CFP (Re)Imagining Tomorrow: Agency and Possibility in Literature and Media for Children and Young Adults (grad conference 3/15/2023; Vancouver 6/23-24/2023)

(Re)Imagining Tomorrow: Agency and Possibility in Literature and Media for Children and Young Adults

deadline for submissions:
March 15, 2023

full name / name of organization:
University of British Columbia, Master of Arts in Children's Literature Program

contact email:
ubc.conference.2023@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/02/26/reimagining-tomorrow-agency-and-possibility-in-literature-and-media-for-children-and.

(Re)Imagining Tomorrow: Agency and Possibility in Literature and Media for Children and Young Adults

Call for Paper Proposals

Deadline for Submission: 15 March 2023

A peer-reviewed graduate student conference

University of British Columbia | Unceded traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Vancouver, Canada | Friday 23 June - Saturday 24 June 2023



What do we think of when we imagine the future? 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) projected a world in which humanity has spread to the stars, where visiting the moon is as routine as a flight across the country. Back to the Future Part II (1989) famously imagined hoverboards and flying cars by the year 2015. The YA dystopian boom of the late 2000s to 2010s imagined compartmentalized, constrained futures like in The Hunger Games (2008)and Divergent (2011). Today, in the face of impending climate disaster, growing economic disparity, and the lingering effects of a worldwide pandemic, the future still seems not only hard to imagine, but uncertain. How can we imagine a future that we may not live to see? How do children grapple with inheriting a future riddled with the mistakes and problems we are generating in the present? If the children are the future, what is that future going to look like? What agency do children have to create their own future? As we live through times of unprecedented global change–technological, cultural, and environmental–the future is no longer a distant reality. The future is created every day. (Re)Imagining Tomorrow: Agency and Possibility in Literature and Media for Children and Young Adults aims to discuss topics surrounding the future and its presentation in youth literature and media and showcase graduate students’ academic and creative work on the matter.



Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Forms of youth activism and agency in a changing world (e.g., climate change, children’s rights, education, etc.)
• De-/Anti-/Post-colonialism of the near and far future
• Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism
• Posthumanism and technology in children's literature
• Cultural Change, Communication, and the Transformation of Identity
• Revolution, War, Resistance, and Reimaginings/Retellings
• Artificial Intelligence
• Alternate/Virtual worlds
• Hope, Resilience, and Memory
• Change, Transformation, and Becoming
• Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia
• Evolution and Progress
• The Anthropocene
• Time Travel
• The future of the publishing industry and the impact of global crisis
• The future of local, national, and global children’s literature
• Cultural, Social, and Economic Change
• The evolution of children’s literature beyond text: films, sequential art, video games, and other media.

These topics are suggestions, as we are open to proposals on any aspect of the future, agency, and possibility in children’s and young adult literature, media, education, and culture. We welcome submissions from graduate students, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies, and others.

Academic Paper Proposals

Please send a 250-word abstract, including the title of your paper, 5-8 keywords, and 3-5 academic, bibliographic references. Your name should not appear on the proposal. Please attach a separate 50-word biography, including your name, preferred pronouns, student status, university affiliation, home country, and email address. Save the proposal and the biography as two separate Word files (.DOC or .DOCX) and use the format “Academic_Name_PaperTitle” in the email subject line.

Creative Writing Proposals

All creative writing genres and forms are welcome, including novel chapters, poetry, picture books, graphic novels, scripts, amongst others. Please send a sample of your work that is no more than 12 pages long, double-spaced. Include the title, a list of references (if applicable), and a 150-word description identifying the topic, genre, targeted age group, and relevance to the conference themes. Your name should not appear on the sample. Please attach a separate 50-word biography, including your name, student status, preferred pronouns, university affiliation, home country, and email address.

Save the sample and description as one Word file and the biography as a separate Word file (.DOC or .DOCX). Use this format “Creative_Name_SampleTitle” for the email subject line.



Participants are welcome to submit both academic and creative proposals. Each proposal will be adjudicated separately, and you may be accepted for one or both streams. Please follow the guidelines for both submissions above and send them in separate emails.

Dates and Logistics

Deadline for proposal submission: 15 March 2023

A notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of April 2023.

All submissions will be blind reviewed by the members of the Review Committee.



Contact Us

Send all submissions to submit.ubc.conference@gmail.com.


If you have any questions regarding the submission or the conference, please don’t hesitate to contact us at ubc.conference.2023@gmail.com.


Follow us on Twitter @ MACLconferenceand visit our conference website at https://blogs.ubc.ca/reimaginingtomorrow2023/for updates.



About Us

The Master of Arts in Children’s Literature (MACL) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is the only graduate program in children’s literature in Canada and one of the most multi-disciplinary children’s literature programs in the world. It is offered through the UBC iSchool (Library, Archival, and Information Studies) with joint participation from the Department of English Language and Literatures, the Department of Language and Literacy Education, and the School of Creative Writing. As one of the few venues in Canada that showcases emerging scholarship in children’s and young adult literature, this conference provides a platform for new scholars and writers from different backgrounds, especially for graduate and upper-division undergraduate students, and creates cross-disciplinary associations that may inspire new and innovative connections to support writing and research in this area.



About the Conference

The first Graduate Student Conference in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Media and Culture took place in 2008. In addition to paper and creative writing presentations, the conference invites renowned scholars and authors as our keynote speakers. Featured keynote speakers from past conferences include Dr. Maria Tatar, Dr. Philip Nel, Dr. Elizabeth Marshall, Dr. S.R. Toliver, Dr. Angel Matos, Dr. Naomi Hamer and best-selling authors Rachel Hartman and Richard Van Camp. This year, students from the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature Program at UBC’s iSchool will come together for the tenth time to host the event.



We look forward to hearing from you!



Last updated February 27, 2023

CFP Young Adult Literature and Culture (In-Person panel) (5/15/2022; PAMLA 11/2022)

Young Adult Literature and Culture (In-Person panel)

Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/05/young-adult-literature-and-culture-in-person-panel

deadline for submissions:
May 15, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association (PAMLA)

contact email:
melaniemarotta@yahoo.com



This session is open to all papers that explore some aspect of Young Adult literature and/or culture. The panel is particularly interested in papers attuned to some facet of the conference theme, " Geographies of the Fantastic and the Quotidian.” How does space impact YA literature and/or culture? How is the Anthropocene represented in YA fantasy? Further, presentations that examine diverse voices in media are encouraged. This panel welcomes submissions about young adult literature, film, television, etc. Feel free to submit an abstract pertaining to the conference theme or otherwise. If you have any questions, please email.



Please submit abstracts via the PAMLA submission portal: PAMLA CFP (ballastacademic.com)

Conference site: https://www.pamla.org/conference/2022-conference-theme/

Location of conference: UCLA Luskin Conference Center and Hotel



Last updated March 8, 2022

CFP Greek Mythology & Modern Culture: Reshaping Aesthetic Tastes (11/30/21; Spec Issue of Humanities)

Greek Mythology & Modern Culture: Reshaping Aesthetic Tastes

Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/03/29/greek-mythology-modern-culture-reshaping-aesthetic-tastes

deadline for submissions: November 30, 2021


full name / name of organization: Humanities


contact email: phillipzapkin@gmail.com




Dear Colleagues,

Much of the Western world has a rising problem with white nationalists. These white supremacists often co-opt fields like Classics, medievalism, and Norse mythology to support their racist ideologies—twisting these disciplines and repressing or ignoring evidence for the multicultural and multiracial realities of the ancient and medieval world. In terms of Classics, these distortions and appropriations have been documented by an emerging generation of scholars like Donna Zuckerberg, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Curtis Dozier, Sarah Bond, and others. Ancient myth, literature, and symbols continue to pervade modern culture.

In particular, Greek myth continues to shape modern worldviews, influence contemporary artists and writers, and appeal to our literary and aesthetic tastes. However, understandings of Greek myth—both in its original context and its reception by later generations—have changed dramatically over time. This special issue of Humanities seeks articles about current research in Greek mythology. Submissions should present cutting edge research about an aspect of Greek myth, prepared for a general audience.

Specific topics might include:

• Greek drama, tragedy, or comedy
• Greek vase paintings
• Epic or lyric poetry
• Reception studies
• Adaptations
• (Re)-Examinations of mythic structures (e.g., rethinking Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces)
• Feminist analysis of Greek myth
• Postcolonial analysis
• Psychoanalytic analysis
• Generic or cross generic analysis (e.g., myths adapted for film or TV)
• Cross-cultural comparison between Greek myths and myths from other cultures
• Children’s or Young Adult literature, movies, or TV

This special issue seeks to offer an impression of the field, with essays presenting different arguments about Greek myth. While this is a broad brief, the issue as a whole should explore the ways in which Greek myth, and debates about it, remains relevant to the modern world.

Dr. Phillip Zapkin
Prof. Dr. Kevin Wetmore
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information



Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Last updated April 6, 2021 

 

CFP Children’s Literature and Climate Change (Spec Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn 6/15/20)

CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2019/cfp-childrens-literature-and-climate-change-special-issue-of-the-lion-and-the-unicorn/
November 11, 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS Children’s Literature and Climate Change
Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn
Guest Editors: Marek Oziewicz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Lara Saguisag, College of Staten Island-City University of New York 

We seek essays on how children’s literature empowers young people to productively engage with the challenges of climate change. After decades of climate change denial and toothless mainstream response, young people are angry. In response to climate change illiteracy and the impotence and negligence of adult-led institutions, teenage activists such as Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Greta Thunberg are calling for radical and immediate action. How does children’s literature and media stoke this transformative anger and inspire young people to address the climate crisis and fight for their fundamental rights to life, health, and sustenance? How can educators and scholars of children’s literature support this fight? What new concepts, approaches, and narratives are needed to accelerate the sociopolitical revolution that will dismantle the status quo, or what Amitav Ghosh calls “the Great Derangement”? In this issue, we intend to bring together innovative research on children’s literature that attends to multiple facets of climate change and advances a conversation about the planetary future we can and want to create. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• The role of children’s literature on climate change in raising young people’s awareness about their responsibility to the biosphere;
• Depictions of climate change across various genres and forms, including picturebooks, chapter books, comics, short stories, and novels;
• Films, apps, music, and games that engage with climate change and seek to mobilize youth action;
• Constructions of childhood in climate change narratives and discourses;
• Climate change and youth participation in community protests, political campaigns, nonviolent civil disobedience, ecotage (ecosabotage), and ecorism (ecoterrorism);
• Climate change narratives about and by Indigenous youth and youth of color, who are often at the forefront of climate justice initiatives and whose communities are disproportionately threatened by climate change;
• Children’s and YA books that link responsibility to climate change with, in the words of Kim Q. Hall, “commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist”;
• Depictions of environmental racism and classism as facets of climate change;
• Climate change and human migrations, including stories about climate refugees; 
• Comparative studies of children’s and YA literature on climate change published in the global north and the global south;
• Visions of climate futures, including discourses of hope or despair;
• Reimagining and restructuring institutions of children’s literature that depend on, profit from, and support polluting, extractive industries;
• Intersections of critical discourse on climate change and children’s literature scholarship, including new taxonomies and emerging genres apposite to the challenges of conceptualizing climate change, from environmental literature and cli-fi to eco-fiction and beyond;
• Reevaluations of existing literary traditions through new theoretical concepts or approaches such as energy humanities, environmental humanities, indigenous futurisms, the Anthropocene, ecocritical posthumanism, and other lenses. 

Essays should be sent to guest editors Marek Oziewicz and Lara Saguisag at LU.Climateissue@gmail.com by July 15, 2020. Submissions should be in the range of 4000 to 8000 words (although we will also consider shorter, forum-length essays). Accepted articles will appear in The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2 (2021).

CFP Everything Old Is New Again: Adapting the Classics in Contemporary Young Adult Novels (9/1/2018)

A nicely written call on an important topic:

Everything Old Is New Again: Adapting the Classics in Contemporary Young Adult Novels
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/30/everything-old-is-new-again-adapting-the-classics-in-contemporary-young-adult-novels

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Drs. Dana Lawrence and Amy L. Montz

contact email: almontz@usi.edu



CALL FOR PAPERS

Everything Old Is New Again:

Adapting the Classics in Contemporary Young Adult Novels

“An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise” (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006).

Linda Hutcheon’s refusal to see adaptation as “vampiric” is particularly inspiring for those who do work on adaptations. The idea of an “afterlife” of texts, of seeing what comes before as an inspiration for what comes now is, by its very definition, keeping works “alive.” Adaptations for young adults, in particular, have the added benefit of engaging the young adult reader with both then and now, past and present. The hope is, of course, that the young adult reader will approach both text and context, both original and adaptation, to explore the importance of a theme, or a writer, or a novel, and see the historical, cultural, and literary connotations presented. Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation further by noting, "If we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly. When we call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt relationship to another work or works.” Adaptation is about connection, connective tissues leading from one text to another, one author to another, one time to another. We see an adaptation and we must remember the original, engage with the original, and are encouraged to visit the original for the first time, or once again.


For this proposed collection, we are most interested in essays that explore relationships between texts and contexts, that see the connections between canonical and young adult literature. As adaptation simultaneously re-imagines and reinscribes a literary canon, the engagement with the canon is a key aspect of the adaptive qualities of the text. The author’s familiarity with the original work--or, for the purposes of this collection, the original author--lends new life to the canonical text. In “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” Robert S. Miola understands adaptations as “literary progeny that bear direct and immediate descent from originary texts and that exist in a very conscious counterpoise of tribute and criticism…If an author’s revision of his or her own work asserts his or her power and domination, then the reviser of another’s work enacts a rebellion and usurpation.” What remains unique about the adaptation is this tension between tribute and criticism, particularly when issues of race, gender, and other aspects of diversity are brought into play. Seeing the past through new eyes means we must examine the past in all its defects. It means engaging with our predecessors and the rights, and wrongs, of their literatures.


“Everything Old Is New Again: Adapting the Classics in Contemporary Young Adult Novels” will explore the “afterlife” of texts and contexts. These historical and literary phenomena will argue that adapting the classics is a way to engage young adult readers with their cultural past, and to see how that past can be rewritten in order to best present what can be changed, what benefits from change, and how they, too, can be agents of change. These adaptations empower young readers to make them more culturally, historically, and socially aware through the lens of literary diversity.

Topics may include:

• Authenticity
• Authorship and Authority
• Fan fiction
• Graphic Novel Adaptations
• Sequels and prequels
• Rewrites of canonical texts

Of particular interest are essays about texts that diversify race, sexuality, gender, and ability in adaptations.

Interested authors will need to submit a 500-word abstract and 150-200 word bio by September 1, 2018. Selected abstracts will be included in a book proposal to a peer-reviewed publisher. 6,000 to 8,000 word essays will due early in 2019. Please submit abstracts to both Dr. Amy L. Montz at almontz@usi.edu and Dr. Dana Lawrence at lawrende@mailbox.sc.edu. Questions can be addressed to both, as well.

CFP Children’s and YA Literature and Culture (10/01/2018; PCA 4/17-20/2019)

Children’s and YA Literature and Culture

https://pcaaca.org/area/children%E2%80%99s-and-ya-literature-and-culture

 

Call for papers: 

 

The 2019 Popular Culture Association Conference will be held in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, April 17 through Saturday, April 20. The Children’s and YA Literature and Culture Area invites presentations for papers on any aspect of children’s and YA popular culture: material culture, media, games, advertising, literature, and so on. Past topics have included recent films/television series; technology and social media; books, authors, and series; and issues and trends in children’s and YA literature and culture such as race, gender, and sexuality, dystopian fiction, the controversy about adults reading YA fiction, and environmentalism. New approaches to classic children’s and young adult literature and culture are also welcome.

For this conference, we are particularly interested children’s and young adult political and social activism, and analyses of politics in children’s and adult literature, though we welcome papers about any topic related to children’s and YA literature and culture.

PCA encourages interdisciplinary approaches to popular culture in its presentations, which should be 15-20 minutes long. The deadline for submissions of a 100-200-word abstract is October 1, 2018. Please include your university affiliation if you have one, your telephone number, and your email address.

ALL PROPOSALS AND ABSTRACTS MUST BE SUBMITTED TO THE PCA DATABASE.

Please do NOT submit papers to more than one session of PCA/ACA at the same time. Also be sure of having travel funds should your paper be accepted. Do NOT submit a paper unless you feel confident of attending the conference. No shows are noted.

Send inquiries to (Note: The actual proposals are to be sent directly to the PCA online site):

Dr. Amie Doughty
322 Netzer Admin
English Department
SUNY Oneonta
Oneonta, NY 13820
Phone: (607) 436-2493
E-mail (preferred) Amie.Doughty@oneonta.edu
You can also find us on Facebook www.facebook.com/chlitcultpca and Twitter @chlitcult_pca.

For additional information and instructions go to www.pcaaca.org.

CFP Mythopoeic Children's and Young Adult Literature (Spec Issue of Mythlore) (3/30/2019)

Mythopoeic Children's and Young Adult Literature
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/18/mythopoeic-childrens-and-young-adult-literature

deadline for submissions: March 30, 2019

full name / name of organization: Mythopoeic Society

contact email: dwhite@atu.edu



Call for Papers: Mythopoeic Children’s and Young Adult Literature



Special Issue of Mythlore, Fall 2019

Guest Edited by Donna R. White

** Draft Deadline: March 30, 2019

** Final paper deadline: June 30, 2019



Mythlore, a journal dedicated to the genres of myth and fantasy (particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), invites article submissions for a special issue focused on children’s literature. Children’s fantasy has always been a part of mythopoeic literature, and Mythlore has occasionally published articles about myth-building children’s writers such as J.K. Rowling and Nancy Farmer; however, this special issue marks the first time we have focused specifically on mythopoeic literature for children and young adults.



As always, we welcome essays on The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, but we also encourage articles that discuss the works of other mythopoeic writers for young readers. Classic works like Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows have clear mythopoeic elements, as do modern fantasies by Philip Pullman, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, and many others. Studies of lesser known writers like Carol Kendall are also welcome.



To get an idea of the range of topics covered in Mythlore, visit the online archive at https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/

and consult the electronic index, which can be downloaded free at http://www.mythsoc.org/press/mythlore-index-plus.htm

Submission guidelines can be found at

http://www.mythsoc.org/mythlore/mythlore-submissions.htm



Send queries and questions to Donna R. White, dwhite@atu.edu.

Drafts and final papers should be submitted via https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/

CFP Not Just Kidding Around: On Teaching Children’s Media (8/18/2017; SCMS 2018)

Of potential interest, but do note the impending deadline:

Not Just Kidding Around: On Teaching Children’s Media (SCMS 2018)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/08/04/not-just-kidding-around-on-teaching-children%E2%80%99s-media-scms-2018

deadline for submissions: August 18, 2017

full name / name of organization: Andrew Scahill / University of Colorado Denver

contact email: adscahill@gmail.com


**CFP for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2018 Conference in Toronto**

In an academic setting, weighty or dramatic “adult” films are generally met with intellectual curiosity by students, or at least an acknowledgement that they are “worthy” of consideration. Genre films like horror or action are met with more resistance, but generally students are willing to admit they have some sort of ideological investments. Films aimed at children, however, are often dismissed as just entertainment. Surely we may analyze Bicycle Thieves, but Home Alone? Yes to Goodfellas, no to Goonies.

The assumption is often that younger audience equates to a simpler text. In teaching children’s media, professors also must deal with the legacy of media effects research, which often leads to knee-jerk and oversimplified assumptions (“Disney princesses are bad!”) and the construction of a completely passive child spectator. Rarely, too, do we discuss how children’s media is designed with a bilateral address to both children and adults, often serving as a meditation on what it means to be a parent as much as what it means to be a child. As a “low” or unworthy genre, professors may also have to deal with an administration unable to see the value in teaching a course on kids’ films.

Pedagogy is a neglected subject in media studies, and this workshop promises a positive, collaborative, and supportive atmosphere. This will be a “best practices”-style workshop, and our facilitators will bring teaching materials to distribute among attendees, including model syllabi, assignment prompts, and discussion prompts. Each facilitator will be asked to prepare a short testimony about a challenge they experienced teaching children’s media, and what steps they took to overcome it. This comes at an important time for our 2018 conference, as the “Children’s and Youth Media and Culture” scholarly interest group is merely a year old, and this workshop would aid in our community-building and recruitment efforts.

To express interest, please contact Andrew Scahill (University of Colorado Denver) at adscahill@gmail.com by August 18 and explain how you would be able to contribute to this workshop.


keywords: pedagogy workshop children media animation film cinema kids academia

Last updated August 7, 2017 

CFP Essays for MLA Volume on Teaching Young Adult Literature (proposals by 11/1/2015)

Call for Essay Proposal for Volume on Teaching Young Adult Literature (1 November 2015)
full name / name of organization: MLA Publications
contact email: kscoat2@ilstu.edu
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63154

Proposals are invited for a volume entitled Teaching Young Adult Literature to be edited by Karen Coats, Mike Cadden, and Roberta Seelinger Trites. This volume in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series aims to bring together a range of articles describing innovative and successful approaches to designing and teaching stand-alone Young Adult Literature courses at the post-secondary level, as well as incorporating YA texts into other undergraduate and graduate courses relevant to MLA members and Education and Library Science faculty.

This volume will be a resource for new and experienced teachers of young adult texts. It will provide suggestions for supplementary materials and pedagogical activities for a variety of student audiences in a range of college settings. Abstracts that use specific YA texts as examples to demonstrate how to teach genres within YA literature (e.g. graphic narrative, historical fiction, the verse novel, etc.) are welcome, as are abstracts that focus on themes, topics, methods, and problems in teaching Young Adult literature in various settings.

Your abstract should clarify your intended topic, setting, its relevance to the subject of Young Adult literature pedagogy, the texts, genre(s) or theories you expect to explore, and the value of your intended topic to a broad range of instructors and students. Please note that any quotations from student papers will require written permission from the students. Contributors to a volume must be members of the MLA when their contribution is submitted in the final, approved manuscript, through publication.
If you are interested in contributing an essay of between 2000–3000 words, please submit an abstract of 350–500 words to Karen Coats at kscoat2@ilstu.edu by 1 November 2015.


By web submission at 07/25/2015 - 18:49

CFP The Cultural Landscape of Teenagers Conference (9/15/2015; France 6/15-16/2016)

The Cultural Landscape of Teenagers
full name / name of organization:
University of Maine (Le Mans, France) and University of Akron
contact email:
elphine.letort@univ-lemans.fr ; elisabeth.lamothe@univ-lemans.fr
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63630

The Cultural Landscape of Teenagers

An international and multidisciplinary conference co-organized by Elisabeth Lamothe, Delphine Letort (University of Maine-Le Mans in France, 3L.AM), and Heather Braun (University of Akron, Ohio) with the support of the regional program EnJeu(x).

Université du Mans, June 15th and 16th, 2016

Designated as a new social category in America after the Second World War, “teenagers” represent an age range that can be tapped as a market of consumers. While teenagers are now offered a diversity of cultural products to choose from, professionals train themselves to deal with adolescents and define parenting and schooling strategies that should allow youth to blossom into responsible adulthood. Youth movements express a sense of rebellion against the coercive norms of society, shaping their own teenage counterculture through experiments, sometimes conducted in gangs. Thomas Doherty pinpoints the specificity of “contraculture” in opposition to “counterculture”, opposing the local dimension of the teenagers’ gangs to the 1960s’ national youth movements that questioned mainstream values by adopting alternative lifestyles (Teenagers And Teenpics: The Juvenilization Of American Movies, 38). The author argues that in the West, teenagers possess their own culture, which is defined in response to dominant culture and developed through conflict.
More recently, however, youth culture has gone mainstream and served as a rallying, trans-generational landmark: a generation’s coming-of-age was predicated by the success of the Harry Potter and Twilight sagas, buttressed by popular cinematographic adaptations. Even dystopic literary productions such as The Hunger Games reveal the general public’s interest for adolescent protagonists and their perspectives. The genre of Young Adult literature raises a set of issues that are the subjects of debates among literary scholars: who should (or should not) be reading it? Does the genre make for experimentation and participate in renewing those literary and theoretical conventions analyzed by Nathalie Prince (La Littérature de jeunesse, 2010)? From the emergence of adolescent literature over the past century, including classic works such Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951) and The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton, 1967) to contemporary Young Adult novels such as The Fault in Our Stars (John Green, 2012) and Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell, 2013), the genre has changed over time, providing particular attention to first-person narrators entering, immersed in, or about to leave their teenage years.
This conference aims to shed light on those cultural artifacts that target not only teenagers but an increasingly wider public – including television series, films, young adult novels, among others – and explore the images of teenagers. Although the adolescent poetic and critical perspective on the world is often idealized, the figure of the teenager also connotes a set of issues to be resolved – drug abuse, risk taking, resistance to authority, behaviour problems. We encourage scholars to question how these subjects are dealt with in contemporary literature, music, films (fictional or nonfiction) and other visual arts such as photography.

Possible avenues of research:

- the type of narrative structure adopted in teen series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, Melrose Place, Charmed, Misfits, etc.), teen movies (slasher films, fantasy films, etc.); the values they promote through representation (teen girls, sexualization, consumer values, etc.) and the themes broached (violence, gender divide...) ; the spaces associated with adolescence (the classroom, the street, the home, the suburb or the ghetto, the video, the blogosphere...)

- teenage literature as a developing market (chick lit, bit lit) and the questions the latest trends elicit in academia (Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 1999; John Green, The Fault in Our Stars 2012 ; S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders, 1967; R.J. Palacio, Wonder, 2012, etc.) ; their screen adaptations (Gus Van Sant, Paranoid Park, 2007) ; Vadim Perelman, The Life Before her Eyes, 2008) ; Amy Heckerling, Clueless, 1995) ; Josh Boone, The Fault in Our Stars, 2014)

- the development of girlhood studies and their contribution to the study of Young Adult culture and art.

- the adolescent stars (Justin Bieber, Violetta, etc.) and the models they represent (Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls; Emma Watson in The Bling Ring…); teen stereotypes in TV series (The Wire, The Leftovers…), reality television shows (The Voice) and auteur films (Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant, Sofia Coppola, Laurent Cantet, etc.)

- the place and representation of youth in multicultural literature and the issue of biculturality (Anne Mazer, Going Where I’m Coming From: Memoirs of American Youth, 1995; Francisco Jimenez, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child, 1997; Lori Carlos, ed., American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults, 1994)

- transnational youth cultures: the differences between North American and European youth literatures(s) and the ways in which they intersect with and influence one another (Christine Beigel, Jean Molla, Stéphanie Benson in France ; Annika Thor, Johanna Thydell, Arne Sungen in Sweden ; Melvin Burgess in Great Britain)

- life-writings (the graphic memoir, the journal, autobiographical fiction, testimony) and the postcolonial, transnational models of resistance they represent (Malala Yousafsai’s I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education, 2013)

- health issues (anorexia, bulimia, cancer, HIV/AIDS) and their inclusion in young adult literature (Janet Bode, Food Fight, 1997; Diana Sharples, Running Lean, 2013; John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012; Courtney Sheinmel, Positively, 2009); sexual violence (Sapphire, Push, 1996)

- the genre of the school story and its transformation across the ages, along with its cinematographic adaptations, from Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and A Separate Peace to Harry Potter, Glee and Beverley Hills 90210.

- the emergence of virtual writing and reading communities via online applications such as Wattpad; does their success compete with or complement printed material? Do they replace traditional journals and diaries? What stylistic and linguistic forms of innovation do they propose?

- the perspective of photographers on the experience of growing up, the transition from childhood to adulthood (i.e. South-African photographer Michelle Sank); photographing young people from different backgrounds and through street photography and collaborative work with youth groups; work on portraits to question much of the public’s perception (or misconception) of young people.

300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers in English or French must be sent to both Delphine Letort (delphine.letort@univ-lemans.fr) and Elisabeth Lamothe (elisabeth.lamothe@univ-lemans.fr) by September 15, 2015. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating their institutional affiliation.


By web submission at 08/25/2015 - 07:37

CFP Adolescence in Film and Television Area (10/1/2015; PCA/ACA Seattle 3/21-25/2016)

Still cleaning my inbox:

Adolescence in Film and Television (March 21-25, 2016; Proposals due October 1, 2015)
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/77876/adolescence-film-and-television-march-21-25-2016-proposals-due

Announcement published by Kylo-Patrick Hart on Monday, August 10, 2015
Type: Call for Papers
Date: October 1, 2015
Location: Washington, United States
Subject Fields: Film and Film History, Popular Culture Studies

The Adolescence in Film and Television Area invites paper proposals for presentation at the annual Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference, to be held March 21-25, 2016 in Seattle, Washington.

Submissions that explore noteworthy coverage patterns, representations, and themes pertaining to the portrayal of adolescence/adolescents in film and television, during any historical era, are desired from scholars, educators, and students at all levels.

PLEASE NOTE: Given adequate participant interest and high-quality submissions, the Adolescence in Film and Television Area chair is hoping to publish selected papers (with author’s permission) presented in this area in March 2016 in a special essay collection. Submission instructions will be provided in the weeks following the October 1, 2015 submission deadline.

Possible topics of relevance include, but are certainly not limited to, advertising images and appeals, coming-of-age narratives, drug use, HIV/AIDS, juvenile delinquency, nerd culture, non-heterosexuality, otherness, premarital sex, product placement, queerness (broadly defined), violence and social aggression, and (losing one’s) virginity.

Interested individuals are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words (including presentation title) by October 1, 2015.

Submit your abstract online at http://ncp.pcaaca.org (and be certain to select the “Adolescence in Film and Television” subject area from the drop-down menu when doing so).

Decisions pertaining to the status of submitted abstracts will be communicated within approximately two weeks of receipt. For questions prior to submitting an abstract, please contact area chair Kylo-Patrick R. Hart
 (k.hart@tcu.edu).

Contact Info:
Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Ph.D.

Department of Film, Television and Digital Media

Texas Christian University

Contact Email:
k.hart@tcu.edu

CFP Children and Media (7/20/15; SCMS 2016)

CFP: SCMS 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia - Panel on Children and Media, Disney, Nickelodeon, Gender, Girls etc.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/14467/discussions/74776/cfp-scms-2016-atlanta-georgia-panel-children-and-media-disney

Discussion published by Christina Hodel on Friday, July 10, 2015

Children, Teens and Everyone In-between: Youth Media

This panel is intended to explore representations of childhood/children on screen. The panel is currently broadly conceived and is open to submissions relating to other aspects of children’s media although topics relating to girls and gender are highly encouraged.

Some possible suggestions for topics are below, but again, please apply if anything related to children and media (and especially gender) is part of your thesis.

·         Disney, Nickelodeon and other producers of children’s media content
·         Child gender and sexuality issues
·         Race, Culture, Class and Children
·         Children and relationships
·         Advocating for children
·         The dark side of childhood/children
·         Child perpetrators and victims of violence on screen
·         The status of children’s films and/or family films in terms of genre
·         The commercial and/or aesthetic aspects of children’s media
·         The reception of children’s media
·         Participatory video or child-led cinema
·         The liminality of childhood and its relation to questions of nationhood on screen
·         Aspects of film and television that teach us about current constructions of childhood
·         How films/television resist/undermine contemporary constructions of childhood
·         How media helps us better understand the role of children in a given societal context
·         How media shed light on the relationship between children/adults
·         Depictions of childhood understood as metaphors for specific cultural phenomena
·         Societal anxieties embedded in media featuring children
·         Explanations of how ideas regarding childhood have affected movies and television

Proposals should be sent to Christina (hodel@ku.edu) and consist of a 250 word abstract, a list of three keywords, and a brief biographical statement listing your title, the name of your college or university, and your areas of research.

Deadline to submit is July 20, 2015.
Decisions will be communicated by July 25, 2015.

CFP Intersection of Cartoons/Animation/Youth Media (Spec Issue of ChLAQ) (11/1/16)

Of related interest:

The Intersection of Cartoons, Animation, and Youth Media: A Special Issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/61774
full name / name of organization:
Joseph Michael Sommers/ in association with the Children's Literature Association
contact email:
somme1jm@cmich.edu
-Call For Papers-

The Intersection of Cartoons, Animation, and Youth Media:
A Special Issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Edited by Joseph Michael Sommers
Deadline: 1 November 2016

In connection with the upcoming 2016 ChLA conference on Animation, this special issue of ChLAQ will focus broadly and widely on that multimodal and ever-expanding medium known as youth animation. From children's cartoon shorts such as Walt Disney's Steamboat Willy (1928) and Leon Schlesinger's Looney Tunes (1930-1969); to full-length animated motion pictures such as the work of Studio Ghibli, Pixar, and Nickelodeon; to Homestar Runner, video games, and flip books, if it's sequential art put into motion, it's on the table for discussion.

The Quarterly invites papers that craft, extend, and/or disrupt existing discussions, including (but certainly not limited to):

- Histor(-ies) of children's animation (from the Walt Disney, Fleischers, and Warners forward to the Hanna Barbera and Terrytoon Television era and all stops in between and beyond)

- The adoption of animation intended for other audiences and venues to an audience of children (The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, The Simpsons, etc.)

- New Frontiers of Animation (modes and media, interactivity, video games, etc.)

- The commodification of and interaction between animated media and revenue streams (animation as product tie-in/commercial for toys and games [Barbie, GI Joe, Transformers, Disney Princesses, etc.])

- Adaption of print media into animation and further transmedia

- Difference in animation (broadly ­from cultural and global perspectives, styles, historical perspectives etc.)

- Stop motion, CGI, puppetry, and other operative modes in the creation of animation

- Sex(-ing) and gender(-ing) in animation for youth culture

- Close readings of animated properties.

Papers should conform to the usual style of ChLAQ and be between 5,000-7,000 words in length.

Queries and completed essays should be sent to Joseph Michael Sommers (somme1jm@cmich.edu with a re: line indicating "ChLAQ Essay") by 1 November 2016.

The selected articles will appear in ChLAQ in 2017.

By web submission at 04/12/2015 - 19:10

CFP Animation Conference Theme (no deadline; Columbus, OH 6/9-11/16)

Came across the following by accident today. It sounds like a great venue. Source: http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?option=com_mc&view=mc&mcid=72&eventId=435346&orgId=chla.

2016 Conference of the Children's Literature Association

Hosted by The Ohio State University

Sponsored by the Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology

June 9 - 11, 2016
Columbus, OH
The Sheraton Columbus at Capitol Square

Conference Theme:  “Animation”

The theme for ChLA 2016 is “Animation.”  This concept reflects new developments in both the aesthetic creation and the critical analysis of children’s and YA literature.  The idea of “Animation” has a special significance for OSU, given the campus’ well-known comics collection and cartoon museum, its Wexner Center for the Arts, and its Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD).  Moreover, we feel that the theme “Animation”— defined variously as “inspiration, vivacity and liveliness” as well as “continuous motion or shape change”—will inspire a wide variety of possible paper topics.  These might include:

• picture books and illustration
• graphic novels for young readers
• Jerry Griswold’s notion in Feeling Like a Kid of “aliveness” as a key feature in texts for young readers:  toys coming to life, anthropomorphized animals, etc.
• Comics and cartoons for young people
• critical practice as an animating act, bringing historically neglected authors and texts to the attention of current readers
• birth, aging, and the life cycle
• Animation from the standpoint of science and technology:  in the form of machinery, mechanics, and energy in books for young readers
• Shape shifting and morphing
• children’s media: film, cartoons, television, video games
• the animation of texts that occurs in classroom settings through activities like read-alouds
• electronic books and digital storytelling
• children’s and YA literature in performance:  stage plays, musicals, book trailers, etc. 

---

The conference organizers are pleased to announce that Gene Luen Yang will be a featured speaker.  He will be giving a talk and book signing on the evening of Thursday, June 9!

Gene Luen Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. In 1997, he received a Xeric Grant for Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, his first comics work. He has since written and drawn a number of titles, includingDuncan’s Kingdom, The Rosary Comic Book, Prime Baby and Animal Crackers.American Born Chinese, his first graphic novel from First Second, was a National Book Award finalist, as well as the winner of the Printz Award and an Eisner Award. He also won an Eisner for The Eternal Smile, a collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim. Recently, he has been working on the comics series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

---

The 2016 Francelia Butler lecture, "Children's Comics, Past and Present," will be co-presented by:

Charles Hatfield - Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, author of Alternative Comics (2005) and the Eisner Award-winning Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2011) and co-editor of The Superhero Reader (2013). He has served on the boards of the International Comic Arts Forum (1997-2009) and MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives (2010-2013). His essays on children’s comics have appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (2011), and Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2011). Charles is currently curating a Kirby exhibition and co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Comics.

Joe Sutliff Sanders - Associate Professor in the Children's Literature track of the English Department at Kansas State University.  He is the author of a book about classic orphan girl novels (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) and the co-editor, with Jackie C. Horne, of a collection of essays about The Secret Garden (Scarecrow, 2011).  In 2011, Joe received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 2013 he was the Fulbright fellow to the University of Luxembourg.  Joe is the editor of a collection of essays about the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and the author of new and forthcoming essays on picture books, manga, digital comics, and the history of children's comics.

Location: The Sheraton Columbus, Ohio

For more information:

Contact: Association Manager
Phone: 630-571-4520
Email:  conference@childlitassn.org

CFP Current Research in Speculative Fiction (3/9/15; Liverpool, UK 6/8/15)

Europeans have all the fun:

Current Research in Speculative Fiction [CRSF] 2015
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/60481
full name / name of organization:
Current Research in Speculative Fiction [CRSF] / University of Liverpool
contact email:
CRSF.team@gmail.com
Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2015
Monday 8th June 2015
University of Liverpool

With Keynote Lectures from:
Dr. Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Dr. Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge)

Returning for its fifth consecutive year, CRSF is a one day postgraduate conference designed to promote the research of speculative fictions, including SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY and HORROR; showcasing some of the latest developments in these dynamic and evolving fields. CRSF attracts an international selection of delegates and provides a platform for postgraduate students to present their current research, encourages discussion with scholars in related subjects and the construction of crucial networks with fellow researchers. The University of Liverpool, a leading centre for the study of speculative fiction and home to the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, will host the conference. We are seeking abstracts relating to speculative fiction, including, but not limited to, papers on the following topics:

•Alternate History •Alternative Culture •Animal Studies •Anime •Apocalypse •Body Horror •Consciousness •Cyber Culture •Drama •Eco-criticism •Fan Culture •Gaming •(Geo)Politics •Genre •Gender •Graphic Novels •The Grotesque •The Heroic Tradition •Liminal Fantasy •Magic •Meta-Franchises •Morality •Monstrosity •Music •Non-Anglo-American SF •Otherness •Pastoral •Poetry •Politics •Post-Colonialism and Empire •Proto-SF •Psychology •Quests •Realism •Sexuality •Slipstream •Spiritualism •Steampunk •Supernatural •Technology •Time •TV and Film •Urban Fantasy •Utopia/Dystopia •(Virtual) Spaces and Environments •Weird Fiction •World Building •Young Adult Fiction.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words for a 20 minute English language paper and a 100 word biography to CRSF.team@gmail.com by Monday 9th March 2015. Queries can be sent to the same address.

By web submission at 01/27/2015 - 16:25

CFP Lost Girls and Teen Dreams: Constructions of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Texts (8/11/14)

Lost Girls and Teen Dreams: Constructions of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Texts (8/11/14)
full name / name of organization:
University of Wisconsin Colleges
contact email:
holly.hassel@uwc.edu
Source: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57685

Call for Proposals: Lost Girls and Teen Dreams: Constructions of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Texts

Young adult literature has seen tremendous market growth in recent years, stemming from the explosive popularity of the Harry Potter series to the success of the Twilight series and later the Hunger Games series. Children’s literature remains both a popular and contested site of children’s literacy and social enculturation. Young adult texts provide a unique window into both the range of representations of gender construction as well as the ways in which children and teens react to these constructions. Further, popular culture is both a space in which young adults are enculturated to traditional gender expectations and an opportunity for gender conventions to evolve, to subvert, and to contest traditional gender boundaries.

Tricia Clasen (contributor to Bitten By Twilight and Heroines in Comics and Literature) and Holly Hassel (Contributor to Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy and co-author of The Critical Companion to JK Rowling) call for proposals for essays to be included in an upcoming anthology focused on gender in young adult literature and popular culture. We have an interested publisher but require a full prospectus for a confirmed contract.

Sitting at the intersection of cultural studies and literary studies, our vision for this edited collection is to collect diverse and complementary examinations of how gender operates in children’s and young adult literature. As a result, essays accepted for this collection should contribute to an understanding of the potential impact and of the current status of gender portrayals in children’s and young adult texts. The editors seek proposals from a broad range of gender studies approaches: feminist critiques and readings of popular or non-mainstream texts, readings from the perspective of masculinity studies, and examinations of gender construction (boys/girls/trans*). Further, we imagine an expansive definition of "texts" that might include a range of traditional print texts such as novels, short stories, picture books, nonfiction, etc. as well as comic books, mixed textual/image works for children (such as the Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Ellie McDoodle series), graphic novels, and other print and electronic texts aimed at child and adolescent readers.

The topics below are intended as suggestions, but the editors welcome related proposals:

• gender and genre conventions in popular series
• subversive approaches to gender, femininity, masculinity in popular or alternate series
• gender, race, class, and difference in children’s and young adult literature
• treatment of sexuality and trans* issues in children’s texts
• evolving representations of gender, femininity, masculinity in specific works by a single author or within a genre
• Responses to evolving gender representations in literature-based fan communities and/or social networking sites.
• Treatment of diversified gendered perspectives upon adaptation

For submissions, please include:

• a proposed chapter title
• an abstract of your proposed essay (no more than 500 words), including your proposed area of inquiry, original thesis, and overview of the essay’s argument
• an abbreviated curriculum vitae highlighting your relevant teaching, research, and service experience to the book’s focus

Deadline for proposals: August 11, 2014

Please submit your materials as a single word or PDF document as an attachment. Copy Dr. Tricia Clasen and Dr. Holly Hassel at tricia.clasen@uwc.edu and holly.hassel@uwc.edu.


By web submission at 07/21/2014 - 18:32

CFP SWPACA Children’s/Young Adult Literature and Culture Area (11/1/14; Albuquerque 2/11-14/15)

CFP: SWPACA Children’s/Young Adult Literature and Culture Area (11/1/14; 2/11-14/15)
full name / name of organization:
Southwest Popular/American Culture Association
contact email:
gypsyscholar@rgv.rr.com
Submission Deadline: November 1, 2014
Source: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57702

SWPACA Children’s/Young Adult Literature and Culture Area
36th Annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference
February 11-14, 2015
Albuquerque, NM
http://southwestpca.org/

Submission deadline: November 1, 2014
Submit proposals to: http://conference2015.southwestpca.org

Conference hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
300 Tijeras Avenue NW
Albuquerque, NM 87102
Further conference details are available at http://southwestpca.org/

Please join us in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in February 2015 for the 36th annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference. The overall theme for this year’s conference is “Many Faces, Many Voices: Intersecting Borders in Popular and American Culture.”

Playing off the overall conference theme, the Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture area has taken as its theme “Breaking Boundaries, Blurring Lines in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture.” We highly encourage “thinking outside the box” with this theme. We would especially be interested in papers that look at how children’s and young adult authors and works push, break, or blur narrative, form, genre, language, gender, ethnicity, racial, and other societal boundaries. How do children’s and young adult literature and culture make room for the many faces and many voices in popular and American culture? Are there any clear-cut lines between what constitutes “children’s” and “young adult” literature, or even literature “for adults” for that matter?

While papers addressing the conference or area theme will be given preference, papers addressing other aspects in children’s and young adult literature and culture will also be read with interest.

This area covers a wide variety of possible mediums: traditional book/literature culture, but also comics, graphic novels, film, television, music, video games, toys, internet environment, fan fiction, advertising, marketing tie-ins to books and films, just to name a few. Proposals on fiction, non-fiction, poetry, picture books, wordless picture books, or cross-genre topics are welcome. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome, as are presentations that go beyond the traditional scholarly paper format.

Scholars, researchers, professionals, teachers, graduate students and others interested in this area are encouraged to submit an abstract. Graduate students are especially encouraged and will be assisted in accessing any and all award opportunities the conference and/or associations provide. Award categories can be found here: http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/. Upon acceptance of a proposal, I will send out information on which awards would be most suited to the subject matter of the presentation. Submission deadline for all award categories is December 1, 2014.

We would like to encourage scholars and students outside of the United States to submit proposals. However, all potential presenters need to be aware that our conference rules state that participants must present their papers in person at the conference. Given the more complex nature of international travel these days, we encourage international proposals be submitted as early as possible so as to provide enough time to make those travel arrangements.

All proposals need to be submitted using our conference submission database at http://conference2015.southwestpca.org/. This database is used to send out acceptance notifications, organize panels, and put the conference program together. It is important for all submitters to enter their contact information and presentation proposal information into the database to avoid confusion.

In addition, please check out the organization’s new peer-reviewed, quarterly journal: Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. (Find more information at http://journaldialogue.org.)

Please submit proposals of 250 words and a brief bio (100 words) for individual presentations, or a proposal for a full panel (3-4 papers on a panel – please note that each person on the panel must submit his/her own contact information, abstract, and brief bio on a separate proposal form) to our conference database at http://conference2015.southwestpca.org/.

Proposal submission deadline: November 1, 2014

For questions, or if you encounter problems with submitting proposals to the database, please contact Diana Dominguez, Area Chair. Please put SWPACA in the subject line so I can filter the messages effectively.

Contact info:
Diana Dominguez
Area Chair: Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture
gypsyscholar@rgv.rr.com
The University of Texas at Brownsville


By web submission at 07/22/2014 - 14:28

CFP Youth Culture in Contemporary Media (7/31/14; Montreal March 2015)

SCMS 2015 Proposed Panel: "Youth Culture in Contemporary Media" Deadline July 31, 2014
full name / name of organization:
Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, March 2015, Montreal, Canada
contact email:
karin.beeler@unbc.ca; tshary17@gmail.com
Source: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57447


Youth Culture in Contemporary Media

Co-chairs: Karin Beeler and Timothy Shary

Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, March 2015, Montreal, Canada

Youth culture (be it people from age ten into their twenties) continually exerts enormous influence on the media industries to develop new products and promote new content, and those industries are in a constant race to maintain the attention of the youth market. Many of the postwar trends that led to the rise of numerous adolescent stars and the development of corresponding movies and TV shows are still in play today, with a disproportional amount of all screen media (and music) devoted to youth, even when their share of the population has been decreasing. Yet the messages about youth contained in so much of the media are suspect, not only due to their exploitative aims, but because so few people under the age of twenty-five are actually generating them.

This panel seeks to address how youth are represented in contemporary media through a wide appreciation for the stakes of that representation. How do the images of young people in movies and on TV today convey or distort their real lives? Why have these media lately gravitated toward fantasy stories (especially the monstrous and supernatural) and what aspects of current youth experiences are highlighted or subverted by those stories? What explains their displacement of traditional teen concerns about delinquency and sexuality? What do youth stand to gain and lose in their reception of contemporary media about them?

Please submit a proposal that details your idea for a paper on this topic, listing the relevant films/shows you will consider, as well as the research from which you are working. Also include a short biographical statement about yourself. Please send us your proposal by July 31, and we will notify you of our decision by August 12.

If we accept your proposal for our panel, we’ll then expect you to remodel your proposal according to SCMS requirements: a summary of no more than 2500 characters, 3 or more keywords, 3-5 sources, and a bio of no more than 500 characters. That proposal must reach us by August 22.

Please send a proposal to each of us: Karin Beeler (karin.beeler@unbc.ca) and Timothy Shary (tshary17@gmail.com).


By web submission at 07/03/2014 - 02:47

CFP Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction (9/15/14)

CfP: Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction
Posted on June 4, 2014 by Public Information Officer
“I don’t think I am like other people”: Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.
Source: http://www.fantastic-arts.org/2014/cfp-anomalous-embodiment-in-young-adult-speculative-fiction/

Editors Sherryl Vint and Mathieu Donner are seeking submissions for a volume of essays on young adult literature entitled Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

The large commercial as well as critical successes of such works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series have pushed young adult fiction to the forefront of the literary world. However, and though most of these texts themselves engage in one way or another with questions related to the body, and, more precisely, to a body that refuses to conform to social norms as to what a body ‘ought to be’, few academic studies have really explored the relation that young adult fiction entertains with this adolescent ‘abnormal’ body.

In her work on corporeal feminism, Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that adolescence is not only the period during which the body itself undergoes massive transformation, shifting from childhood to adulthood, but that it is also in this period that ‘the subject feels the greatest discord between the body image and the lived body, between its psychical idealized self-image and its bodily changes’ and that therefore, the ‘philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges may be dated from this period’ (Volatile Bodies 75). Following upon Grosz’s observation, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the relation that young adult fiction weaves between the adolescent body and the ‘norm’, this socially constructed idealized body image which the subject perceives to be in direct conflict with her/his own experience.

This collection will thus be centred on the representation, both positive and negative, of such body or bodies. From the vampiric and lycanthropic bodies of Twilight and Teen Wolf to the ‘harvested’ bodies of Neal Shusterman’s novel Unwind, YA fiction entertains a complex relation to the adolescent body. Often singularized as ‘abnormal’, this body comes to symbolise the violence of a hegemonic and normative medical discourse which constitutes itself around an ideal of ‘normality’. However, and more than a simple condemnation or interrogation of the problematic dominant representation of the corporeal within young adult fiction, this collection also proposes to explore how such texts can present a foray into new alternative territories. As such, the collection proposes a focus on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s label the anomalous body, or embodiment re-articulated not necessarily as the presumption of an inside and an outside of normality, but rather as ‘a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 244), one which interrogates and challenges the setting of such a boundary by positioning itself at the threshold of normativity.

We are particularly looking for contributions on works which either (1) interrogate, problematize the dominant discourse on normative embodiment present in YA fiction, (2) emphasize, by a play on repetition or any other means, the limitations of the traditional discourse on the ‘abnormal’ or ‘disabled’ body, and signal the inherent violence of such normative paradigms, and/or (3) propose an alternative approach to the anomalous body. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

• (Re-)Articulating disability;
• The adolescent as ‘abnormally’ embodied;
• Transcending gender and the sexuated body;
• Medical norms and the violence of ‘normative’ embodiment;
• Bodies and prosthetic technologies, or the posthuman boundary;
• Genetics, Diseases and medication, or transforming the body from the inside;
• Cognitive readings of the body, or how do we read body difference;
• Embodied subjectivities, anomalous/abnormal consciousness;

We invite proposals (approximately 500 words) for 8’000-10’000-word chapters by Monday 15th September. Abstract submissions should be included in a Word document and sent to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@ucr.edu) and Mathieu Donner (Mathieu.Donner@nottingham.ac.uk). Please remember to include name, affiliation, academic title and email address. Postgraduate and early-careers researchers are encouraged to participate.

CFP Victorian Period in 21st-Century Children’s Literature (8/1/14)

[UPDATE] The Victorian Period in 21st-Century Children’s Literature: Representations & Revisions, Adaptations & Appropriations
full name / name of organization:
Sara K. Day and Sonya Sawyer Fritz
contact email:
Vic21Collection@gmail.com

This proposed volume seeks essays that analyze how twenty-first century texts for young audiences across a variety of media--including print, film, television, and digital formats--interact with Victorian literature and culture.

A significant aim of contemporary literature for young people is to provide a window into a variety of historical periods and cultural milieus. Such representations of the past have educational, creative, and political resonances, reflecting both on historical periods and contemporary values. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, we seem to have reached a critical mass of works for children that engage the Victorian period in particular.

Perhaps the most visible form that this trend has taken is Neo-Victorianism, a literary and cultural phenomenon that has shaped contemporary fiction for children and young adults through the general prevalence and popularity of Neo-Victorian series such as the Enola Holmes novels and the Gemma Doyle trilogy. A recent special issue on the child in Neo-Victorian Studies also indicates that the critical discussion inspired by this genre has specific implications for studies of youth culture.

However, Victorian influences and impulses extend beyond works that can be categorized as Neo-Victorian. Historical fiction and timeslip fantasy set in the Victorian period interact with the past through placing the modern reader in the position of the nineteenth-century child, while steampunk fiction imagines alternate histories and technologies that emerge from the nexus of Victorian culture. Contemporary texts also engage Victorian fiction through adaptations and retellings: films such as Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002) reconfigure the iconic works of Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson for a twenty-first century audience, as do intertextual retellings such as April Lindner’s Catherine and Cara Lockwood’s Wuthering High, both young adult novels that update and revise the narrative of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Critical questions that this volume seeks to address include but are not limited to the following: What do such works reveal about contemporary understandings or assumptions regarding Victorian values and sensibilities? What has made the Victorian era such a productive and inspiring space for so many authors and young audiences of the twenty-first century? What is lost and what might be gained by reframing a text for Victorian adults for a contemporary audience of young people?

Essay topics may include but are not limited to

• the Victorian text as intertext in contemporary literature
• Neo-Victorian literature
• steampunk fiction
• representations of the Victorian past in time-slip fantasy and/or ghost stories
• contemporary retellings of iconic Victorian stories
• the portrayal of the Victorian period in contemporary nonfiction
• film adaptations of Victorian literature
• representations of Victorian cultural icons (Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Jack the Ripper)
• Victorian sensibilities and aesthetics as influences on contemporary fiction
• historical fiction set in the Victorian period

We are currently seeking a book contract for this volume. Submit a 500-word abstract, along with a working bibliography and a brief, up-to-date CV by August 1, 2014 to Sara K. Day and Sonya Sawyer Fritz at Vic21Collection@gmail.com. Completed essays of 5000-7000 words will be due by March 1, 2015.


By web submission at 06/04/2014 - 17:06