The University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies and The University of Texas at San Antonio is pleased to announce the 2017 National Latino Children’s Literature Conference to be held in San Antonio, TX on March 23-25, 2017. The National Latino Children’s Literature Conference was created for the purpose of promoting high-quality children’s and young adult books about the Latino cultures and to offer a forum for librarians, educators, researchers, and students to openly discuss strategies for meeting the informational, educational, and literacy needs of Latino children and their families (Naidoo, 2014).

Request for Proposals: In keeping with the recurring conference theme “Connecting Cultures & Celebrating Cuentos,” we invite program proposals that contribute to and extend existing knowledge in the following areas: Latino children’s and young adult literature, literacy development within bilingual education, Latino family literacy, Latino cultural literacy, library services to Latino children and their families, literacy programs utilizing Latino children’s literature, educational needs of Latino children, educational opportunities and collaborations, Latino children’s responses to culturally-responsive literature, social influences of children’s media on Latino youth, extra-curricular biliteracy programs in schools and libraries, and critical perspectives on children’s literature for and about Latinos.

Presentations may be empirical or provide a demonstration of practical applications of Latino children’s literature for current or pre-service librarians and educators. The National Latino Children’s Literature Conference is both a research and practitioner conference and all proposals go through a peer review process. There are two options for presentations.

(A) Program Proposals (Paper presentations, hands-on, workshop ideas): To submit your program proposal, please provide the following information in the following order:

1. The title of your paper/workshop/presentation;
2. 250 word (maximum) abstract of your presentation along with the program title;
3. Indicate the language [English or Spanish]
4. The name of the program organizer;
5. The names of all presenters and their affiliations along with their preferred contact phone, email, and address;
6. Your preferred presentation day (Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Either)
7. Please email this information to conference co-chair Dr. Howard L. Smith at howard.smith@utsa.edu.
8. Please write “Program Proposal” in your subject heading.

(B) Poster Proposals: Posters can be a presentation of research  or  practical suggestions for teachers, librarians, and other educators. To submit your poster proposal, please provide the following information in the following order:

1. The title of your poster;
2. Indicate the language of your poster discussion [English or Spanish]
3. A 200 word (maximum) abstract of your poster;
4. The subject of your poster (e.g., Literature/Media Studies, Programs & Services in Libraries, Educational & Literacy Strategies, Exemplary Programs
5. Your name and affiliation; your preferred contact phone, email, and address;
6. Your preferred presentation day (Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Either)
7. Please email this information to conference co-chair Dr. Howard L. Smith at howard.smith@utsa.edu.
8. Please write “Program Proposal” in your subject heading.
9. Easels will be provided for posters and additional information about poster size will be provided with the acceptance letters.

The deadline for proposal submissions is midnight January 15, 2017  with notification of acceptance on or before January 31, 2017.

Need more information on the conference? Contact Conference Co-Chair Dr. Howard L. Smith at howard.smith@utsa.edu. (Please write “Conference” in the Subject Line).

Call for Papers for Junior Scholars
Symposium
Pedagogy of Images II: Depicting Communism for Children
Princeton University,
March 31 – April 1, 2017

The Pedagogy of Images project started in 2015 with an exploratory symposium that mapped out approaches to studying the process of amalgamation of text and image within the boundaries of the illustrated book for young Soviet readers. As a part of the general desire to translate Communism into idioms and images accessible to children, these books visualized ideological norms and goals in a way that guaranteed easy legibility, without sacrificing the political appeal of the message.

Using a corpus of Soviet-era illustrated books for children from the collections of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, the participants of the first meeting focused on the dual verbal-visual representation of the Communist imaginary and sensibility in early Soviet books. The initial symposium also had a second purpose: to achieve a more nuanced awareness of the ways in which digitization of these works can facilitate more exhaustive mining of the information contained in these rich graphic and verbal artifacts. An edited volume growing out of the work of this first symposium is currently in production.

The goal of the second symposium is to expand the generational boundaries of scholars working on early Soviet children’s books. We invite advanced Ph.D. students and recent Ph.D. graduates from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to submit their proposals for participating in a two-day symposium that will take place at Princeton University on March 31- April 1, 2017.

The proposals should focus on the expanded corpus of digitized materials from the Cotsen collections, which consists currently of more than 160 titles. In the interest of increasing the scope of disciplinary approaches to the visual language of the Soviet children’s book (and to avoid thematic duplications), we ask potential participants to consult the list of the contributions already included in the edited volume.

Please, send a short CV and a 500-word proposal, describing your choice of children’s books, methods, and arguments, which you would like to develop for your presentation at the symposium to pedagogyofimages@gmail.com by December 30, 2016.

