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Remembering, remembrance, memory, and forgetting shapes children’s literature: authors’ personal memories of childhood that inform their texts or are preserved in cross-written texts or memoirs; larger cultural memories adults wish to pass down to future generations; and events, incidents, and topics elided or “forgotten” in the canon. Indeed, the genre of children’s literature relies on the remembrance, reinterpretation, or revision of past works. This panel invites papers considering all aspects of memory in children’s and young adult literature (historical, literary, nostalgic, patriotic, personal, repressed, traumatic, etc.) as well as papers that explore how literary memory shapes the canon of children’s and YA literature through intertextuality, another site of memory.
Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:
Adult memories of childhood mined from archives, letters, diaries, memoirs, libraries, school classrooms, or childhood reading practices
Cultural and historical events remembered, forgotten, elided, or revised in works of children’s and young adult literature
The role of remembrance and nostalgia in canon formation: forgotten texts that are making a comeback (e.g., Henty’s novels in the homeschooling community) or texts that should be remembered
Genre: historical, theoretical, or institutional practices of remembering and forgetting what constitutes children’s literature
Traumatic memories: how they’re represented in individual works as well as how they’re presented to younger readers
Iconic texts about remembrance: anything to do with war, but also “holiday” books and texts about important historical events
Please send 500-word proposals by March 15 to Karin Westman at westmank@ksu.edu.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Special Issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly: The Child
Posted on February 18, 2014 by admin
Call for Papers, Poetry and Prose
WSQ Special Issue, Spring 2015: CHILD
Guest Editors: Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane
Children have always been fraught subjects for feminist scholarship. Women are alternately infantilized and subsumed in service of children. Indeed, nowhere are women’s rights more assiduously attacked than around the question of their biological capacity to bear and raise children. Our concerns in this issue of WSQ, though, are children and childhood themselves: representations of children, children’s experiences, and children’s place in the world.
Recent scholarship in childhood studies has taken on core assumptions around children, especially children’s innocence and their removal from the realm of work and financial gain. And yet children play a crucial role in the global economy. As consumers, children represent an immense market. As producers and workers, children manufacture goods of every kind. Children constitute a significant stream of bodies for trafficking networks of domestic and other kinds of labor, including sex work. And children tried as adults populate prison systems around the world, especially in the United States.
Children’s identification with potentiality and futurity has reached proportions unimaginable only decades ago. Developments in prenatal imaging technology has solidified the “fetal child” as a subject, and trends in neuroscience have renaturalized the concept of binary gender in newborns and young children. At the same time, children are identifying as queer and transgender at earlier ages. How do we understand children’s gendered and erotic desires? How is childhood gender expression made to stand in for or retrospectively understood as sexuality, and how are childhood sexual desires precursors to and divergences from adult sexual identities?
Finally, what is the affective work that children do? They are supposed to give adult lives meaning and pleasure, to represent a world larger than the one at hand, to be the source and recipients of love. How is this affective work inflected by nation, race, class, and gender? Which children have affective value and which ones are outside the ecology of care and love?
Some of the topics we’re interested in exploring from a feminist/gender perspective include, but are not limited to:
Children and the Nation
The Child as a Consumer
Children as Economic Actors
The Child and Memory
The Child and Trauma
The Racialization of Children
Children in the Carceral State
Children and Social/Digital Media
Adoption: Transnational and Domestic, Transracial
Rights of the Child and Human Rights
Scholarly articles should be sent to guest issue editors Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane at WSQChildIssue@gmail.com by April 7, 2014. Please send complete articles, not abstracts. Submissions should not exceed 6,000 words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with the formatting guidelines at http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor at WSQpoetry@gmail.com by April 7, 2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information.
Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s fiction/nonfiction editor at WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com by April 7, 2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.
Posted in calls for papers
IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies