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Motherhood is a concept in motion. For the past decade it has gained many new and contradictory meanings, and as a result mothering has also come to be linked to an increasing number of subjects.
To this theme in Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, we invite submissions that explore motherhood and mothering in relation to literature for children and adolescents through different approaches and theoretical perspectives. The aim is to highlight the relevance of children’s and young adult literature as well as children’s literature research in the context of the contemporary discourse on motherhood. We welcome submissions that address older as well as contemporary Nordic children’s and young adult literature.
Guest editors of this theme are Malin Nauwerck, the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books, and Tuva Haglund, Uppsala University.
Deadline for abstracts is 8 April 2022.
Read more about the call here.
CFP: The Child of the Future
“…the symbiont children developed a complex subjectivity composed of loneliness, intense sociality, intimacy with nonhuman others, specialness, lack of choice, fullness of meaning, and sureness of future purpose.”
(Haraway, 2016, Staying With The Trouble, p.149)
After living through a once-in-a-generation pandemic, whilst in the midst of a slowly-evolving climate crisis, our expectations about what the future of humanity will look like have been called into serious question. These disruptions have impacted the world of children perhaps more than that of adults. In the wake of lockdowns and school closures, children’s development, interpersonal connections, and engagement with media, learning and play have become increasingly unstable and unpredictable. More concretely, populations are declining around the world, calling into question how many children of the future there will be and where we might find them.
Correspondingly, the ways in which we conceptualise the child are shifting. In parallel to world events, theoretical discourse in the fields of childhood studies have experimented with viewing children as ontologically fluid. Scholars are increasingly thinking outside of the temporal binary implied by the words “adult” and “child”, instead refiguring childhood and the wider spectrum of age as complex assemblages and entanglements; the child with greater time left (Beauvais, 2018 p.77), the child enfolded in matter and meaning across time (Barad, 2007), the human and the nonhuman inextricably linked (Haraway, 2016).
This shift can be seen in children’s literature and media studies’ more recent interest in posthumanism, new materialism, spectrality and other adjacent theories which read childhood through the more abstract complication of animals, plants, objects, texts and technologies.
This conference aims to bring together these burgeoning conversations that are increasingly evident across disciplines at a time where these connections are more relevant than ever before. We are looking to explore the many and varied ways that scholars may conceptualise the idea of ‘the child of the future’. We hope to hear papers that interpret the topic in many different ways, those that consider the ‘child of the future’ as both real and imagined, actual and fictional.
In addition to a focus on the child of the future, proposal topics may include (but are in no means limited to):
The Anthropocene and/or Chthulucene and/or Capitalocene
Nonhuman modes of being (animal, plant, microorganism, robot, etc.)
Environments, bodies and spatiality
Engaging with the past/ theorising the future
Sci-fi, fantasy and non-mimetic media
We welcome papers of a duration of 20 minutes that will be arranged into thematic panels. Papers that blend the creative and the critical will be considered, and interdisciplinary papers and panel proposals are also encouraged. We particularly wish to offer opportunities for graduate students and other early-career scholars. If you fall into this category, please indicate in your application if you wish to be considered for one of our funded conference bursaries.
Please send an abstract of 300 words, a short biography (100 words) and 5-8 keywords in a Word document to thechildofthefuture2022@gmail.com with the following subject line: ‘The Child of the Future abstract’.
Submissions must be received by 5th January 2022. Notification of acceptance will be sent out at the start of February 2022.
University of Cambridge, St John’s College | Thursday June 30th – Friday July 1st, 2022
In line with COVID-19 guidance and regulations, we anticipate that this conference will go ahead as planned in person at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. However, we are conscious of the safety of all speakers and attendees and as such will update you of any changes should they arise.
Thank you for considering this CFP, and we look forward to hearing from you!
Posted in calls for papers, conferences, IRSCL news, members' news, news
CFP: Black Spaces in International Children’s Literature
Posted on December 3, 2021 by admin
Sociologist Elijah Anderson has astutely observed that in spite of the influence of the United States’ civil rights movements, racial segregation remains central to U.S. society. Anderson has noted that while public spaces have officially or nominally become open to all, “the wider society is still replete with overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, universities, workplaces, churches and other associations, courthouses, and cemeteries, a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in which Black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present” (10).
This concept of white space extends to children’s books and media, publishers, and scholarship. Yet Anderson’s conception of more inclusive “cosmopolitan” and Black spaces is also relevant for theorizing and understanding African and African Diasporic writing for young people. These rich and diverse bodies of literature, film, and other media comprise spaces that center on and portray the power of Black identities, cultures, and histories.
For this special issue of IRCL, the journal of an organization whose membership includes very few Black scholars from Africa and the African Diaspora, we, Karen Chandler and Michelle Martin, African American guest editors and senior scholars who want to foster more BIPOC scholarship in the field, intend this issue as an invitation into more scholarly conversations by and about Africa and the African Diaspora. We invite international contributions that expand upon this notion of Black Space in children’s literature, film, and related media of African societies and the African Diaspora–spaces that afford attention to Black identities, cultures, and histories. In adapting Anderson’s ideas about White and Black Space, we are most interested in moving beyond conventional thinking that equates Black space with dysfunction and lack (e.g. the American ghetto), the “primitive/barbaric or natural/romantic” (e.g. patterns in West African children’s books that Vivian Yenika-Agbaw has analyzed), or other emphases that simplify or distort Black experience.
We aim to bring Anderson’s conception of Black Space into conversation with texts created by authors from Black African societies and the Black Diaspora who are writing for young readers. We are interested in scholarship on children’s and young adult literature that portrays Black Space as generative, creative, secure, joyful, nurturing, and more. Outdoor spaces, porches, kitchens, barbershops, markets, salons, churches, schools, and other communal spaces often form metaphorical “villages” where mutual care takes place, where Black young people find nurture and community, and where they locate the resources to learn to be and express themselves.
Some contemporary Black creators to consider include Ghanaian author Portia Dery; Nigerian author Mary Ononokpono; African American Patricia McKissack (Porch Lies and Other Tales), Joyce Carol Thomas (adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston stories with Chris Myers and other illustrators) and Mildred D. Taylor (Logan family saga); British Malorie Blackman (Noughts & Crosses series); Ivorian-French Marguerite Abouet’s Aya series (Aya of Yop City); Nigerian American Nnedia Okorafor (the Akata Witch and Binti series); Kwama Mbalia (Tristan Strong series), and Toni Adeyemi (Children of Blood and Bone series); Canadian American Zetta Elliott (Dragons in a Bag series); Haitian American Edwidge Danticat (Untwine, The Last Mapou); and the many crafters (e.g. Reginald Hudlin, Jesse Holland, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ryan Coogler) of the Afrofuturistic world of Black Panther. We are also interested in earlier children’s literature and applicable/relevant theory, such as that by J. O. de Graft Hanson, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Essays on historical or contemporary texts might pursue some of the following:
Black spaces: places (real or imagined) where Black people are able to thrive, to create, to build, to regenerate
Black creativity: representations of Black individuals or groups making things, creating art, gardening, cooking, being ingenious, making music, dancing, talking and telling stories, performing comedy
Conflicts related to class, ethnicity, religion, gender identities, etc. among different communities of the Black Diaspora
The environment, ecology, land, air, parks and gardens, and sustainability related to how and where Black people live and work
Food justice in Black communities
The motif of the underground as spaces of escape or safety for people of the African Diaspora
Genres and formats as spaces, including spaces that have yet to be inhabited by publishing houses and Black authors in a substantive way. While Black YA authors’ urban street lit and historical nonfiction and historical fiction find routes to publication, what genres are still relatively rare or non-existent for Black authors, and what might that future look like?
Publishing traditions and constraints vs. Black artistic integrity: national settings can sometimes dictate what genres are most common and what children’s literature looks like; how might more international conversations between writers for children and young adults from different locales within the African Diaspora push the boundaries of what is possible for all?
The role of literary prizes (e.g. The Golden Baobab Award, Children’s Africana Book Awards, Coretta Scott King Award, etc.), archives, and curation in sustaining the availability of Black books both for enjoyment and for study
Own Voices as a contested space: tensions have long existed between texts written from outside of a lived experience vs. texts written from an Own Voices perspective
Problematizing conceptualizations of Blackness to examine its diversity and complexity; and exploring books from different parts of Black Diaspora
Texts as sites for cross-cultural collaborations, as when a co-writer who brings the story to light amplifies the voice of the teller or when a Black writer or illustrator collaborates with a non-Black artist
Translations or adaptations of Black texts for young people
Intersections between Blackness and Indigeneity within shared spaces, and Black individuals’/groups’ relationship to Native cultures, heritage, tribal lands, sovereignty, citizenship, etc.
Protests/protesting, histories and revisionist histories informing protests; particular cultural practices that are forms of protest
Speculative fiction as revisionist history and/or as prophecy
Please send your proposal to the guest editors (karen.chandler@louisville.edu, mhmarti@uw.edu) and the journal editor, Roxanne Harde (rharde@ualberta.ca) by 1 January 2022.
Completed articles will be due 1 April 2022.
Email subject: “IRCL Special Issue Black Spaces.”
The submission should include an abstract of no more than 300 words, a brief bio (100 words) and 3-5 key words.
Please follow the IRCL style guide.
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IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies