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Recently, issues of health insurance access and cost have been a dominant political issue in the United States. However, questions about health care (beyond insurance) have surfaced in children’s literature from many nations, for many decades. This edited collection will consider how children’s literature and media can enrich our understanding about health care from many perspectives, through consideration of international comparisons; historical change; disparities based on gender, race, disability, class, and age; and attention to informal as well as formal systems of care.
Essays for this volume might address a variety of topics. The following is a partial list of pertinent topics, but proposals are welcomed on other issues of health care not mentioned below:
How children’s literature addresses (or does not address) the cost of care
Barriers to health care in children’s books, including barriers based on race, sexuality, class, gender, or disability
Differences in care based on visible vs. invisible disabilities
Questions of who gets sick and who stays healthy in literature
Health care broadly defined as access to food, shelter, and security, as well as care for acute sickness, chronic illness, mental health, and disability
How issues of health access are addressed in books pre-WWII (before health insurance in many nations), as well as in historical fiction written since
How children’s literature portrays children growing into caring professions (aspiring to be nurses, doctors, etc)
Child characters as caretakers and healers for family and community members
Scholars interested in contributing to this volume should submit a 300-500 word proposal by January 30, 2019. Please email proposals, and any questions, to Naomi Lesley (naomi.lesley@hcc.edu), Sarah Hardstaff (sflh2@cam.ac.uk), or Abbye Meyer (abbyemeyer@gmail.com).
CFP – Special Issue of The Black Scholar: Black Girls and Girlhood
Call for Papers for Special Issue of The Black Scholar
Beyond Borders: Black Girls and Girlhood
For its 50th anniversary, The Black Scholar is issuing a call for papers on Black girls and girlhood in the US, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and other spaces in the diaspora, including where English is not the first language. This global reach should show the range of the lives of Black girls, including their racialized childhood. It may incorporate where their lives intersect with other girls of color, while also understanding that Black girls constitute a specific and distinct category within the broader definition of girls of color or non-white girls.
In the last few years, we have seen an exciting movement to center Black girls in the US. From 2015 to 2016, the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research was created by a national coalition of institutions of higher education, research, advocacy, and practice with a commitment to supporting and advancing research addressing the lives of women and girls of color. In March 2016, the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls was announced, the first ever caucus devoted to advancing public policy that eliminates the specific disparities facing Black girls and women. And in 2017, Peter and Jennifer Buffet of the NoVo Foundation put out a call for letters of inquiry from community-based organizations working directly with girls of color to build sisterhood and connection and to address the structural barriers faced by girls of color. NoVo is investing an unprecedented $90 million over seven years.
This movement in the sphere of activism and public policy is matched by a growth in scholarly as well as cultural work surrounding Black girls and girlhood. Writings like Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, by Nazera Sadiq Wright (US), Comme un million de papillons noirs (Like a Million Black Butterflies) by Laura Nsafou (France), Black Girls Magazine, edited by Annette Bazira-Okafor (Canada), and others have added to the growing global commitment to Black girlhood itself as well as using it as a lens through which to explicate relationships of experience, knowledge, intimacy, and power.
Submission may include but are not limited to the following questions:
What are some of the ways Black girls lack girlhood, or how is girlhood itself differently modulated in anti-black contexts?
What are some of the psychological and social implications for how Black mothers raise Black girls?
What is Black Girl Magic?
Is there a relationship between the movement for Black girls in the US and Black queer and/or trans and gender nonconforming?
What are some of the systemic and structural barriers facing Black girls?
What are some of the youth development practices that empower Black girls?
What are some of the challenges faced by grassroots organizations addressing the struggles and challenges of Black girls?
How is it different for Black girls living at the intersection of multiple identities such as race, language, a distinct culture and/or ethnicity, and sexuality?
Is there a need for Black girls to build solidarity with other girls of color?
How do Black girls fit into the Movement for Black Lives?
How can Black girls be taught to harness their political power so that they can wield it as Black women at the ballot box?
Submission consists of the following two parts:
First, a 200-word abstract must be submitted and is due no later than June 1, 2019. Authors will be notified by mid-June whether their abstract has been accepted. Please submit abstracts to Shireen Lewis at lewis@theblackscholar.org.
Second, once invited to submit a full article, the deadline is December 1, 2019. Full submission should range in length from 3,000-6,000 words. Word count must include notes and images (images count as 200 words each). Please format per Chicago Manual of Style—endnotes only, no works cited/bibliography. Because we strive for a public, Black/Africana Studies and interdisciplinary space of intellectual exchange, we discourage highly specialized or professional language and encourage open, argumentative work that is well written. Strive for an essayistic tone and target your submission to an engaged, informed but general audience. TBS’s submission guidelines can be found here. Any submission that does not adhere to the guidelines stated in this CFP and on TBS’s website will be sent back to the author and may be rejected.
