Monthly Archives: June 2017

Astrid Lindgren Foundation Research Grant

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The Astrid Lindgren Foundation “Solkatten” was established in 1986. One of its aims is to ”contribute to the teaching and further education of individuals who are involved in research on children’s culture and are capable of conveying the results of their research to a larger audience.”

For this purpose the Board of Directors has established a grant intended to give researchers – ”primarily from abroad” – the opportunity “to pursue research on Swedish or Nordic literature for children and young adults.” Amounting to SEK 40,000, this grant should cover costs for a research period at the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books in Stockholm, which has a research library with a large collection of theoretical literature on children’s literature (appr. 20 000 items). The Institute will provide study space and reference services and will also arrange for professional contacts with colleagues within the Department of Literature and History of Ideas at the University of Stockholm.

The Board of Directors hereby invite Professors and Research leaders at academic departments to submit nominations for eligible candidates before August 21, 2017. The recipient will be expected to make use of the grant before June 15, 2018.

The nomination should not extend two pages of text and should, besides personalia in the form of name, address etc. contain information on the candidate as to:

  • academic education, other relevant qualifications and main research interests,
  • previous research achievements (a separate bibliographical account of academic material and publications should be enclosed but books and other printed material should be submitted only at the request of the jury),
  • language proficiencies (knowledge of one Scandinavian language is a strong merit),
  • the aim of the research period in Stockholm,
  • the approximate time preferred for the utilization of the grant.

The Jury includes representatives of the Foundation, the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books, and the Department of Literature and History of Ideas at the University of Stockholm.

The appointment will be made known before September 15, 2017.

Call for Chapters – Posthuman Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years

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Call for Chapters: Posthuman Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years
Deadline for Submissions: August 31, 2017
Editor: Jennifer Harrison, East Stroudsburg University, USA

I am currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume celebrating the centenary in 2026 of A. A. Milne’s The World of Pooh. As classics from the “golden age” of children’s literature, Milne’s Pooh stories have received considerable attention from critics and fans over the years; however, less critical attention has been devoted to the continuing relevance of the Pooh phenomenon in contemporary children’s culture. As recent critics have discussed, the Pooh stories are complex and multifaceted, written in many different modes and employing a vast array of different narrative styles and techniques; they have also undergone transformation and adaptation into a plethora of related cultural artefacts.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of The World of Pooh, therefore, this volume will explore Pooh in light of cutting-edge children’s literature and culture theory, with a particular focus on the stories as addressing the fundamentally modern posthuman concern with interrogations of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial. Anticipated publication of this volume is for 2020 – the birthyear of Christopher Robin, and the year in which the real “Winnie” was adopted by London Zoo.

Submissions of an interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome, as are submissions which examine the relationship between the texts and modern adaptations and artefacts. Some potential areas of exploration might include:

  • The blurring of human-animal-toy boundaries
  • Explorations of space and place within the stories
  • Adaptations for film and TV
  • The marketing of the Pooh franchise
  • Explorations of time within the stories
  • Material culture and artefacts within the stories
  • Bodies and identity within the stories
  • Postcolonial and ecocritical readings

However, this list is nowhere near exhaustive and I am happy to consider any submission which focuses on the Pooh stories and their role in modern children’s culture.

I hope to include chapters by authors from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of current studies in children’s literature and culture, as well as the diverse relevance of the Pooh stories in modern children’s culture. Please submit a 500-word chapter abstract and a biography of no more than 250 words by August 31, 2017, to: jharriso11@esu.edu

You can also see a digital version of the CFP at: http://quantum.esu.edu/faculty/jharrison/2017/06/20/call-chapters-posthuman-pooh-edward-bear-100-years/.

All proposed abstracts will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion. If selected, completed chapters will be due by December 30, 2017.

All questions regarding this volume should be directed to: jharriso11@esu.edu

CFP – Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

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Call for Papers for the inaugural issue of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

Mission: The mission of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature is to publish scholarship attending to issues of diversity, equity, social justice, inclusion, and intersectionality in youth literature, culture, and media.

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL) is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal hosted by St. Catherine University’s Master of Library and Information Science Program and University Library. It will be published two times a year, with the first issue to be published on June 1, 2018.

For our inaugural issue, we welcome submissions by #OwnVoices (underrepresented persons writing about topics related to their lived experiences) from all disciplines engaging with Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s article “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” (1990). Almost thirty years after its initial publication, how have youth literature and the practices surrounding it (scholarship, publishing, programming, teaching, and circulation) responded to, taken up, and/or ignored Dr. Bishop’s framework and call to action?

Please submit complete essays to co-editors Dr. Sarah Park Dahlen (spark@stkate.edu) and Dr. Gabrielle Atwood Halko (ghalko@wcupa.edu) by December 1, 2017. Essays must be between 5,000-8,000 words, including notes and citations, and use APA Style.

