CFP – Mechademia – Second Arc Volume 01: Childhood

Call for Papers
Mechademia Second Arc Volume 01: Childhood

As the inaugural issue of this “second arc” of the narratives initiated by the Mechademia book series, the topic of “childhood” seems appropriate and timely, for several reasons. Primarily, this new book series expands the vista of the Mechademia series to encompass not just Japan, but Asia and even the world beyond, covering manga/manhua, anime, and gaming, but also the expansions to those art forms that have in the last decade, begun to absorb, innovate, morph, and expand to a panoply of new media, new expressions, new narratives, and new categories of transnational and transcultural work. In addition, these set of art forms which had in the past been considered by most mainstream considerations to be for children, have now been accepted as work that defies age, racial, gender, and sexual boundaries to become all the more globally consumed and appreciated. These aesthetics have influenced the world of fashion, literature, filmmaking, and virtually every game design.

But most poignantly, these works have always, and continue to deliver important narratives about the childhood experience. As a time of discovery, desire, disappointment, and creativity, childhood is the source of the adult experience. These experiences shape the trajectory of the adult in their approach to the world, to other people, and to the creative exploit. The child is perceivable as a “trace” under the image of the adult, as a map that lays out the journeys and spaces of experience and loss, love and despair, discovery and repression that become the founding text of the larger narrative of a life. And because the creative work can speak to the dense complexity of both the times and spaces of these events, the narratives of anime, manga/manhua, and gaming become especially profound because of their specific aesthetic in their ability to tell these tales.

This first volume, then, seeks to lay the foundation of the volumes to come in this series. Bringing forward the works of Mechademia, and expanding the parameters of its approach, the work of the Second Arc, the part of a narrative that deepens the discourse, the mystery, the characters, and the play of the narrative string — will begin by exploring the profundities of childhood, to set upon a new narrative toward maturity. Possible topics cover a vast territory: but we ask not for a simple recounting of the many narratives found in these works, but a critique, a theoretical troubling, and a creative projection from the connections and complications found in the secret places of these works. In addition to narrative considerations and explorations of the “symbolic” child, we would also welcome essays that explore children as readers, consumers, and creators, and the material conditions of transnational production that market to children.

Please send abstracts of 200 words, a keyword list of four terms, and essays of no more than 5000 words to: frenchy_lunning@mcad.edu by August 15, 2017.

CFP – Children and Youth in a Global Age

Call for Papers – Children and Youth in a Global Age
International Conference on the History of Youth and Childhood
25-26 May 2018
The University of Hong Kong

This two-day conference explores the rich potential of making children and youth the focal point of historical research. At a time when historians are placing greater emphasis upon the global and the trans-national this conference asks what roles children and youth played in “intimate” histories and how these connected with larger networks such as those of empire. How, were ideas about childhood and youth instrumentalised and institutionalised in ways intended to underpin authority, nationhood, or different genres of imperialism? How did everyday practices, objects and ties of intimacy inform ideas, practices and structures of youth and childhood shaped in circulation? In what ways did mobility, transfer and exchange shape modern concepts and experiences of being young? The conference provides a forum for the discussion of youthful practices and border-crossing mobilities that produced metropolitan and trans-imperial connections in modern times.

The conference will bring together scholars working across geographical and methodological lines to reexamine histories of childhood and youth from the mid/late nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, acknowledging young people as active co-participants in the shaping of history. We welcome different disciplinary approaches to children, childhood and youth, enabling the exploration of convergences, conflicts, and omissions, new methodologies and theoretical positions. The conference location in Hong Kong offers an ideal site to reflect on the historical reach and limitations of overlapping imperialisms, emerging nationalisms, postcolonial tensions and for the foregrounding of young people and their experiences in global, (post)colonial, trans-national and trans-imperial contexts.

Specific conference themes to be explored may include:

  • child and youth mobility (and lack of mobility), cultural transfer
  • war, disaster, refugees and asylum seekers, displacement and resettlement
  • violence (domestic, communal and state), forced or voluntary labour
  • age categories (child, adolescent, youth) in relation to (unspoken) categories of mid-life
  • sentiment, and histories of emotion
  • education, law, crime and consumption
  • medicine, understandings and experiences of illness and health
  • cultures of children and youth, play and friendship, sexuality
  • young people, the family and home
  • representations in literature and art
  • questions of theory and methodology
  • youthful masculinities and femininities, gendering of “girlhoods” and “boyhoods”
  • institutions, including schools, clubs, welfare centers, orphanages

Proposals are invited for individual papers of about 20 minutes, or for panels including three such papers. Please address questions to youthemp@hku.hk. To submit a proposal for consideration, send abstract of 300 words (maximum) and one-page c.v. by 1 December 2017 to youthemp@hku.hk. Applicants will be notified in January 2018.

There will be no charge for registration.

