Call for Chapter Submissions – Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Call for Chapter Submissions

Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century
Laura M. Nicosia & Rebecca A. Goldstein, Editors, Montclair State University
Series, Constructing Knowledge: Curriculum Studies in Action
Under contract with Sense Publishers

The purpose of Through a Distorted Lens is to explicate the media as forms of public curricula and pedagogy within the rapidly shifting context of a marketized, corporatized, and commodified torrent of media messages that threatens democratic possibility (Gitlin, 2007).

We seek contributions that focus on the political, social, economic, and cultural subjectivities that are simultaneously constructed, resisted, and transformed through media, and which tackle themes such as:

  • The hidden dynamics of media discourse production in the age of neoliberalism
  • Hypermedia as a form of explicit and hidden curricula
  • The performative workings of power and pedagogy in the curricula of the media
  • The public pedagogy of the media as a fractured lens: Socio-cultural, political, economic, and sexualized discourses
  • The cultural politics and currency of critical readings of media about education
  • Public pedagogy as action: Preparing current and future global participants

Chapters illustrate and advocate for an inter- and meta- reflexivity in which authors interrogate the co-constitutive nature between the media, and the public and private worlds. The essays we seek will strive to uncover what is left unsaid in and through media discourses. Approaches to these essays may be theoretical, pedagogical or conceptual, as appropriate.

We hope to provide readers with chapters that explore and explain what and how the media teach, to and by whom, and for what purpose. While concerned with education, authors move the discussion beyond the setting of formal schooling to uncover the ways in which the media contribute to individual and collective understandings of self and other, and their relations to society at micro and macro levels. In doing, this edited collection moves beyond exclusionary discussions of citizenship to consider participation in local and global geographies against a neoliberal backdrop that marginalizes those unable to, unwilling to, and excluded from competing in the free market (Ong, 2006).

Contributors extend their deliberations back to formal school settings to pose pedagogies that rediscover the reading of the word in the world through multimodalities (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In this sense, the text strives to be transdisciplinary, and is appropriate for use in multiple disciplines and fields of study.

Tentative Table of Contents and Structure of Book

Forward (2500 Words)
Introduction: Mapping the Distortion: The Mediating and Mediatization of Curricula and Pedagogies in Everyday Life (6500 words, confirmed)

Part One: Probing the Media: Contexts, Theories, and Problems in the 21st Century
1. A Fourth Estate for the Mainstream No More? Corporatization, Mediatization, and the Public in the 21st Century (6500 words, confirmed)
2. Public No More: The Curricula and Pedagogies of Privatization and New Languages of/about Learning in the Media (confirmed, 6500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

  • The Myth of Media Democratization: Global Inferences, and the Curriculum and Pedagogy of Surveillance
  • Reflecting the 1%: Selling the Political Economics of Neoliberalism through Curricular Control
  • Discourses of Globalization: Framing the Invisible in Media Discourses
  • The New Rugged Individual: The Framing of Web 2.0, Media Literacy, and “Workplace Readiness”
  • On the Internet, Everyone is Equal: Deconstructing Marginalizing Discourses in the Media
  • Curriculum Studies and the Media

Part Two: Learning to “See” the Curricula and Pedagogy of the Media: Uncovering the Official and the Hidden
5. How dare you make her black! Mediating Images and The Hunger Games (confirmed, 6,500 words)
6. The Spectacle of Mental Illness in the Media: Explicating the Curriculum of Mariginalization (6500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6,500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

  • Media Framing of the Labor Movement within the Discourses of Neoliberalism: The New Curriculum of Work
  • The Political Work of the Curriculum About Education: Media Influences and Mediating Norms
  • Imaging the Public in Education: Media Images of Education from Around the World

Part Three: Transforming Media Curricula, and Pedagogies and the Public
9. “Queering” the Media, “Queering” the Narrative: Revealing and Transforming the “It Gets Better Campaign” and the Curricula and Pedagogy of/about Queer Youth, (confirmed, 6,500 words)
10. A Heavy Burden to Shake Off: Immigrant Youth Challenging Islamophobia in Media Contexts (confirmed, 6,500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

  • Envisioning a Curriculum and Pedagogy of the Media that Serves the Public
  • Beyond False Equivalencies: Defining a critical public media pedagogy
  • Understanding the Media as Curriculum and Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning about the World

Time-table:

February 28, 2014 Chapter proposals due (250 word abstracts)
April 1, 2014 Notification of acceptance of the chapter proposals complete
June 15, 2014 Draft of chapters and questions due
July 15, 2014 Review of drafts complete; Comments sent to contributors
September 1, 2014 Revised chapters due
November 1, 2014 Copy editing and final rewrites
January 1, 2015 Final formatted manuscript delivered to Publisher

Chapter Proposals

Authors interested in contributing a chapter should submit a 250 word abstract which provides an overview of the intended manuscript no later than February 28, 2014 to Nicosiala@mail.montclair.edu or Goldsteinr@mail.montclair.edu.