Call for Chapters – Representations of Children and Youth in Popular Culture

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Call for Chapters
Representations of Children and Youth in Popular Culture

Ingrid E. Castro, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, USA
Jessica Clark, University of Suffolk, Ipswich, UK

We are currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume that interrogates the representations of children and young people’s agency in popular culture. When considering children and youth, acts of agency are inseparable from the heightened structures they are forced to work within and around. The complexity of these analyses is heightened further when examining the spatial, material, and familial structures and contexts within which agency may be realized and performed. Placed on them by “well-meaning” adults and the institutions they govern, children will find small and large ways to have their intentions known, desires expressed, and voices heard above the din of what adults (and sometimes peers) think is best for their development, safety, and futures.

While the topic of children’s agency has received some attention in sociology, psychology, and childhood studies, this book aims to contribute to such discussions by considering the under-interrogated domain of representations of children’s agency in popular culture. As such, this volume will explore children and youth’s agency as found in the popular cultural forms of film, television, literature, music, comic books, animation, video games, art, sports, toys, etc. Representations of children’s agency in popular culture can be analyzed from a variety of grounding points. For example, chapters might consider the intersection of agency and:

  • Friendships/Dating
  • Family/Intergenerational Relations
  • Pets/Animals/Nature
  • Age/Time
  • Material Culture: Permanent/Impermanent
  • Gender/Race/Ethnicity/Class
  • Bodies/Sexuality/Disability
  • Religion/Spirituality
  • Education/Work
  • Innocence/Knowledge
  • Space/Place/Location
  • Genre/Era

(This list is by no means exhaustive and we are happy to consider any work which places representation of children’s agency at its center).

We hope to include chapters by authors from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, reflecting the contemporary study of and with children and childhood. Please submit a 500-word chapter abstract and a biography of no more than 250 words by July 31 to: representationsofagency@gmail.com.

All proposed abstracts will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion. If selected, completed chapters will be due by November 30.

All questions regarding this volume should be directed to: representationsofagency@gmail.com.

CFP – Border-Crossing in Children’s Literature

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The Second International Symposium for Children’s Literature and The Fourth US-China Symposium for Children’s Literature
June 14-16, 2018
Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University

The International Symposium for Children’s Literature, first held in 2012 as the US-China Symposium for Children’s Literature, was born at an exciting moment in children’s books and reading in China.

Imported/translated picture books and juvenile literature, along with parent-child shared reading practice, were increasingly introduced to rising middle-class Chinese families and rejuvenated the creation of domestic works. The symposium has become an important venue where leading scholars from China, USA, and an expanding list of countries exchange the latest research on children’s literature, fertilizing the field with inquiries that cross national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

The Cotsen Children’s Library is proud to host the Second International Symposium for Children’s Literature in 2018. Cotsen is a special collection of international historical children’s materials housed within Princeton University Library. It is one of the few institutions, outside East Asia, that house a sizeable and growing research collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books, magazines, manuscripts, original artwork, prints, games, and toys for children’s entertainment and education.

The Second International Symposium for Children’s Literature seeks to facilitate interchange of ideas on new issues in children’s literature research between scholars from East and West. We are particularly interested in two thematic areas.

(1) Children’s literature on the screen
Electronic screens have joined paper to carry text, images, and other multimodal contents that entertain, educate, inspire, and stimulate children. Shelby A. Wolf (2014) challenged us to widen literary analysis “to include the interplay of visual, auditory, and interactive opportunities” offered by digital children’s literature. We welcome proposals that investigate digital picture books or children’s book Apps from dimensions that range from definition to creation, evaluation, criticism, usage, access, response, and impact.

(2) Border-Crossing in Children’s Literature
This is a broad area that encompasses multicultural, international, and translated children’s literature, in any format and genre, including but not limited to East Asian children’s literature, its relationship with global literature, its application in second language education, and East Asian-themed American works.

Submission Timelines

August 14, 2017 — Deadline for submitting abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute presentations (in English or Chinese) to: rMnzN6Ynkfr1X7f32>

September 14, 2017 — Decision notification. The symposium is able to schedule up to 24 presenters into the program.

February 14, 2018 — Deadline for the submission of your paper. The necessity of on-site, simultaneous translation requires that we receive the full text of your presentation with adequate time to have English-Chinese bilingual versions prepared.

Following the symposium, we plan to assemble revised versions of the symposium papers into a book or a special journal issue.

Co-organizers

Dr. Minjie Chen
Cotsen Children’s Library
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections Princeton University Library
Phone: (609)258-9574
Email: minjiec@princeton.edu

Dr. Qiuying (Lydia) Wang
Professor, Reading/Literacy (K-8)
School of Teaching and Curriculum Leadership Oklahoma State University
Phone: (405)744-8001
Email: qiuying.wang@okstate.edu

Shareable URL: http://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/2017/06/cfp/

CFP – Child-Animal Relationships in Comics: Historical and Transcultural Perspectives

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Call for Papers
Child-Animal Relationships in Comics: Historical and Transcultural Perspectives

Many of the most well-known comics protagonists have pets or animal friends, loyal sidekicks in their daily lives and adventures: Charlie Brown has Snoopy, his independent, precocious dog, Calvin has Hobbes, a stuffed tiger acquiring life through the boy’s imagination, Beano‘s Dennis the Menace eventually acquired an equally destructive canine companion called Gnasher, Tintin (successfully eluding the adult-child distinction, but remaining in many ways a child with a degree of agency accorded only to adults) has Snowy. Already the Yellow Kid was accompanied by several stray dogs, cats and other animals, who accentuated the action and the humor. Decades later, the importance of animal sidekicks persist, as exemplified by the series devoted to Spirou’s fantastic, semi-domestic Marsupilami. That these children and their animal friends combine characteristics of both adults and children not only accounts for their appeal to a broad audience but also highlights the complexity underlying these characters in spite of their flattened, polyvalent essence. Thus, for Umberto Eco, “Schulz’s children create a little universe in which our tragedy and our comedy are performed” and “Snoopy carries to the last metaphysical frontier the neurotic failure to adjust.”

Even though child-animal relationships have been a staple of comics production, they remain overlooked by comics scholarship, which is only tentatively broaching the study of children and comics, as exemplified by recent publications (Abate and Sanders; Gordon; Heimermann and Tullis). In expanding on existing scholarship and combining it with studies on picture books and comics as well as animals in comics (Groensteen; Hatfield; Hatfield and Svonkin; Sanders), this anthology seeks to build stronger bridges between the fields of comics studies, childhood studies and animal studies in order to take a first step towards a more profound and holistic understanding of the roles and relationships of animals and children in comics. It is particularly interested in historical studies (from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) and transcultural comparisons of child-animal relationships in comics that engage with one or more of the following aspects:

  • extent of questioning or reproduction of conceptualizations of childhood and childishness
  • relationship to adults and adulthood
  • degree of agency accorded to both children and animals
  • role of eccentricity for both child and animal characters as well as the supporting cast
  • othering and interaction with others
  • representations and roles of family life
  • portrayal and presence of schools and other civil and social institutions

Please send abstracts of 500 words (for a 7000 word contribution) to Maaheen Ahmed (ahmedmaaheen@gmail.com) by 31 August 2017. Accepted contributions are due by 31 January 2018.

The volume will be published in late 2018 by the University Press of Liège as part of the ACME series on comics studies.

Call for Editors for Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature

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Bookbird, Inc., the managing board of IBBY’s journal, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, seeks an editor or editorial team to take over from the current editor whose term of office finishes with the publication of the October 2018 issue. Bookbird is a refereed journal published quarterly by IBBY (The International Board on Books for Young People), and is distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) is a non-profit organization which represents an international network of people from all over the world who are committed to bringing books and children together.

The Bookbird editor(s) must have the following qualifications:

  • An appropriate level of experience in editing a journal or books to publication level.
  • An understanding of the publishing process and experience in working with copy editors, designers and printers. Previous experience in this area will be a definite advantage.
  • Evidence of a clearly defined interest in and knowledge of children’s literature in an international context.
  • An excellent command of the English language and a general ability to work with other languages and writers whose first language is not English. Proficiency in a language other than English will be an advantage.
  • A degree in an appropriate discipline, e.g. literature, languages, children’s literature, childhood studies, publishing or librarianship.
  • A sympathetic ability to work with and encourage authors from a wide range of cultures and different educational backgrounds.
  • Excellent Information Technology skills, in particular related to editing and publishing.
  • An ability to work within and keep to deadlines.
  • Commitment to the ideals of IBBY and an understanding of and empathy with the principles guiding the publication of Bookbird.
  • Have appropriate office/secretarial support.
  • A willingness to work closely with the board of Bookbird, Inc., the IBBY Executive Committee and the IBBY Secretariat.
  • Be available to travel internationally to designated meetings of Bookbird, Inc. and the IBBY Executive.

Editorial duties include:

  • Planning the content of each issue of Bookbird.
  • Sourcing and commissioning suitable articles.
  • Liaising with the Bookbird review panel and overseeing the refereeing process for each article.
  • Working with authors to improve their texts.
  • Working with the organizations and individuals that produce additional content for the journal, i.e. reviews, ‘Focus IBBY’, etc.
  • Editing content and overseeing the copyediting and proofreading of articles and dealing with illustrations and permissions.
  • Liaising with the designer and printer and managing each issue of the journal to print and ensuring that it appears on time.
  • Working closely with and informing the board of Bookbird, Inc. on editorial-related matters.
  • Promoting the overarching aims of IBBY through Bookbird.

