CFP – Beyond Social Science History: Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World

Call for Papers for the Childhood and Youth Network of the Social Science History Association

We invite you to participate in the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association by submitting a paper or session proposal to the Childhood and Youth Network of the SSHA. The conference will take place November 17-20, 2016 in Chicago, IL. For more information on the conference as well as the general call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website: http://www.ssha.org. The deadline for full panel or individual paper proposals is February 20, 2016.

The association particularly emphasizes interdisciplinary and transnational research, and the annual meeting provides a very supportive environment in which to present new work. The theme of the 2016 conference is “Beyond Social Science History: Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World,” though papers on any other aspects of the history of childhood and youth are also certainly welcome. Complete panels must include at least 4 papers and presenters from more than one academic institution. Other formats, including roundtable discussions and book sessions, are also possible. Please do get in touch with the network chairs if you have an idea for a session but need help gathering presenters.

Proposals can be submitted by means of a web conference management system at http://ssha.org. If you haven’t used the system previously you will need to create an account, which is a very simple process. Graduate students presenting at the conference may apply for a travel grant from the SSHA (http://www.ssha.org/grants).

Let us know if you need any help making a submission or advice about a proposal. If you have any questions, please contact the Childhood and Youth network co-chairs:

Emily Bruce: bruce088@umn.edu
Anna Kuxhausen: kux@stolaf.edu
Ataçan Atakan: atacanatakan88@gmail.com

Possible themes suggested at the 2015 Childhood and Youth network meeting include:

  • child refugees
  • girlhood in comparative perspective
  • postcolonial theory in childhood studies
  • childhood illness in graphic memoirs
  • adoption
  • childhood and the history of emotions
  • parenting and experts in an interdisciplinary world
  • children in revolutions; childhood and war
  • youth and disability
  • queer childhoods
  • performativity and childhood
  • children’s literature
  • state-child relations
  • childhood and religion
  • race, class and childhood

CFP – Trauma as Cultural Palimpsests: (Post)communism against the Background of Comparative Modernities, Totalitarianisms, and (Post)coloniality

Trauma as Cultural Palimpsests: (Post)communism against the Background of Comparative Modernities, Totalitarianisms, and (Post)coloniality
Research Center for Postcolonial and Posttotalitarian Studies, Faculty of Philology, Wrocław University
2-3 June 2016

Call for papers

The trauma inflicted on societies under communist regimes and post-traumatic symptoms manifesting themselves across the whole spectrum of public discourses remain one of the most painfully under-researched problems in the study of Central and East European (CEE) cultures. The conference aims to investigate the multiple forms of totalitarian trauma and of the (post-)traumatic transition period in the region. The assessment of the totalitarian pasts has been the object of divisive and partial political debates, themselves, at times, no more than post-traumatic symptoms at the discursive level. The conference aims to investigate the seriality of trauma in the recent history of CEE (from ghettos to gulags to globalization, from Holocaust to communist and postcommunist mass killings, from concentration camps to immigration camps etc.), as well as the palimpsestic interplay between the different historical and experiential layers of cultural distress.

We encourage potential participants to propose inter-/trans-disciplinary approaches and to devise comparative frameworks which may accommodate trauma studies, transition studies, postdependence studies, postcommunist studies, and postcolonial studies. We welcome transhistorical and transregional accounts of massive traumas of the 20th century in CEE and elsewhere, such as the extermination of the Armenians in the Ottoman Turkey in 1915, the Holocaust and Nazi extermination policies in WW2, the Indian Partition, the Balkan War, or the Rwandan genocide, to name but a few. Attention may be given to the ideological foundation of the breakthroughs of 1989/1991, including the role, contribution and importance of oppositional socio-cultural movements and the emigration (for instance, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Polish October of 1956, the intellectual movements of the 1960s generation in USSR, the Prague Spring, 1968 in Poland (with the ensuing mass eviction of the Polish citizens of Jewish nationality under the umbrella slogan of purging the Party from the Zionist element), the strikes of Polish workers in December of 1970 and June of 1976, Helsinki Accords of 1975, “Solidarity” [“Solidarność”], the announcement of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR in 1985, the Polish Round Table Talks in 1989, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so on).

Suggested Themes:

  • Hidden/forgotten/silenced discourses: topics prohibited or manipulated by the communist regime of /in the official political-social-cultural space including the colonization of Eastern Borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie) by the Second Polish Republic; the politically designed famine in the Ukrainian SSR; the extermination of intelligentsia in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; the Gulags; 1939 and the Second World War confronted with Nazism and Stalinism; collaboration with the Nazis; Stalinist and Nazi crimes; the UPA (The Ukrainian Insurgent Army) from the Ukrainian and Polish perspectives; the post-war massive repatriations/resettlements/expulsions of local populations of diverse ethnicities in the name of mono-national state (and the especially traumatic eviction of the German minorities); the Operation “Vistula”; the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the Berlin Wall and the political division of Germany; the post-war collaboration of intellectuals with the communist regime; repressions of the Church;
  • Mass-media vs. the simulacral totalitarian reality;
  • Post-memory: spectral returns of the past in inter-generational transfer;
  • Geopolitics of memory and trauma;
  • Postcommunist remembrance between reenactment and recovery of cultural trauma;
  • Psychological/Psychoanalytical accounts of postcommunist PTS – Pros and Cons;
  • Traumarbeit;
  • The role of empathy, solidarity, identification, projection in postcommunist trauma cultures;
  • Complications of cultural trauma: anachronism, anatopism, and multidirectional memory [Rothberg], triangular suffering, traumatized perpetrators;
  • Eastern Europe as a site for double/multiple colonization;
  • Layers of historical and structural trauma, traumatic loss (event-generated) vs. traumatic absence (environment-conditioned);
  • Everyday affections and experience in (post-)traumatic societies;
  • Epistemological violence and the colonization of critical discourse in Postcommunism/postcommunist studies;
  • Cultural interference, interpolation, crossways in post-traumatic communities;
  • Postcommunist hollow (wo)men;
  • Silence and verbosity in posttraumatic discourse;
  • The cultural language(s)/discourse(s) of trauma;
  • Trauma storying and the narratology of trauma recounting;
  • Victim and perpetrator cultural profiles;
  • Trauma deviance: trauma queens, the melotraumatic, victimization and conspiracy fixations;

Application: Submit a 250-300 word proposal with keywords for an unpublished paper and a bio-note by 31 January 2016. You will be notified by 15 February 2015.
Conference language: English and Polish
Conference fee: 250 PLN/50 EUR (does not include the hotel accommodation, information on the bank account and accommodation will follow)
E-mail for abstract submissions: cspp.uwr@gmail.com

Assistant Professor in Children’s Literature at Trinity College Dublin

The School of English (Trinity College Dublin) seek to appoint an Ussher Assistant Professor in Children’s Literature. The candidate will have a demonstrable track record of experience and expertise in archival research and working with collections. The successful candidate will join an established team serving exceptionally high demand for teaching at undergraduate level, a well-established full-time one year Masters course, and, eventually, extending the School’s capacity for supervision at PhD level. The candidate will work with Prof Pádraic Whyte on continuing to develop graduate research culture in the field generally. The candidate will dedicate one day per week to working directly with the Library, developing research opportunities in relation to the Pollard Collection of Children’s Books. The candidate will particularly engage in developing the School’s outreach concerning Children’s Literature.

Appointment will be made at a maximum of the 8th point of the New Assistant Professor Merged Salary Scale.

Candidates wishing to discuss the post informally should contact:
Ms. Ruth Archbold, School Administrative Manager, School of English by email: ARCHBOLR@tcd.ie

Applications will only be accepted through e-recruitment.

Further information and application details can be found at: https://jobs.tcd.ie.

Closing date for receipt of completed applications is: no later than 12 Noon GMT on Thursday, 14 January, 2016.

CFP – Archiving Childhood

Archiving Childhood: The 3rd NCRCL Conference
Friday 1 July, 2016
https://archivechild.wordpress.com/conference/

Clothes folded in attic-boxes; play-lists of songs and albums; marbles, shells and conkers lined-up on windowsills; memories of stories and nursery rhymes; tins jammed with ticket stubs; alphabetized book-mountains under beds; postcards and photographs lining walls and staircases; shelves packed with fabric, or skeins of yarn; recipes in bulging folders; sideboards full of vinyl records; a writer’s desk and manuscripts; digital images of ancient books, catalogues, maps or illustrations; art collections in a disused telephone box; nature reserves; grand buildings crammed with objects of ancient and modern life.

The urge to collect and preserve can start in early childhood. Archives hold and preserve the past, yet they can also be virtual, future-orientated and open-source. Indeed, the very nature of archives is changing as our children grow into adulthood; in a digital world, material books may end up in digital archives, rather than sitting on children’s bookshelves.

The 3rd NCRCL conference celebrates the archive in all its forms and recognizes it as an important aspect of childhood culture. We invite scholars to explore the archive as a crucial concept in children’s literature studies, taking into account the physical spaces and practical methods, as well as the conceptual possibilities of archiving. PhD students are encouraged to submit proposals for our special graduate poster session.

Papers and posters might examine the following areas:

  • Archive stories
  • Songs, illustrations, and poems in the archive
  • Theories and methodologies of archiving
  • Objects archives, archives of ideas
  • The archive, the library, the museum, the exhibition
  • The archive as memory, memory as archive
  • The reader as archive
  • Archives in children’s literature
  • Children as archivists and collectors
  • Archival silences
  • Archiving senses
  • Collecting and collectors
  • Digital archiving
  • Cataloguing Beyond the archive

Please send an abstract (200 to 300 words) and a short biography to archivechild@roehampton.ac.uk by February 28, 2016.

CFP – Images of East Germany in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Call for papers
Images of East Germany in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Panel for the Fortieth Annual German Studies Association Conference, September 29 – October 2, San Diego, CA

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, child and adolescent perspectives on the GDR have come into focus again—as evidenced by bestsellers such as Marvel’s graphic novel Kinderland (2014). Equally fascinating as such retrospectively created GDR imaginations are images of the GDR that developed within the socialist state and depict the lived realities of its citizens and particularly of its children and youth.

In the GDR, as in the Soviet Union, children’s and youth literature was a vehicle for promoting socialist ideology. It resisted degenerating into corny, merely entertaining literature, highlighting instead politically relevant topics pertaining to German and Soviet history, proletarian internationalism, and the socialist German state. In fact, GDR society valued their youth as an important component of the state, and consequently literature for young people was considered part and parcel of high culture. Twenty-five years after German unification, it behooves us to investigate the literary imaginary of the GDR also from children’s and young adults’ perspectives – images that accrued during the years of quotidian socialism within East Germany as well as from the outside, and those that were generated after 1990.

This panel seeks papers that investigate images of the GDR presented in literature for children and young adults – written in as well as outside the GDR, and before as well as after the historical caesura of 1989/90. Contributions that examine literary traditions, influences, functions, aesthetics, censorship and Kindheitsbilder within GDR society are particularly welcome. We are open to inquiries into a wide range of genres, including children’s fiction, youth novels, comics and graphic novels, children’s and youth film (both DEFA film or post-wall productions) as well as non-fiction.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short biographical note of no more than 200 words by January 20, 2016 to both Sonja Klocke (sklocke@wisc.edu) and Ada Bieber (adabieber@mac.com).

Please include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any audio-visual requirements for the presentation.

CFP – Into the Bush: Its Beauty and Its Terror

Australian Fairy Tale Society 2016 Conference
June 26
Glen Eira Town Hall, Caulfield, VIC
Call for Presentations
Into the Bush: Its Beauty and Its Terror

“Into the Woods,” is a phrase that has become closely linked to the fairy tale genre. It conjures up all manner of fairy tale images, such as roguish wolves waiting behind trees and lost children stumbling upon gingerbread houses.

But how does it translate into the Australian fairy tale tradition? For our third annual conference, we will be exploring what happens when we venture…”Into the Bush.” Australian fairy tales reflect many of the realities of the bush, while also reimagining it as a space of magic and mystery. Whether it is depicted as real or otherworldly, the bush always encompasses duality – it is a place of both beauty and terror.

We are now accepting proposals for storytelling performances, musical performances, academic papers, and creative readings. We would also love to hear from artists wishing to display and/or sell their works at the conference.

Presentation topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Into the unknown
  • Getting lost, getting found
  • Native flora and fauna
  • Environmental concerns
  • Drought and fire
  • Elements of nature: earth, wind, fire, water
  • Urban and rural
  • The bush as sexual metaphor
  • Fear and danger in the bush
  • Secrets and hidden treasures
  • Havens, homes and holes in the ground
  • A place to breathe in: spiritual nourishment
  • National identity and our relationship to the bush
  • Tales of colonisation
  • Culture clash, culture meld
  • A fork in the road
  • The bush as a liminal space
  • Making your own path
  • Following tracks
  • Blazing trails and dropping breadcrumbs
  • Survival kits (including a storyteller’s swag bag)
  • Stories like wildfire
  • The wildness of stories (and their seeding)
  • Changing nature and ‘the changing nature’ of the Australian bush and the stories we tell there
  • When European fairies and tales re-root themselves in the bush
  • The changing landscape of fairy tales and tellings in Australia

Academic papers will be up to 20 minutes in duration and performances and readings will be up to 15 minutes in duration. All presentations will be offered the option of 10 additional minutes of question time.

Please email your proposal of no more than 200 words to austfairytales@gmail.com by 5pm Friday January 29, 2016.

CFP – Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth

CALL FOR PAPERS
Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth
Inaugural Conference
The Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People
20-22 October 2016
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC

Confirmed Keynotes
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor, Chair of Modern Media and Culture, Brown University)
Steven Bruhm (Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English, Western University)

The Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People invites proposals for an inaugural conference in the field of children’s and youth cultural studies. While scholars have been producing exciting work in the field for decades, that work has found itself positioned most often under the umbrella of other fields, including children’s literature, education studies, sociology, media studies, or cultural studies itself. This conference seeks to establish itself as a biannual event to draw together scholars from these diverse fields to showcase and discuss the astonishing breadth of interdisciplinary scholarship in children’s and youth cultural studies.

We therefore welcome approaches to the study of childhood and children’s and youth cultures from an array of disciplines, fields, and historical periods, including work deploying a wide range of methodologies and theoretical approaches. Themes and topics may include:

  • The Racialization of Childhood
  • Media Darlings
  • The Spoils of Childhood
  • Child/Culture/Chronotope
  • Paradoxes of Development
  • Child’s Play
  • Children’s and Youth Spaces
  • Tender Travelers
  • The International Child
  • Theory’s Children
  • Youth Labours
  • Youth Subcultures and Scenes
  • Methodologies of Child and Youth
  • Cultural Studies
  • Psychoanalysis and/of Young People
  • Reproduction and/as Ideology
  • Archiving Young People
  • The Problems and Futures of Sex-Ed
  • Remediated Childhoods
  • Ecologies of Youth
  • Criminal Youth and Child Perpetrators
  • Animated Childhoods
  • Indigenous Youth Cultures
  • Out of the Mouths of Babes
  • Pedagogy and Its Discontents
  • Sonic Youth: Where Sound Meets Subculture
  • Embodied Youth
  • Fan Cultures
  • Remediating Young People
  • DYI Aesthetics
  • Minor Matters
  • The Limits and Possibilities of Children’s Rights
  • Channeling Youth Cultures: YouTube, ITube, WeTube
  • Cultures of Risk
  • Youth Cultural Production
  • The Emerging Narrative “I”/”Eye”
  • Baby Cultures
  • Children, Youth, and the DSM
  • The Sartorial Child
  • The Energies of Youth
  • Utopian/Dystopian Youth
  • Kinder Gardens: The Child in Ecocriticism
  • Queer and Trans Childhoods
  • Famous Babies

Submission Guidelines

Individual Submissions:
All individual proposals must be submitted by email to admin@arcyp.ca by 11:59pm PST on January 15, 2016.

Please use the following format for the subject line of your email: “Proposal Last Name First Name” (eg. Proposal Woodson Jacqueline). Please assist us by attaching a single document in .DOC, or .DOCX format only with the following information in exactly the order listed below:

  • Paper Title
  • Name; institutional affiliation; position or title; degrees and granting institutions; email address; and phone number
  • Abstract of the content and rationale of the paper: up to 300 words. (Presentation time for papers is 20 minutes maximum)
  • Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography of presenter
  • Indicate any audiovisual needs or special accommodations

Panel Proposals:
Final panel proposals, including proposals for no more than three individual presenters (formatted as above) are due by no later than 11:59pm MST on January 15, 2016. Papers not accepted by panel organizers may be resubmitted to the general call for consideration provided they meet the above deadline. Please respond to all submissions in a prompt and courteous manner.

Please use the following format for the subject line of your email: “Panel Last Name First Name” (eg. Panel Rowling J.K.). Please assist us by attaching a single document in .DOC, or .DOCX format only with the following information in exactly the order listed below:

  • Panel Title
  • Name; institutional affiliation; position or title; degrees and granting institutions; email address; and phone number
  • Copy of the panel proposal (up to 150 words)
  • Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography of organizer
  • Indicate any audiovisual needs or special accommodations
  • Three proposed papers & related information formatted as above under “Individual Submissions”

CFP – Many Worlds to Walk In: Exploring Diversity in Children’s Literature, Librarianship, and Education

Many Worlds to Walk In: Exploring Diversity in Children’s Literature, Librarianship, and Education
Call for Paper Proposals
Deadline for submission: February 15, 2016
A peer-reviewed graduate student conference on children’s literature, media, and culture
University of British Columbia – Saturday, April 30, 2016

Many Worlds to Walk In: Exploring Diversity in Children’s Literature, Librarianship, and Education is a one-day conference on April 30, 2016 showcasing graduate student research in children’s literature. You are invited to submit an academic paper proposal that contributes to research in the area of children’s and young adult literature, librarianship, education, media, or cultural studies. Submissions of creative writing for children and young adults are also welcome. We are particularly interested in research and creative pieces that draw on the broadly interpreted theme of diversity–including research on narratives that depict diversity and the diverse formats we use to create and share narratives.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Diverse theoretical perspectives on children’s and young adult literature (e.g. postcolonial, feminist, queer, eco-critical approaches)
  • Multiculturalism and stories of underrepresented, marginalized, or disabled populations
  • Underrepresented formats of stories for children and young adults (graphic novel, picture book app, etc.)
  • Inclusive programming and services in children’s librarianship and education
  • Indigenous and aboriginal narratives
  • Oral storytelling and sign language storytelling
  • Newcomer, refugee, and immigrant narratives
  • Otherness and trans-national identities
  • Problematic interpretations and definitions of diversity
  • Diversity within genres: boundary-pushing books, films, etc.
  • Cross-media adaptations of children’s and young adult texts
  • Translated and multilingual texts for children and young adults
  • Resources and services for multilingual readers and families
  • Empathy-building through story
  • Imagined identities: diversity in fantasy, created worlds
  • Multiple perspectives on historical events (Holocaust narratives, etc.)

The topics above are a guideline for the proposals we would like to see, but we are eager to receive paper proposals on any facet of diversity in children’s and young adult texts.

Academic Paper Proposals
Please send a 250 word abstract that includes the title of your paper, a list of references in MLA format, a 50 word biography, your name, your university affiliation, email address, and phone number to the review committee at submit.ubc.conference@gmail.com. Please include “Conference Proposal Submission” in the subject line of your email.

Creative Writing Proposals
Submissions of creative writing for children and young adults in any genre are welcome, including novel chapters, poetry, picture books, graphic novels, scripts, etc. Please send a piece of work no longer than 12 pages double spaced. (Anything shorter is welcome– poetry, for example, might only be a page). The submission should include the title of your piece, a 150 word overview of your piece (describe age group, genre, and links to the conference theme), a list of references in MLA format (if you have any), a 50 word biography, your name, your university affiliation, email address, and phone number. Please send to the review committee at submit.ubc.conference@gmail.com. Please put “Creative Conference Proposal Submission” in the subject line of your email.

For more info, please contact ubc.conference.2016@gmail.com.