Welcome to another round of calls-for-papers and upcoming
children’s literature conferences!
Somehow—if you remember our last
CFP blogpost—this post once
again falls on the last stretches of the semester, with finals week only 5
weeks away, and summer sunshine just on the other side of all of those
responsibilities between now and then. But summer’s the perfect time to get out
there with your ideas and proposals, and here are a few children’s literature
prompts to help you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Critical Perspectives
Description:
“Editors seek essays that
critically engage with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and works, including the Little House series, her journalism, her
letters, and Pioneer Girl: The annotated
Biography. We are interested in essays that consider Wilder’s relationship
with the academy as well as her enduring place in American popular culture. We
are especially interested in essays that consider Wilder’s place in the
classroom, at the elementary level and also in university curricula.”
For a range of topics,
visit the website below.
Deadline: April 15, 2016
Website: http://www.childlitassn.org/assets/docs/wilder%20cfp.pdf
Instructions:
- Submit abstracts of 300–500 words along
with a short CV to Miranda Green-Barteet (mgreenb6@uwo.ca ) and Anne Phillips (annek@ksu.edu)
by the deadline.
- Accepted essays will be due no later
than September 1, 2016
The Child Before
Adulthood, Midwest Modern Language Association
Dates: November 10–13, 2016
Location: St. Louis, MO
Description:
“From the late Victorian period throughout the early decades of the
twentieth century, Anglo-American children’s literature and young adult fiction
experienced a sudden surge in popularity. While some sentimental or didactic
North American literature reinforced obedience to parental and societal
expectations, such as Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World (1850) and Martha
Finley’s popular Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905), other works explored the
possibilities resulting from disobedient adolescence, such as Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green
Gablesseries (1908-1920). Meanwhile, British fantasy literature by authors such
as George McDonald and E. Nesbit idealized the middle-class English child as
subversive protagonist of the modern fairy story, supernaturally combating
social ills and injustices existing in the adult system of legal justice, while
at the same time testing and submitting to acceptable moral, social, and gender
parameters. Such narratives, whether undercutting or reaffirming adult
behavior, also establish childhood as a unique space of negotiation,
perception, and decision occurring prior to adulthood.
This session invites
proposals for individual papers on the societal pressures in children or young
adult literature from this period that worked to shape and necessitate the
embodiment of womanhood or manhood, queer or subversive resistance to
conforming to idealized, or imperative notions of gender norms, the childish
world conflicting with the public or adult sphere, rejection of female or male
attire, duty, or performance, and spatial avoidance of the domestic sphere by
means of nature or adventure.”
Deadline: April 30, 2016
Website: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/66975
Instructions:
Youth Literature and Media
Organization: Midwest Popular and American Culture Association
Dates: October 6–9, 2016
Location: Chicago, IL, Hilton Rosemont Chicago
O’Hare
Description:
“We are looking for proposals for
arguably the hottest area in popular culture: Youth Literature and Media. Youth
Culture is everywhere. From the rise of YA Lit to the fall of Facebook,
twenty-five is the new eighteen. The Millennials are here. This area is for the
study of Lit and Media for Youth (all three terms broadly conceived),
representations of youth in Lit and Media, and youth as consumers and producers
of Lit and Media.
We want to know all about the kids these days,
from their classrooms to the parents’ basements, from S.E. Hinton to Luke
Herzog, from the slew of really really rich youth who play videogames and apply
make-up on YouTube to the tens of thousands more who mod everything from
videogames to movies to Legos into their own Maker-inspired, bricolage cultural
productions. Who are they, what are they reading and doing, why, and who cares?
Pop Culture Studies is a multi-disciplinary endeavor, so bring us your close
readings, your ethnographies, your visual analysis, and hard core stats:
anything and everything as long as it’s about youth and popular culture!”
