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CFP: Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture (an edited collection)
Deadline for abstract submissions: December 1, 2021
Contact: Željka Flegar, flegarzn@longwood.edu; Jennifer Miskec, miskecjm@longwood.edu
In Place: A Short Introduction, human geographer Tim Cresswell argues that “place” is space that people have made meaningful. While landscapes can be observed objectively, and spaces may be abstract, places are imbued with personal and cultural meaning and attachment. The landscapes, spaces, and places of children’s culture are varied and diverse. Here we propose a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture.
We invite submissions for an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the changing landscapes of contemporary children’s literature, media, and culture, from methodology to content. In particular, we seek explorations of “place” in all of its forms: the places of fiction; physical and virtual children’s places; finding one’s place in children’s culture; the new and expanding places of children’s culture; the places from which scholars approach, assign value to, and collaborate on children’s culture; and even children’s culture’s place in popular culture.
It is our aim to build on the impressive body of international research on children’s literature, media, and culture by considering essays on literary and media phenomena as well as individual case studies focused on the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the places and spaces that make up today’s children’s cultural geography in a time of change.
The place of children’s culture in popular culture
Cross- and transmediated places and spaces (e.g., amusement parks, theme parks, film sets, virtual tours)
Children’s book festivals and children’s places
Digital era access and collaboration
Ecocriticism and children’s literature and culture
Expanding landscapes: new places, cartographies, and pathways
New ways of seeing children’s literature through
By featuring a variety of forms and approaches to storytelling, including different literary and media formats, modalities, and practices, we hope to gain a variety of insights into the changing landscapes of children’s culture, its spaces, places, and contexts. We would especially like to encourage interdisciplinary scholarly collaborations, international multi-author projects, and, in the spirit of this collection, academic conversations about aspects of children’s culture that don’t have an obvious scholarly place.
Essays should be 5,000-7,000 words in length, in MLA format.
Proposals (no more than 1,000 words, including a short bio) are due on December 1, 2021 to the editors: flegarzn@longwood.edu and miskecjm@longwood.edu
*We are currently working with a publisher. We hope to make decisions about accepted articles by mid-January. Full articles would be due by August 1, 2022.
CFP: Child and the Book Conference “The Role of the Child as Citizen: Constructing Childhood through Agency and Activism”
Dates: 26-28 May 2022
Deadline for Abstracts: 15 November 2021
The advisory board of the “Child and the Book” conference series, would like to call your attention to the next Child and the Book conference, “The Role of the Child as Citizen: Constructing Childhood through Agency and Activism”, to be held at the University of Malta, May 26-28, 2022.
Further information can be found here: https://www.um.edu.mt/events/childandbook2022
Please consider that the deadline for the submission of abstracts is November 15, 2021.
NEWS: Innovation and Experimentation in Portuguese Picturebooks
Posted on September 14, 2021 by admin
On behalf of the members of The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Wrocław, members are invited to Professor Ana Margarida Ramos’ online lecture, Innovation and Experimentation in Portuguese Picturebooks, the fourth talk in the “International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies” series, to be held on October 13, 2021, at 6 p.m. Warsaw time.
In recent years, the quality and diversity of Portuguese picturebooks has been internationally recognised and acknowledged with several important awards; indeed, new creators are being distinguished for their increasingly elaborate and complex proposals which challenge the traditional relationship between the reader and the picturebook.
This presentation identifies the main contemporary trends in Portuguese picturebooks in order to characterize their recent revolution.  These trends include the introduction of elements of surprise, humour, challenge, and reflection; the growth of the illustration inside the picturebook and its displacement into other parts of the book; the investment in playfulness via the introduction of visual games, intertextual readings, parody, visual narratives, and parallel stories; the creation of an original and easily identifiable personal style (a kind of visual signature); and the creation of special art reading objects that highlight the importance of book design.
When: October 13, 2021 at 18:00 (CET)
*If you are interested in taking part in the lecture, please contact us by email by October 10 at mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl
Posted in IRSCL news, members' news, news
Posted on September 6, 2021 by admin
In past years, the International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association has organized a special panel focusing on children’s and young adult literature from a specific country at the conference. This year, we are hosting a themed panel at the ChLA annual conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia from June 2-4.
To that end, we seek paper proposals on the topic of “Dreams” that approach this theme from an international, non-Euro-American perspective. Preference will be given to papers that examine texts originally written in languages other than English and/or created by authors and illustrators from communities beyond Anglo-American children’s and YA publishing traditions, including global indigenous communities. Topics could include but are not limited to the following:
Dreams as the vision of what is possible, including political / social change
Children’s dreams, aspirations or nightmares (literal and figurative)
Adults’ dreams or visions about childhood
Dreams as expressions of cultural desires, aspirations or fears
Dreams as a narrative device (“it was all just a dream”)
Dreams and storytelling as imaginative work
Freudian understandings of dreams as “wish fulfillment” as well as other interpretive paradigms that come from non-western traditions
Symbolism and meanings of dreams in various cultures (e.g. Dreamtime)
Dreams of other places, spaces, and opportunities
Dreams as a way of memorializing/recovering the past
Dreams as a way to make sense of or to re-imagine selfhood
Dream worlds vs lived realities
Since there might be an option to present at the conference virtually, we encourage scholars and students who are based outside of North America to submit proposals.
Please submit a 350-word abstract and a 200-word biographical statement with the subject line, “ChLA 2022 Themed Panel Submission” to nithya.s@txstate.edu by 11:59 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) September 30, 2021.
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 Distinguished Scholar who will be invited by the committee to present at the conference.
Authors of proposals selected for the panel will be notified by October 10, 2021.  The International Committee encourages those scholars who are not selected for the Themed Panel to submit an abstract through the general Call for Proposals so that international children’s literature will become part of other panels at the conference.
The deadline for general submission to the ChLA 2022 Annual Conference is October 15, 2021.
Posted in calls for papers, conferences, IRSCL news, members' news, news
NEWS: First Online Series on Translation for Children and Young Adults at NUI Galway
Posted on September 6, 2021 by admin
Starting: October 27, 2021, running monthly
Funded by the Athena Swann Scheme in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies at NUI Galway, six webinars on translation for children and young adults organised by Dr. Pilar Alderete Diez (NUI Galway) will take place monthly, kicking off in October.
All talks are free to attend, and are followed by a discussion and conversations will start at 6:00pm GMT and finish at 7:30pm GMT.
October 27, 2021 – MS. NOEMI RISCO
November 24, 2011 – PROFESSOR ZOHAR SHAVIT
December 22, 2021 – DR. VANESSA LEONARDI
January 26, 2022 – DR. OWEN HARRINGTON-FERNANDEZ
February 23, 2022 – MR. MUIRIS O’RAGHALLAIGH
March 23, 2022 – PROFESSOR EMER O’SULLIVAN
Posted in IRSCL news, members' news, news, workshops and classes
CFP: “City in a Forest”
Posted on September 6, 2021 by admin
Atlanta holds any number of monikers—Hollywood of the South or the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, for example. Indeed, local residents also refer to Georgia’s state capital as the “City in the Forest.”
And so, for ChLA 2022: Atlanta, the first in-person meeting of the Children’s Literature Association since 2019, we’d like to grapple with the questions, contradictions, and possibilities that arise in considering the concept of a “City in a Forest” within the context of young people’s literature and media.
Children’s literature scholars have long grappled with the ways in which young people have been associated with the natural world, whether that be to nostalgize an idyllic, pastoral past or to emphasize youth’s wild, untamed behavior. But children are also used in culture as markers of the future, which is often conflated with progress, industry, and metropolitan spaces.
As Rebekah Sheldon notes, “The child became legible not only as a record of the past but as the recipient of a specific biological inheritance freighted with consequences for the future.” The figure of the child, in other words, becomes a site of promise, possibility, and protection.
Critics have explored the implications of an ideological nexus between city and nature on many fronts, from perspectives of environmentalism to that of hybridity. As we ponder relationships between the city and the forest within and beyond children’s literature, we can also look to and learn much from Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and other frameworks that explore the ecosystems of individual and social identity.
