, but in this opportunity, we wished to reach out to IRSCL members who did not submit a proposal for the congress.

IRSCL2021 will take place virtually from October 19 to the 29th. The event will be powered by Whova, a virtual platform that specializes in participative gatherings with similar magnitudes to our congress. Whova will provide participants with access to the event’s schedule in their corresponding timezone, with the chance of adding presentations to their personal calendars, and also feature an array of social activities that go beyond zoom presentations (discussion forums and user-led events, among other features to be announced further on).

IRSCL members will be entitled to register as audience in the congress for free, but you do need to register: please visit our registration page, and fill in the registration form entering the discount code “IRSCLMEMBER21.”

The deadline for audience registrations is October 10th!

If you have any questions about the registration process, do not hesitate to contact Congress Coordinator Ja’nos Kovacs (jskovacs@uc.cl). He will be happy to assist you.

We are looking forward to seeing all of you in October!

CFP: Players and Pawns: Political Childhoods, Political Children

Special Session, MLA (Modern Language Association) 2022
Location/Dates: Washington DC, 6-9th January, 2022
Deadline for submissions: March 5, 2021
Organization: Children’s Literature Division, MLA
Contact email: mgreenb6@uwo.ca

“Think of the children,” we say, again and again using the child as the object of political discourse. Policies and laws governing everything from education and public health to minimum wage and sexual relations are enacted with the intent of protecting children and improving their lives. So often, however, children are denied the ability to be perceived and accepted as political agents themselves. In fact, when children and teens, such as Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Mari Copeny (Little Miss Flint), and David Hogg, among many others, become involved in politics, adults often criticize their efforts, arguing that children possess neither the experiences nor the knowledge to be involved in political discussions or to advocate for policy changes.

As children’s and YA literature affirms, children and teens both are used for the political gain of others and are themselves interested in politics. Drawing on children’s and YA literature, as well as films and other forms of youth media, this panel considers what it means to be a political child and/or how children are used by politicians. In other words, in what ways are children players in the game of politics, and in what ways are they pawns?

Papers might consider the following questions:

  • What are the politics of the child?
  • How is the political child constructed by adults? By children?
  • What kinds of childhood are instrumentalized by people in positions of power, and to what end?
  • What does it mean to “fight for the children?” How does the desire to protect children affect political children? What is the politics of childhood without the guise of futurity?
  • What is the child’s role in politics? Who is included and excluded from being a political child?
  • In what ways do children and teens resist political power? How might children politicize themselves?
  • Which possibilities or which limitations of children’s agency are inherent in political discourse?
  • How does the political child collaborate with the political adult?
  • What is the connection between anti-fascism and children’s and youth media?

Please submit 300-word abstracts and a brief biography to Miranda Green-Barteet (mgreenb6@uwo.ca) by March 5, 2021.

CFP: Food and/in Children’s Culture

National, Internatinal and Transnational Perspectives
Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Comparative Studies
Palazzo Cosulich – Zattere Dorsoduro, 1405, 30123 Venezia – Italy
6 – 9 April 2021

Food is a prominent element in children’s literature and culture. As Carolyn Daniel puts it, by reading about food children learn “what to eat and what not to eat or who eats whom” (2006, 4). In children’s narratives food can be, simultaneously, a mark of national identity, and a bridge between cultures, through which children can both learn about their own national culture and encounter other cultural identities and experiences. It can be a mark of kinship, but also a mark of difference and monstrosity, a symbol of desire, but also a vehicle of danger and death. Food scenes at times represent moments of intense pleasure for characters in movies, books, and different kinds of performances and, therefore, vicariously, for the reader/spectator, who becomes involved in what Gitanjali Shahani has called “food ekphrasis” (2018, 3) and consumes fictional banquets through vivid descriptions. At other times, these vivid descriptions may place before the reader/spectator/listener foods that are decidedly unappealing, at times monstrously so; and in some cases they may represent, equally vividly, scenes of hunger, poverty, and longing for unreachable food.

There are indeed few elements so multifaceted, counterintuitive, and contradictory as food, and its role in children’s literature and culture usually bears heavy ideological, political, and/or cultural connotations. This conference invites broad, interdisciplinary interpretations of this theme encompassing, but not limited to:

  • Children as eaters and/or food
  • Medicine and science: diets, “clean vs un-clean” eating, nutrition
  • Food and gender
  • Picturebooks: picturing food and food fantasies/nightmares
  • Period-specific perspectives (Early Modern, Eighteenth Century, Victorian and Neo-Victorian, post-War, contemporary …)
  • Food and the child body: normalized, codified, modified, rejected/accepted
  • Trans/national perspectives
  • Images of food and intercultural dialogues/issues
  • The press (childcare, cooking and house management magazines, children’s periodicals)
  • Eating at home and abroad (in institutions [hospital, workhouse, school …], in different countries, picnics, the family meal, feasts and special occasions …)
  • Magical food
  • Food fantasies/nightmares
  • Children, food, and the environment: climate change, ecocriticism, access to food based on class/nationality …
  • Expressing concern about food: alcoholism and temperance, food disorders, poverty and hunger

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

Emeritus Professor Peter Hunt, Cardiff University (UK)
Professor Nicola Humble, University of Roehampton (UK)
Professor Björn Sundmark, Malmö University (Sweden)
Dr Zoe Jaques, University of Cambridge (UK)

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words for 20-minute papers and a 100-word biography to the Conference Organizers, Dr Anna Gasperini and Professor Laura Tosi, at foodchildrenculture2021@gmail.com by 30 November 2020.
For further information, please visit the website FED – Feeding, Educating, Dieting

Note: the conference is envisaged as an in-person event; should this not be possible, an on-line version will be organized. We will provide updates about this in due course.