Finalists will be notified by January 15, 2017. Final papers should be submitted by March 15, 2017. During the symposium, participants will be paired with leading senior experts in the field, who would provide critique of the contribution and guidance for its future development.

The symposium will be held at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Every effort will be made to offer assistance with travel and accommodation expenses to selected candidates.

CALL FOR PAPERS
CONCEPTUALIZING CHILDREN AND YOUTH CONFERENCE
October 12-14, 2017
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

The Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University invites you to attend “Conceptualizing Children and Youth,” a multi- and trans-disciplinary conference fostering dialogue on young people among and across all disciplines. A special issue of a journal is being negotiated for dissemination.

The conference will include keynote speakers, paper sessions, a special evening event, networking opportunities, and graduate student workshops. Topics include but are not limited to: mental and physical health, bodies and sports, exceptionalities, (dis)abilities, developmental psychological approaches, criminal justice, socio-cultural approaches, race, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationhood, educational contexts, Indigeneity, methodological and ethical dilemmas, social issues, peer contexts, play, work, popular culture, global contexts, and other related topics.

To submit please complete the abstract submission form by January 13, 2017. Submissions may take the form of posters, individual papers, symposiums, or workshops. Notification of results will be communicated by April 10, 2017.

Any questions please contact: chysconference@brocku.ca.

CALL FOR PAPERS: XI ANILIJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
27th, 28th and 29th September 2017, University of Granada, Spain
XI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH ON CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
“Translation, Adaptation and Double Addressee in Children’s Literature: Reflections Converging in the City of the Alhambra”
27, 28 and 29 September 2017
University of Granada

The Spanish National Research Association on Children’s Literature (ANILIJ) will hold its eleventh conference in September 2017 in the city of Granada. Once again, we have the pleasure to invite you to take part in the conference, which, on this occasion, will focus on translation, adaptation and double addressee in children’s literature—issues of great interest which affect both the type of literature written for children and its reception.

We have already confirmed the attendance of two of the most renowned professors and researchers in the field of translation worldwide: Riitta Oittinen, University of Tampere (Finland), and Zohar Shavit, University of Tel Aviv (Israel). Besides, we are organising other complementary activities, of a cultural and recreational nature, to complete your experience in the city of Granada during the days of the conference: round-table discussions (authors, translators and editors), readings, writing and story workshops, visit to the Alhambra, gala dinner, tastings, etc. We will keep you regularly updated about these activities on our blog as they day of the conference gets closer. As mentioned, and as done in the previous edition, we have created a blog specially focused on the event where you can consult and get to know all the details of the conference, such as the procedure for the submission of abstracts and papers, information on the keynote speakers, the members of the committees, etc. In these months, we will be updating different details on this platform, such as the final programme, recommended accommodation, scheduled activities, registration process related issues and all that information you may be interested in to make the XI ANILIJ International Conference in Granada an unforgettable experience.

GENERAL AIMS

The scientific aims of the conference are as follows:

1. To gather together international and national researchers in children’s literature and the members of ANILJ/ELOS (the Galician and Portuguese association) in order to consolidate contact networks and assess teaching and research within this field in Spanish, European and overseas universities.
2. To reflect on how the studies dealing with children’s literature influence education policies, as well as on the possibilities and restrictions they imply for teaching and research development.
3. To analyse the current position of research on children’s literature within the general Spanish context of university research as a whole.
4. To assess the international promotion of the activities carried out by different national research groups, and their impact and inter-connection with other groups.
5. To share new methodological approaches applied to the translation of children’s literature.

THEMATIC AREAS
Among others, the thematic areas of the conference include: Translation and children’s literature; Adaptations of literary works; Fiction and double addressee; Children’s literature and adaptation of illustrations; Children’s literature and gender; Children’s literature and culture; Children’s literature and didactics; etc.

PAPERS
To submit a paper proposal, candidates should send an abstract (150-200 words) to Cristina Álvarez at the following address: cristinaalvarez@ugr.es, requesting confirmation of receipt. Abstracts may be written in English or Spanish and should be accompanied by a brief bio note including the author’s personal details, affiliation and principal lines of research. Papers will be allotted 15-minute time slots to be followed by 5 minutes for questions and discussion, at the end of each session. The main language at the conference will be Spanish, but abstracts and papers may be submitted in Spanish or English.

After their presentation at the conference, the papers may be included in a bilingual volume (Spanish and English) which the Association undertakes to publish in collaboration with a prominent institution or publishing house. Please note that for this publication, authors must follow the style guidelines for the Association’s journal AILIJ, available on our website.

KEY DATES
Abstracts (150-200 words): 30 January 2017
Confirmation of acceptance: 30 April 2017

Article submission deadline:
Spanish: 30 May
English: 30 June
Registration: 20 June

To access to the latest information on the event, please visit the blog of the conference: https://xicongresointernacionalanilij.wordpress.com/.

If you have any queries or comments, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at the following email: asociacionanilij@gmail.com.

SPRING/SUMMER 2017 Issue of SIGNAL Journal
Theme: Sustainability in Young Adult Literature
Deadline: February 1, 2017

Although they are not always acknowledged as such, problems such as climate change, deforestation, pollution, sustainability, and so on are, at their core, social justice issues. They have also begun to receive attention in works of literature for adolescents. Dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and M. T. Anderson’s Feed are often set in worlds that have been ravaged by the effects of climate change brought on by corporate greed. In other works—for example, Marie Lu’s Legend and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder—totalitarian regimes deploy bio-weapons such as the plague against their enemies. Consideration of these issues is not limited to the genre of speculative fiction, however. Eliot Schrefer’s Endangered and Threatened, along with other works of realist fiction, examine how issues such as government corruption, deforestation, and war impact the natural world, threatening humans and animals alike. Still other works of young adult literature identify steps readers can take to mitigate these problems. In Generation Green: The Ultimate Teen Guide to Living an Eco-Friendly Life, Linda and Tosh Siversten outline specific actions they suggest readers can take to combat a range of environmental issues, while Garth Sundem’s Real Kids, Real Stories, Real Change: Courageous Actions Around the World collects stories about adolescents engaged in activist work in their respective communities. In these ways and others, a growing body of young adult fiction and nonfiction is interested in understanding how environmental issues impact young people, and how they are in turn responding to them.

This issue of SIGNAL Journal invites contributors to share their experiences using young adult literature, fiction as well as nonfiction, to engage students in exploring issues associated with sustainability, climate change, nature, and other related topics. How do you use literature to engage students in examining the natural world? What texts—print as well as non-print—do you find helpful in doing so, and how do you challenge students to take those texts up in class? What critical questions do you invite students to ask of fiction and nonfiction that touches on environmental issues, defined broadly? How do you pair works of canonical literature that are concerned with the natural world—for example, Thoreau’s Walden or much of Dickinson’s poetry—with young adult texts that address related issues? How do you create opportunities for students to read young adult literature through the lens of eco-criticism and other related literary theories, and what do you understand them to gain from doing so? In what ways do you partner with teachers in other content areas to engage students in studying issues related to sustainability and the environment, and how do they benefit from experiencing these interdisciplinary relationships? These are just some of the questions that contributors might potentially explore. SIGNAL Journal aspires to publish a balance of theoretical and practitioner oriented articles that are concerned with the study of young adult literature. Inquiries may be directed to Sean Connors at signaljournal@gmail.com.

Call for Papers for MLA Panel
From Gotham to Camazotz: Madeleine L’Engle at 100 and New York City

The year 2018 marks the centenary of the birth of Madeleine L’Engle, author of the classic work of children’s literature, A Wrinkle in Time.

This auspicious occasion is augmented by the fact that L’Engle was born in New York City, the site of the MLA conference in 2018.

This non-guaranteed panel session will engage with both of these issues.

It will examine the past place, current status, and future significance of L’Engle and her work in the year when she would have turned 100. During this process, it will pay special attention to the relationship that L’Engle simultaneously had and didn¹t have with the city of her birth.

In so doing, this panel will trace L’Engle’s geographic trajectory from Gotham, where she was born, to Camazotz, the planetary metropolis from A Wrinkle in Time for which she is most well known and on which her legacy largely rests.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The portrayal of the city in L’Engle’s work
• L’Engle as a New Yorker
• The importance of place, setting, and regionalism in L’Engle’s work
• A Wrinkle in Time as a commentary on urban spaces and modern metropolitan life
• L’Engle’s period as a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City: its impact, influence, and importance
• The mythology associated with the Big Apple in L’Engle’s writing
• The Young Unicorns and The Severed Wasp as New York novels
• L’Engle’s work as a rejection of the metropolis and a turn to the pastoral
• Dr. Alex Murry’s tesseract research and The Manhattan Project
• The depiction of New York City in L’Engle’s novels, especially the Austin Family series
• Characters Adam Eddington, Camilla Dickinson, Katherine Forrester Vigneras from the Austin Family series as New Yorkers
• Geography, topography, and mapping in L’Engle’s writing

Send 500-word paper proposals by March 1, 2017 to Michelle Ann Abate, abate.30@osu.edu.