If you are interested or would like to discuss the project in more depth, please feel free to contact Shireen Lewis at lewis@theblackscholar.org.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Special Issue of Jeunesse on Borders
Posted on August 20, 2018 by admin
Special Issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures: Borders
In an attempt to think about borders at a time when they appear so intractable, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures invites abstracts on all matters pertaining to borders in relation to young people’s texts and cultures for a special issue that will be published in Winter 2019.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, played out most cruelly on the bodies of young migrants forcibly separated from their parents at the United States-Mexico border since April 2018, highlights the continued need to consider the often destructive role that borders play in the lives of young people. In this case, the border is national, the product of the social construction that is the nation, or what we might call, borrowing the words of Benedict Anderson, an imagined community. In other words, there is nothing natural about nations or their borders; rather, nations come into being when numerous strangers scattered across great distances begin to perceive themselves as belonging to a larger body politic. Anderson argues that print capitalism was instrumental to the formation of nations, since strangers could, as a result of learning about others in distant locations in their own vernacular, feel as though they had something in common with them. He explains that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined,” and that they “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6). Despite the fact that they are imagined political communities, nations have real and often devastating material effects, both on those within their borders, who may or may not experience a sense of belonging, and those attempting to cross their borders. For many migrants, for example, national borders can be a site of bodily intrusion. Even in their less physical form, national borders literally obstruct movement, since the movement of goods and capital within a grossly unequal playing field of world trade benefits some countries and decimates others. Such inequity helps to determine the movement of people as well. As many have been quick to point out since the beginning of Trump’s war on child arrivals, immigrants, refugees, visa-seekers, amnesty applicants and other vulnerable people, the U.S. is deeply complicit in migration patterns: Decades of U.S. foreign and economic policies have effectively made many other nations dangerous or unlivable. The current administration’s policy stance on immigration is both tone deaf and history-blind. It is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
As the continuing war on refugees and immigrants in the U.S. and elsewhere demonstrate, young people are often caught at the border or, worse, killed in the borderlands. At the same time, young people themselves may contribute to attempts at policing borders. These borders need not be confined to national ones. Borders come in many forms, including frontiers, boundaries, edges, margins, perimeters, and peripheries. Imagined or not, borders can surround, enclose, encircle, flank, fringe, hem, or adjoin. As these contradictory meanings suggest, borders are infinitely messy and complex despite their pretensions to sieve-like hygienic purpose, cleanliness, simplicity, and even purity.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Borders and refugee children
Childhood on the border; children and borderlands
Children and borders under UNCRC
Borders and carceral culture; incarcerated young people; representations of incarcerated young people
Characteristics of borders in the “global south/north” dynamic and the impact of colonization on First Nations and other indigenous young people
Socioeconomic borders and young people
Borders and racialization of young people; young people and racism
Borders between self and other, child and parent; borders of independent selfhood
Borders and personhood; the borders of personhood
Borders of childhood; the border separating child from adult
Young people and lost borders; imagined or remembered borders
Bodily borders and young people
Borders, sex, and gender; sex and gender in the borderland; children/young adults and transgender; transgender texts by, for, or about young people
Young people and the borders of risk/danger: young people’s negotiation of risk and danger, their negotiation or mapping of public spaces in terms of risk and danger; their performance or embodiment of safety, protection, and confidence in public spaces; their innovative negotiations of identity and morality in such spaces
Geographical borders and young people; attempts to police young people’s mobility in public spaces; borders between adult space and space designated as children’s space (e.g. playgrounds); borders between time and space
Borders between the “homed” and the “unhomed”; precariously housed young people; street-involved young people
Borders between the urban and the suburban and young people
Borders erected between nature and culture; attempts to keep children in nature-lands; young people’s negotiations of rural and urban environments
Architectural borders and young people; young people and design; the role that design plays in erecting or blurring borders between children and adults
Borders and disability; young people’s negotiations of ableist spaces
Formal and informal transgression and policing of borders of legality; young people’s interactions with authority/law enforcement; their negotiation of the borders of legality; the role that support workers play in providing assistance in shoring up borders of legality
Negotiating border control and regulation through youth activism; youth-led social and political movements and how these cross borders and boundaries
The negotiation and transgression of youth subcultural borders
Abstracts are due October 15, 2018
Short-listed papers will be notified on or around November 5, 2018
Final papers due February 1, 2019
Inquiries may be directed to Lauren Bosc, Managing Editor: l.bosc@uwinnipeg.ca
Further information about submission guidelines is available at: http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Intersectional Approaches to Activism and Social Equity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Posted on August 20, 2018 by admin
Call for Papers: 2019 ChLA Diversity Committee’s Annual Sponsored Panel
Intersectional Approaches to Activism and Social Equity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Children’s Literature Association Conference
To what extent can children’s and young adult literature push readers to acknowledge and advocate for more democratic and egalitarian ways of existing in the world? Do these literatures reflect various, overlapping forms of oppression, and do they consider intersecting domains of identity including (but not limited to) gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and class? What voices are included or excluded in this call for advocacy and acknowledgement?
ChLA’s Diversity Committee welcomes paper proposals that focus on intersectional approaches to activism and social equity in children’s and young adult literature. Pioneering scholars such as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw have argued that people and bodies suffer multiple and simultaneous forms of discrimination—these forms of discrimination converge, leading to different, visceral expressions and experiences of oppression. An intersectional approach to oppression and identity therefore takes into consideration the “combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex” and other domains of identity. We are interested in papers that rigorously examine texts that: a) promote and foster different forms of empathy, collectivity, and political engagement; and b) that provide a rich, complex, intersectional approach towards identity and oppression that considers multiple forms of experience and being. We expect papers in this panel to highlight the groundbreaking work that is being accomplished by both traditional/cutting-edge texts and expose areas where this literature needs improvement. Furthermore, we hope that panelists will explore the aesthetic, narrative, visual, poetic, and/or literary techniques that texts implement when representing activism and social equity through an intersectional lens.
For questions or queries, please contact Angel Daniel Matos (amatos@sdsu.edu) or Lara Saguisag (Lara.Saguisag@csi.cuny.edu). Email a 350-500-word abstract and a 2-page abbreviated CV to Angel by September 15, 2018. Notification of the selected proposals will take place by October 1, 2018. Scholars whose proposals are not selected will be able to resubmit their abstracts to ChLA’s general Call for Papers (deadline is October 15, 2018).
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – 2019 Yearbook of the German Children’s Literature Research Society: Fact, Fake and Fiction
Posted on August 14, 2018 by admin
Call for Papers for the Yearbook of the German Children’s Literature Research Society (Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung|GKJF) 2019
Topic: Fact, Fake and Fiction
Since Donald Trump made the microblogging service Twitter the central communication medium of his policy, there is a constant talk of “fake news” and “alternative facts”. Whether we actually live in a “post-truth age” today is an open question, but there is no doubt that playing with fact and fiction has reached a new level of staging and stylisation in the media public sphere.
The case is somewhat different for literature, as a fictional text is precisely defined by the feature that it does not claim to be verifiable in extra-linguistic reality. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared in 1817 that “a willing suspension of disbelief” was the prerequisite for reading and understanding a literary text. But what can the fictional contract between author and reader be if, for example, the histoire of a narrative contains explicit or implicit falsehoods, or an unreliable narrative instance exists on the level of the discourse? How do recipients deal with literary and medial illusions and lies?
The question of the relation between fact and fiction is equally relevant relevant for information books, as each view of the world and the things in it is selective and from a specific perspective. Where are the boundaries between truth and invention, between the factual and the fictional? How far can the reduction of complexity in information books for children go before the simplification becomes a distortion, a deception?
Contributions for the third volume of the open access, peer-reviewed Yearbook of the German Children’s Literature Research Society (Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung|GKJF), should address implications of the topic of “Fact, Fake and Fiction” in its various medial forms (narratives, picture books, comics, graphic novels, films, television, computer games and apps) from both a theoretical and material perspective. Articles may be in German or English, and while articles on German children’s literature and media are particularly welcome, the editors also welcome proposals on other cultural and linguistic areas.
Possible themes and approaches with reference to children’s or young adults’ literature or media are:
The boundary between the novel and non-fiction, and hybrid forms in between
The boundary between feature film and documentary, and hybrid forms in between
The motifs of deception, lie, masquerade, topsy-turvy world
The figure of the con man
The genres of the tall tale, the Munchenhausen-like cock-and-bull story, the picaresque novel, tales of Cockaigne, alternate history, scripted reality
Narrating with contrapuntal image-text combinations
Pseudotranslations between fake and fiction
Fictional authors, fictional editors
Beyond the focus theme, the Yearbook will publish up to three open contributions on questions of children’s literature and media from a historical or theoretical perspective; proposals for these open contributions are also welcome.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for an article on the focus theme or for an open contribution by 10.10.2018. The abstract should provide a short summary with reference to theoretical positions, and name the main literature to which the article will refer.
The article itself should not exceed 40,000 characters (including spaces, footnotes and bibliography), and should be submitted to the editors as a Word document no later than 01.03.2019.
Please send your abstracts to:
We look forward to receiving your proposals. A style sheet will be sent once the abstract has been accepted. The Yearbook of the German Children’s Literature Research Society (Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung|GKJF) 2019 will be published online in December 2019.
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IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies