Call for Papers

 How do different cultures present the concept of death to children? How is death represented pictorially? How is death suggested metaphorically? How do the images and metaphors in children’s books reflect contemporaneous beliefs, hopes, and fears? Are there taboos in the verbal and visual presentation of death? How is the transition made from death being something that happens to someone else to death being something that will inevitably happen to oneself? How is the inevitability of death made less fearful than it was in the past (or is it)?

How are fear and fascination or appeal balanced? Often it is the elderly or animals that die: is this distancing conducive to empathy? What are the means of achieving empathy with those confronting death? 

 This call-for-papers is for a collection of essays that would address these and other related questions. The editors are particularly interested in proposals that focus on the topic of death as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and a social construct. Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives and on literature representing different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, picture books, graphic novels, translations, adaptations) and different cultural perspectives and periods are welcomed. 

 If you would like to contribute to this publication, please submit a 450-550 word abstract of your proposed paper and a curriculum vitae (no more than two pages) by Friday, 1 February 2013, to Dr. Lesley Clement (lclement@lakeheadu.ca) and Dr. Leyli Jamali (leylijamali@gmail.com).We will contact you about the status of your proposal by the end of April, 2013, at which stage we will be approaching publishers that have a special interest in children’s literature and global issues. If the editors invite you to submit a paper, it should be 18-22 double-spaced pages (including endnotes and bibliography) and would be due the end of August, 2013. Please address any queries to above editors.

CALL FOR PAPERS:
 #1: Genderqueer Children and Youth

#2: Institutionalized Spaces, Geographies, and Environments of
Young People

#3: ‘Growing up global’: Childhoods in a Transnational Context

A JOINT SESSION OF ARCYP AND ACCUTE
AT THE CONGRESS OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA
JUNE 1-8, 2013
DEADLINE: November 1, 2012

NOTES: You must be a current member of ARCYP or ACCUTE to submit to this session. Rejected submissions will not be moved into the general “pool” of ACCUTE submissions.

Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP)
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. 8888 University Drive.
Burnaby, BC. V5A 1S6. Tel. 778.782.7293 E-mail: admin@arcyp.ca Website: http://arcyp.ca

More of Three CFPs for Association for Research in Cultures of Young People..

The 2013 ChLA Conference call for papers online submission site is now open at www.usm.edu/chla2013.

 Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference

Play and Risk in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture

June 13-15, 2013

Biloxi, Miss.

The University of Southern Mississippi

The 40^th Annual Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) Conference will address play and risk in children’s and young adult (YA) literature and culture. Much of John Newbery’s A Pretty Little Pocket-Book, one of the first books to mark the emergence of children’s literature as a successful commercial enterprise, is devoted to teaching the alphabet through play and games.  Innovators of children’s literature have taken risks in building businesses or careers around the notion of pleasurable works for children, just as the scholars who gathered for the first ChLA convention in 1974 and those who followed have taken risks to establish the professional study of the “Great Excluded.” Thus, from its beginnings as both a literary and scholarly enterprise, children’s literature has been linked with play and risk. Many classic and contemporary works for young people represent children or young adults entertaining themselves or taking chances: the March sisters put on plays in Little Women, and Beth risks her own life to care for the Hummel baby; Alice plays croquet in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and risks losing her head; Peter and Wendy play house in Peter Pan and risk being killed or kidnapped by Captain Hook. Play and risk are everywhere in children’s and YA literature and culture. 

We invite paper or panel proposals on the following topics:

• play and games in children’s and YA literature and culture
• children’s games as texts
• children’s theatre and drama or school plays
• linguistic, stylistic, or formal play in children’s and YA literature
• game theory or risk theory and children’s and YA literature and culture
• role-play, performance, or performativity in children’s and YA literature and culture
• childhood/adolescence as play, playing at childhood/adolescence
• video games and/as children’s and YA literature
• sports or competition in children’s and YA literature and culture
• winning and losing in children’s and YA literature and culture
• risk-taking in children’s and YA literature and culture
• uncertainty or chance in children’s and YA literature and culture
• the personal or professional risks of studying, writing, or reading children’s and YA literature
• the discourse of “at risk” youth
• how children’s and YA literature or culture put children at risk
• the risks of how children and childhood are constructed or experienced
• playing with race, class, gender, or sexuality in children’s and YA literature and culture

Abstracts of 300 to 500 words will be accepted by the selection committee between October 15, 2012, and January 15, 2013.  Please submit your proposal online at www.usm.edu/chla2013.

Fantastic Adaptations, Transformations, and Audiences

March 20-24, 2013

Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel

ICFA 34 will explore the ubiquity of adaptation in all its Fantastic forms. In addition to essays examining our Guests’ work, conference papers might consider specific adaptations, adaptation theory, translation, elision and interpolation, postmodern pastiche, transformation and metafictionality, plagiarism and homage, audience and adaptation, franchise fiction, or the recent resurgence of reboots, retcons, remakes, and reimaginings. Panels might discuss the intersection of fantasy and adaptation, the question of fidelity, the relationship between adaptive creation and target audiences, the impact of fan fiction, the popular reception of adapted classics, the perils of translation, or the challenges of adaptation and multiple media. If everything must adapt or die, then join us in Orlando and put off death for another year.

More of CFP: The 34th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Deadline: October 31, 2012..

 CALL FOR PAPERS

Picturing Children of the Sun: A Critical Kaleidoscope of  African-American Children’s Picture Books

Edited by Michelle H. Martin

With the publication of Mrs. A. E. Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way (1890) and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Little Brown Baby (1895), the genre of African-American children’s literature was born.  During its brief print run in 1920 and 1921, The Brownies’ Book Magazine published photographs and visual images of African American children that brought to light the importance of visual and artistic representations of Black life and childhood that depicted the actual experiences of Black people rather than the distorted views that too often surfaced in picture books that relied on minstrel images as did Little Brown Koko and The Ten Little Niggers books.  As African-American children’s picture books evolved throughout the 20^th century, they reflected the monumental shifts taking place in African America; the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement have given rise to what I have labeled the “Golden Age” of African American children’s picture books.  While the publication of African American children’s literature climaxed in the late-1990s and has fallen since, a substantial number of Black authors and illustrators of children’s picture books continue to make a living from their craft, and second-generation Black picture book craftsmen and women are also becoming more common.

This anthology will feature critical and creative essays about African-American children’s picture books from the earliest introduction of the genre until the present.  In this volume, African American children’s literature is defined inclusively; hence, essays will be considered that focus on picture books by African American authors and illustrators as well as those by non-African American authors whose picture books portray the Black experience.  Contributors are invited to consider critical papers about fiction, nonfiction, biography, wordless picture books, graphic novels for younger readers, historical and contemporary picture books, little-known texts, and archival research on particular picture books.  Critical essays from English Studies, Education, Library Science and other fields will be considered, but the editor would prefer not to include pedagogical essays. Creative pieces might focus on particular authors or illustrators and their work, specific texts, lifelong connections with Black picture books, autobiographical concerns of African American authors and/or illustrators, etc. 

Finished essays and creative pieces should be sent by December 15, 2012 to the address below.  Critical essays should be 15-20 pages and should be written in MLA documentation style; creative pieces can be any length.  Those considering submitting are encouraged to correspond with the editor.

Dr. Michelle H. Martin,
Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy
School of Library and Information Science
University of South Carolina
217 Davis College
Columbia, SC 29208
martinmi@sc.edu; 803-777-1215