The editor(s) are required to attend Bookbird, Inc. and IBBY Executive Committee meetings twice yearly in various venues around the world. These are held in March or April at the Bologna Book Fair and possibly in another location later in the year, usually during August or September. There is a modest budget available to cover hotel and travel expenses to these meetings.

The application deadline is 25 August 2017. Application review will begin on 1 September 2017 and the position will be open until filled.

It is expected that the incoming editor(s) will be in place by early 2018 to prepare the first issue of 2019 (January). The contract to edit Bookbird extends for four years subject to an initial period of approval.

This is an excellent opportunity for an ambitious and creative person or persons with a strong interest in international children’s literature to acquire invaluable experience. It is not a full-time job, and a small honorarium is paid. There is a separate budget for design, copyediting and for translation of articles, when necessary. The editor/editors will need to provide their own administrative back-up by way of office facilities and secretarial help. The editor(s) work from their own homes or offices and may be based in any country.

Applicants are expected to be familiar with Bookbird and with the aims of IBBY.

Interviews for the post are likely to be conducted by Skype or telephone with a follow-up interview in person.

Expressions of interest, including a detailed CV (resumé), a statement about the applicant’s vision for Bookbird and an outline of how the applicant would manage the processes involved in producing the journal are invited from suitably qualified persons. These should be sent by email to:

Valerie Coghlan, President of Bookbird, Inc.: bookbirdpresident@gmail.com
Ellis Vance, Treasurer of Bookbird, Inc.: Executive.Secretary@usbby.org
Evelyn Freeman, Member of the Board of Bookbird, Inc.: freeman.5@osu.edu

CFP – Special Issue of Global Studies of Childhood: Children and Popular Culture

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CFP: Global Studies of Childhood
Special Issue: Children and Popular Culture
Guest Editor: Patrick Cox, Rutgers University

Childhood and youth are always contested notions, but perhaps nowhere more than in popular culture. Popular culture offers representations of children and youth as, among other things, wise, dangerous, evil, innocent, sexual, doomed, and in various states of “in progress.” Popular culture is also the broad site of much child agency, where children and youth produce texts from novels to YouTube channels to websites, blogs, and zines, frequently outstripping their adult contemporaries in technological savvy and communicative capability. Popular culture for children is by turns condescending to the youngest audience, crass, pedantic, and appropriated by adults for their own pleasure. Elements of popular culture are designed to educate and socialize children; others are manipulated by children as political activism. These turns call into question and trouble conceptions not only of “the child” but of “popular culture” itself and propose a compelling nexus of questions befitting both Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies.

In this special issue, authors are invited to consider intersections of popular culture by, for, and about childhood, both broadly construed. We will explore both the impacts of popular culture on youth and childhood and the very real impacts of children and youth on popular culture. All disciplinary approaches are welcome, including but not limited to textual and visual analysis, ethnographic work, studies of children’s popular material culture, historical readings, comparative analysis of texts, and consumer and communication studies.

Additionally, contemplations of the interstices between Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies as academic endeavors are encouraged. The two fields have been in limited conversation with one another, perhaps separated by epistemological and methodological concerns, yet the available data seems like a rich vein for insight. While both fields are multi-disciplinary and continuously evolving, Childhood Studies maintains very clear traces of its roots in social sciences, while Popular Culture Studies is still found more often housed in the Humanities. The two fields each have at their center subjects that have at times made it difficult for them to be taken seriously as sites of academic inquiry. With different questions at their core, how can the two fields interact? Put another way, how do we study this multitude of texts?

Topics for this special issue might include:

  • Popular culture and education, whether intentional or inadvertent;
  • Children’s popular culture as grown-up nostalgia;
  • Youth vs. adult perspectives on popular culture;
  • Children and youth as producers of popular culture;
  • New media as empowering or oppressive;
  • Capabilities for communication and interconnectivity;
  • Adult consumption of children’s popular culture;
  • Children’s consumption of decades-old popular culture;
  • Definitions of youth in popular culture;
  • Nostalgia through revivals and reboots;
  • Social media;
  • Diminishing space between children’s and adult popular culture.

The guest editor welcomes submissions of articles via the journal submission system on its SAGE Publishing site. See “Submission Guidelines” here: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/global-studies-childhood#description. Journal information available here: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/global-studies-childhood

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2017.

Please send any queries to guest editor Patrick Cox at patrick.cox@rutgers.edu.