2014 ACLAR conference, "Emotional Control: Affect, Ideology and Texts for Young People"

The eleventh biennial international conference 

of the Australasian Children’s Literature 

Association for Research (ACLAR)

Emotional Control: Affect, Ideology and Texts for Young People
Waterfront Campus, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
June 30 – July 2, 2014 

proposal deadline: February 28, 2014

Keynote speakers:
Professor John Stephens (Macquarie University)
Dr Juanita Ruys (University of Sydney)

Over the past two decades, studies of affect and emotion have expanded beyond the field of psychology and been embraced by disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Theorists of affect are concerned with the ways embodied forms of knowing and feeling interconnect with the aesthetic, ethical and ideological, including their effect on texts. According to Grossberg (1992), ‘affect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology.’ The 2014 ACLAR conference explores affect and emotion, with a particular emphasis on how theories of emotion and affect might extend research on the ideological agendas encoded in texts for children and young adults.

Abstracts that address the conference theme are welcome and the full range of children’s texts and media may be examined. Papers may engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:



Affecting fictions: How do emotion and affect position readers or audiences to subscribe to the ideology of a text?
Papers might:

• Focus on the way genre, motif, setting, medium and/or semiotics manipulate – invite or foreclose – particular emotional responses to the textual content;
• Consider the emotional or affective responses invited by fictional events because of the age of the implied reader or for reasons such as censorship or didacticism;
• Examine the influence of technology, marketing, fan fiction and/or peer culture in promoting young people’s affective investments in a text.

Sense and sensibility: Are emotions universal or constructed?
Papers might:

•  Consider how the national, cultural, geographical and/or historical origin of a text influences the representation of emotion and/or the implied reader’s emotional response;
• Examine the way fictions set in the past negotiate differences between historical sensibilities and those of the contemporary reader;
• Explore the body and embodiment in the textual evocation of emotion and affect.

Feeling and self: What roles do affect and emotion play in the representation of gender, race, indigeneity, class, LGBT, disability, nationality, religion, etc?
Papers might:

• Investigate the role of affect in positioning the implied reader/viewer to empathize – or not – with characters from dominant and minority groups;
• Focus on the ideological implications of the textual reproduction or subversion of identity-based emotional stereotypes (such as, but not limited to, masculinity and femininity);
• Address issues of authenticity, appropriation and essentialism. 

Emotional socialization: How do children’s texts mobilize affect to educate and acculturate readers and audiences to respond to the life experiences and the life politics of their world?
Papers might:

• Attend to the modeling of emotional intelligence or resilience in fiction or non-fiction;
• Compare the emotional/affective appeal embedded in children’s texts with public discourses in regard to the same social issue;
• Evaluate the merits of theories of affect in relation to cognitive/ narratological/poststructuralist/post-theory modes for explaining how texts socialize young readers or audiences. 

Abstracts of no more than 300 words are due by February 28, 2014 (deadline extended)
Abstracts should be emailed to: aclar2014@gmail.com