cfp.english.upenn.edu

Entangled Children: Technology, Media-Enhancement, and Storytelling in Children's Culture

In My Mother Was a Computer, N. Katherine Hayles states that one of the most important elements of scholarly analysis is examining entanglement: “a manifestation of what [Hayles] call[s] ‘intermediation,’ that is, the complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media” (7). The 2013 SAMLA Children's Literature Discussion Circle seeks papers for this year’s panel addressing any aspect of technology, entanglement, or multimodal/transmedia storytelling in children’s and adolescents’ literature, poetry, media, and games. We welcome presentations exploring depictions of technology or networks, theoretical works on media shifts and new media practices for children’s literature, as well as historical or archival work with representations of media and children/adolescents.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):
* Technological determinism or liberation
* Technology and play
* Technology and reader/player agency
* Technology and utopia/dystopia
* Technology through images—manuals, comics, graphic novels, etc.
* Technology and making meaning in print, digital, and networked worlds
* Teenagers, surveillance, and civil rights
* Relationships between old and new technologies
* Relationships among technology, humanity, and/or the environment/government/turmoil
* Operational logics of children’s media or games
* Convergence, intermediation, entanglement or multimodal texts
* The cyborg or technological enhancement of bodies

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words as a word document by May 1, 2013 to Lisa Dusenberry via email at cldc.samla@gmail.com. The 85th annual SAMLA conference will be held November 8-10, 2013 at the Marriott Atlanta Buckhead Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.