CFP – ChLA International Committee Focus Panel Session on German Children’s Literature

Children’s Literature Association
Call for Papers: International Committee Focus Panel Session on German Children’s Literature
Deadline: September 15, 2017

45th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference
Hosted by the Texas State University
Sheraton Gunter Hotel, San Antonio, Texas
June 28-30, 2018

The International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association is planning a special focus panel on Germany, to be presented at the 45th Children’s Literature Association Conference, held in San Antonio, Texas, and hosted by the Texas State University from June 28 through 30, 2018. The committee invites paper proposals that focus on any aspect of German children’s literature, including fairy tales, picture books, children’s classics, Holocaust literature and contemporary German children’s literature (including diversity and refugee narratives). The Committee is also interested in proposals that relate German children’s literature to the conference theme of “Refreshing Waters: Eternal Springs, Winding Rivers, and Other Literary Oasis.” (Please see the definition of the conference theme at http://www.childlitassn.org/2018).

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 German Distinguished Scholar who will be invited by the Committee to present at the conference.

Please send 500-word abstracts accompanied by up to 250-word bios to the International Committee, Children’s Literature Association, at vanessa.joosen@uantwerpen.be with the subject line “International Committee Paper Submission.” The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2017.

Authors of proposals selected for the panel will be notified by October 1, 2017. The International Committee encourages those scholars who are not selected for the International Focus panel to submit an abstract through the general Call for Proposals so that German children’s literature will become part of other panels at the conference. The call deadline for the 2018 ChLA conference is October 15, 2017.

CFP – Children on the Move

Call for Papers: Children on the Move
University of Greenwich, London, 21-23 June 2018

In 2015, a shocking photograph of Alan Kurdi – one of the many Syrian child refugees drowned whilst crossing the Mediterranean – seared public and political consciousness around the world. Outside London’s Liverpool Street Station, as well as at transport hubs in Berlin, Gdańsk, Hamburg and Rotterdam, commuters collected newspapers detailing the toddler’s terrible fate from stands located near bronze statues of children hauling suitcases and clutching teddy bears, public memorials recalling the years of the kindertransport and an earlier phase of traumatic displacement. Such global uprooting composes a tough and longstanding feature of the experience of childhood and youth. From the Dust Bowl to the Great Trek; from slave ship voyages to the passages of child convict transportees; from border journeys from Afghanistan to Pakistan, or South to North America; from the more contemporary era backwards in time to the great migrations of the pre-modern world: trails of youthful footprints criss-cross the globe.

Albeit deeply significant, however, the practice and concept of youthful movement encompasses more than transnational journeying and displacement. The related concept of mobility – described by geographers as a ‘hallmark of modern times’ (Uteng and Creswell, 2008) – requires interrogation for all historical settings and eras. Children and Youth on the Move, the second biennial conference of The Children’s History Society, seeks to expand understandings of young people’s historical movements in all their forms. In addition to considerations of movements across borders or thresholds, we welcome assessments of movements big and small, individual and collective, localised and global, permanent and temporary, desired and feared, acted out by and acted upon. We will reflect on movement in relation to individual development (intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical), as well as associated cross-cultural implications. Offering a forum for historical reflections from established and upcoming historians of children, childhood and youth, we also anticipate that our conference will again offer a platform for school-age scholars to reflect on the ways they respond to history.

We invite panel contributions (especially long chronological and/or geographically diverse in collective scope) as well as individual papers on topics related to the conference theme. These might include:

  • Forced and voluntary migrations and removals
  • Kinetic abilities and impairments
  • Young people’s independent mobilities
  • Skills in movement and their social function: dance; running; gymnastics, and more
  • Sociability and popular culture
  • Altered emotional or spiritual states (‘being moved’)
  • Ritual movement in religious communities
  • Social mobility in history
  • Youthful holidays/vacations
  • Mobilisations of youthful discourse
  • Child evacuees, refugees and soldiers
  • Mobile young workers, and associated fears of idleness
  • Engagement with modes of transportation: animals; sail; rowing; bicycles, and more
  • Disease and its impact: quarantine; fleeing infection
  • Moving images of and/or by youth
  • Constructions of ‘natural’ youthful energy, and associated conflicts
  • Young people’s physical engagements with heritage sites and museums
  • Literary representations of movement including narrative arcs and bildungsroman
  • Correspondence and shared cultures
  • Movement, lifestyle and economic wellbeing: nomads; ‘moving house’; temporary accommodation; homelessness
  • Marching and demonstration
  • Transnational childhoods and ‘third culture kids’
  • Migration for education: boarding school and its rituals
  • Escapes and pursuit: slavery; prison and institutional breakouts
  • Welfare: settlement, resettlement and entitlement
  • Intellectual and cultural movements and their impact
  • Future trajectories for researching the histories of young people

For individual papers, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with a 2-page CV, to both M.C.H.Martin@greenwich.ac.uk and simon.sleight@kcl.ac.uk by 1 November 2017. Panel submissions featuring three papers of 15-20 minutes apiece are also encouraged, and should be submitted collectively by the panel organiser. Please state your contact email address on the abstract. Applicants will be notified of the outcome in January 2018.

Please note that our definitions of children and youth are flexible, reflecting the multiple constructions through time of these social categories. We expect the selection process to be competitive, and hence we will prioritise papers directly addressing the overall conference theme as well as one or more sub-themes.

We are delighted to announce that the conference will be hosted at the spectacular riverside campus of the University of Greenwich, a world heritage site. Further details will follow regarding accommodation options, travel arrangements and conference-related activities. If you are based in or around London and would like to join the conference organising committee, or volunteer during the conference itself, please email M.C.H.Martin@greenwich.ac.uk and simon.sleight@kcl.ac.uk to express your interest.