CFP – Machines, Monsters and Animals: Posthuman Children’s Literature

CFP – Machines, Monsters and Animals: Posthuman Children’s Literature

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature invites contributions for a special issue exploring the relationship between children’s fiction and posthumanism. From Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, children’s fiction intervenes into debates about what it means to be human, animal, ‘natural’, or machine. Indeed, children’s fiction has an imaginative history of conceiving alternative modes of being. Human and animal ethics, utopia/dystopia, anthropomorphism, and ecocriticism would be appropriate topics to explore. Areas of thematic interest may include, but are not limited to:

  • The alien or monstrous ‘other’
  • Animal ethics
  • Anthropomorphis
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cybernetic organisms (cyborgs)
  • Digital childhoods
  • Digital technology and virtual reality
  • Dystopia and utopia
  • Ecocriticism and nature studies
  • Machine animism and robotics
  • Wildness and civility

Full articles should be submitted to the editor, Björn Sundmark (bjorn.sundmark@mah.se), and guest editor, Zoe Jaques (zj216@cam.ac.uk) by 1 June 2014. Please see Bookbird‘s website at www.ibby.org/bookbird for full submission details. Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.

CFP – The Child and the Book 2014: Time, Space and Memory in Literature for Children and Young Adults

Call for Papers
The Child and the Book Conference
April 10-12, 2014
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

The conference theme is “Time, Space and Memory in Literature for Children and Young Adults.” Proposals are invited on the overall theme and associated topics in the context of international literature for children, and also in relation to print and other media.

Apart from being inextricably interwoven in all aspects of life, time, space, and memory are nowadays at the core of many scholarly disciplines. The purpose of this international conference is to bring together scholars from different countries who are especially interested in theoretical and critical reflections on the ways that time, space, and memory are deployed in literature and media for children and young adults. We also aim to promote further the discussion on a series of shared issues and to prompt participants coming from different backgrounds to engage with one another. The hope is to bring about a heightened appreciation of the variety of approaches that are possible in each case. We welcome analyses from different epistemological perspectives, as long as there is an explicit critical-literary dimension to the discussion. Possible themes may include but are not limited to:

  • Definition of time, space and memory: theoretical problems, implications, consequences
  • Travels in time and space
  • Aspects of chronotope in literature and media for children and young adults
  • The articulation of time and space through narrative modes
  • The artistic expression of temporal and spatial relationships in literature and media for children and young adults
  • Utopias, heterotopias, dystopias
  • Marginal, secluded, or secret spaces in children’s and young adult literature
  • Textual transformations in children’s literature through time: adaptations, translations, retellings, metanarratives
  • Children’s books through time: the evolving nature of books for children, the commodification of traditional stories
  • Memory: true or constructed in literature for children and young adults
  • Literature for children and young adults and the past: representations of history, historical novels, historiographic metafictions
  • Genres of life-writing in literature for children and young adults: biography, autobiography, memoir

The proceedings of the conference will be published in book form, in a prestigious international publication to be determined.

Language of the Conference: English
Abstract submission deadline: 5 February 2014 (proposals are now being accepted)
Notification of acceptance: All abstracts will be peer-reviewed, and notification of acceptance will be sent before the end of February 2014.

Please send abstracts of c. 300 words (for a twenty-minute paper) and a short biographical note (c. 100 words) as e-mail attachments (Word format please) to both convenors, Vicky Patsiou (vpatsiou@primedu.uoa.gr) and Tzina Kalogirou (gkalog@primedu.uoa.gr).

3 Positions with Children’s Book Project in Dublin, Ireland

Please see below details of two Postdoctoral Research positions and one Research Assistant position available for a major children’s book project in Dublin, Ireland.

Post Title: Postdoctoral Researcher, The National Collection of Children’s Books Project x 2 (Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland College of Education)
Post Status: 22-month contract, Full-time
Department/Faculty: School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Location: School of English
Salary: €40,885 per annum
Closing Date: 12 Noon on Thursday, 9 January 2014

Post Summary

This collaborative project between the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Church of Ireland College of Education will detail the content of named collections (while also referring to print and archival materials) in Trinity College, the National Library of Ireland, The Church of Ireland College of Education, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU), Pearse Street Library and others.

Applications are invited for two postdoctoral research positions as part of a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project, funded by the Irish Research Council, which will examine children’s book collections, in the English language, in the city of Dublin. The project, which will establish Dublin as the world-centre for children’s literature research, also represents the beginning of The National Collection of Children’s Books. The project is also supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub. The successful candidates will be expected to take up the posts on 1 February 2014.

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Post Title: Research Assistant, The National Collection of Children’s Books Project (Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland College of Education)
Post Status: 22-month Specific Purpose Contract, Full-time
Department/Faculty: School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Location: School of English (and libraries and institutions listed below)
Reports: Dr Pádraic Whyte (TCD) and Dr Keith O’Sullivan (CICE) – Principal Investigators
Salary: €25,712 per annum
Closing Date: 12 Noon on Thursday, 9 January 2014

Post Summary

This collaborative project between the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Church of Ireland College of Education will detail the content of named collections (while also referring to print and archival materials) in Trinity College, the National Library of Ireland, The Church of Ireland College of Education, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU), Pearse Street Library and others.

Applications are invited for a research assistant as part of a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project, funded by the Irish Research Council, which will examine children’s book collections, in the English language, in the city of Dublin. The project, which will establish Dublin as the world-centre for children’s literature research, also represents the beginning of The National Collection of Children’s Books. The project is also supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub. The successful candidate will be expected to take up the post on 1 February 2014.

Details and guidelines for applicants can be found at www.jobs.tcd.ie and then choosing ‘School of English’ in the ‘Search by Department’ drop-down menu on the page.