We see this in Melissa Jenkins’s study of the flying motif in Black picture books. Jenkins identifies how characters make sense of the divides between country and city, past and future in the ways that they “map, mark, and delineate as part of pointed socioeconomic critiques, responding to the difficulties of urban life by expanding the accepted geographies of black experience and politicizing projects of urban ‘uplift.’” While in The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis Council), the central characters travel through trees surrounding dystopian urban spaces, finding and creating renewal most profoundly amid a type of Indigenous “city in the forest” where they join like-minded resisters, explains Patrizia Zanella.
Such narratives exist within and around Atlanta, a city marked by contradiction, trauma, and prosperity. It wrestles with how to negotiate its past with its present, and continues to experiment with future paths that will both support a diverse metropolitan area and embrace its natural environs. For instance, Clarkston, a suburb of Atlanta, has the highest number of refugees per capita in the United States, and many local refugee organizations focus their efforts on creating community spaces that take advantage of Atlanta’s “forest”—community gardens, co-ops, and summer camps for children. But stories of the refugee experience also take into account the hardships of landscape, such as Linda Sue Park’s Long Walk to Water or Fabio Geda’s In the Sea there are Crocodiles. Nature can be a source of terror and solace in stories of refugees, and we encourage papers that explore this unique Atlanta population.
We invite proposals that examine, from any number of angles or interpretative lenses, this concept of “City in a Forest” within children’s and young adult literature, media, and culture. Papers might address:
Utopian and dystopian spaces
Trees as characters or central story locations
Literature or media about or set in Atlanta
Atlanta as liminal space
International and farmer markets within cities
Migrant experiences in urban and rural settings
Food justice and accessibility
Racial and queer ecologies
Nature as an idyllic past or future
Fantasy as a space that explores/complicates nature
Garden and greenery landscapes in the city
Post-apocalyptic landscapes and cityscapes
Stories of the displaced or refugee populations
Relationship between urban and rural in Civil Rights Movement
Additionally, given the welcome response to the introduction of pedagogy posters at ChLA 2021, we invite proposals for these for ChLA 2022 as well. Pedagogy poster proposals may be submitted in addition to or instead of paper proposals. They should focus on specific approaches to teaching children’s / YA literature or media and provide take-away ideas for adoption/adaptation into the classroom.
Proposals may be submitted here.
Deadline for proposals: October 15, 2021
The 49th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference, “City in a Forest,” will take place June 1 – June 4, 2022 in Atlanta, GA.
Please note that papers previously accepted for Seattle 2020 may be presented in Atlanta or may be held over for Seattle 2023, which retains the same 2020 CFP.
Posted in calls for papers, conferences, IRSCL news, members' news, news
CFP: 53rd Annual Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature
Posted on September 6, 2021 by admin
We are excited to be organizing a face-to-face conference for March 18–19, 2022 after having had an online conference last year. Our 53rd Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature will have a great line-up of authors and illustrators, as well as an exciting list of sessions.
The two-day conference will be held at the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel and is organized by the Department of Language and Literacy Education.
But we need you to make it happen!
We are now accepting proposals for breakout sessions at our 2022 conference. We welcome submissions from teachers, school library media specialists / librarians, graduate students, college faculty, authors, illustrators, and others with knowledge and enthusiasm to share about the field of children’s / young adult literature.
Abstract is limited to 50 words (this is what will appear on the conference program).
Paper or presentation description is limited to 250 words.
All papers must be original.
While breakout sessions are open regarding theme, they usually address one of these four areas:
Children’s / YA literature in the classroom
Children’s / YA literature as life inspiration
Public libraries and children’s / YA literature
Inquiry into children’s / YA literature
NOTE: Acceptance notification will be available early December 2021. If your proposal is accepted, all presenters and co-presenters are required to register for the conference (including registration cost) by the early registration deadline (date TBD) in order to be included on the program and present at the conference.
Please submit your proposals here.  We look forward to receiving your proposals!
Deadline: October 31, 2021
Posted in calls for papers, conferences, IRSCL news, members' news, news
IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies