CFP: On the Move, In the World... Mobility and Young People

A One-day Conference Organized by the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People in partnership with ACCUTE

WHERE: At the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Brock University, Ontario, Canada

WHEN: May 27, 2014

PROPOSAL DEADLINE: November 1, 2013

WEBSITE: http://arcyp.ca/congress2014

Mobility and young people: taken together, these terms produce both anxiety and possibility. On the move in the world, young people are widely perceived to be in danger or at risk. Yet young people’s mobility may also be aspirational or generative, as adventure, transformation, good fortune, and border-crossings of all kinds can effect changes in status and re-orientations of consciousness and identity. Further, the narratives circulated by and for those youth are themselves subject to revisions once they, too, have been put in motion. And the very thought of young people’s mobility puts us in the realms of affect and embodiment, of ability and impairment. Affect raises questions about the emotional landscape of the young people so moved, how young people are deployed in a variety of media to move adults, and the ways in which we map and describe our attachments to those cultural objects we find to be moving. The body in motion invites us to think of childhood in terms of kinesthetics, choreography, and ideologies and architectures of enablement, while the very idea of mobile youth asks us to consider spatio-temporal relationships: how young people move through space and time, measuring time by space and vice versa. All of these ways of thinking about mobility in the context of youth cultures take various narrative, political, aesthetic, and conceptual forms— narratives that are, themselves, subject to movement and therefore subject to revision, reconsideration, subversion, and change. Mobility itself might be seen to generate new youth movements—opening up ways to think about the cultures of young people and for young people to move our sense of culture. ARCYP invites proposals for papers (or panels) that consider any and all facets of young people’s mobility/movement.