Deadline: April 30, 2016
Instructions:
- Submit abstracts (up to 300 words) along with your name,
affiliation, and email to the Youth Literature and Media area at http://submissions.mpcaaca.org (include whether or
not you’ll need a projector)
Submit Essays or Writing on Gender and Literacy
Organization: Gender and Literacy Assembly: NCTE
Gender Studies Assembly
Description:
“An NCTE affiliate, GALA is published every December and seeks submission
on gender and K-12 education. Write about how you teach or address gender in the K–12 classroom; how
boys and girls learn and more.”
Gothic
Association of New Zealand (GANZA)’s third biennial conference: Gothic
Afterlives: Mutations, Histories, and Returns’
Dates: January 23–24, 2017
Location: Auckland University of Technology, New
Zealand
Description:
“GANZA is interdisciplinary in nature,
bringing together scholars, students, teachers and professionals from a number
of Gothic disciplines, including literature, film, music, television, fashion,
architecture, and other popular culture forms. It is the aim of the Association
to not only place a focus on Australasian Gothic scholarship, but also to build
international links with the wider Gothic community as a whole.
The conference invites abstracts for 20-minute
presentations related to the theme of ‘Gothic Afterlives’.”
Contact Dr. Lorna
Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz ) and/or Dr. Erin Mercer (e.mercer@massey.ac.nz)
Deadline: August 1, 2016
Instructions:
- Please email
abstracts of 200 words to the conference organizers at: conference@ganza.co.nz
- Abstracts should
include your name, affiliation, email address, the title of your proposed
paper, and a short bio (100 words max).
Dystopia, The
Hunger Games, And the Culture of Death
Organization: SAMLA, Myrna Santos
Dates: November 4–6, 2016
Description:
“The word
utopia, coined by St. Thomas More, seems to be a Latin pun: It is used in the
sense of eu-topia, a “good place” or “ideal society,” which More claimed was
his intended sense, but the spelling of u-topia means “nowhere” and is often
taken to suggest that eutopia is impossible, as well as, nonexistent. More’s
term eventually suggested a more practical word, dystopia, and speculative
fiction has benefited from this concept over the course of many years. Young
adult literature, and films based on this literature, has particularly embraced
this concept, and this panel seeks to explore the reasons for this phenomenon.
Papers on trilogies such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, as well as other
works, are welcome.”
Deadline: June 6, 2016
Instructions:
Flow
2016 Conference on Television and New Media
Organization: Flow 2016
Dates: September 15–17, 2016
Location: Austin, Texas
Description:
“The 2016
Flow Conference will feature a series of roundtables, each organized around a
discussion question on contemporary issues in television and new media culture
and scholarship. Respondents are asked to submit a brief (150-word) abstract
addressing one of the Flow 2016 roundtable questions.”
Deadline: May 20, 2016, 5
p.m. (CST)
Instructions:
- Submit a brief (150 words)
abstract addressing one one of the
Flow 2016 roundtable questions, using the online form on their website (above)
- Participants are encouraged
to let the conference coordinators know if they are willing to participate in
another roundtable if their first choice has too many responses
- Upon acceptance,
respondents will be asked to expand their abstract to a 600–800-word position
paper, due late August 2016
- Direct any
questions/concerns to: flowconference2016@gmail.com
And
don’t forget to check out this year’s ChLA conference, hosted by The Ohio State
University, on the theme of “Animation”: our very own Dr. Jerry Griswold
appeared on the topic list and Gene
Luen Yang will be a featured speaker!
http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?option=com_mc&view=mc&mcid=72&eventId=435346&orgId=chla
Good luck, everyone, on upcoming finals, final papers, and submissions for this year's conferences and calls for papers!
In
the end, telling and retelling these stories—of Emmett Till, of Eric Garner, of
Trayvon Martin—decreases the power of the perpetrators. The contemporary
erasure or retelling of Black history is an unsettling commonality due to white
privilege and speaks to a need for more accurate narratives of our history. And
may those narratives start in young children’s books and young adult novels,
and may they propel future generations into action.
