childrens literature

MLA 2021 “#OwnVoices in Children’s and Adolescent Literature”

Guaranteed Session Sponsored by the MLA GS Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum

Toronto, Ontario

January 7-10, 2021

Panel Chair:  Brigitte Fielder

Deadline for submissions: 10 March 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS: *Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures*

Published by the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures (CRYTC) at the University of Winnipeg, *Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures* is a scholar-led, interdisciplinary, refereed academic journal whose mandate is to publish research on and to provide a forum for discussion about cultural productions for, by, and about young people.

Our scope is international; while we have a special interest in Canada, we welcome submissions concerning all areas and cultures. The focus of the journal is on the cultural functions and representations of “the child.” This can include, but is not limited to:

The Other in Narratives of Rival Nations

This panel seeks papers that examine the representation of the ethnic Other in literatures of rival nations or ethnic groups in twentieth and twenty-first century children’s and young adult fiction from around the world. How is the ethnic Other presented to young readers, and how are children initiated into certain cultural, political, national, or historical ideologies of the rival nation? 

We are seeking panelist proposals for the accepted Children’s Literature Association (ChLA 2020) conference panel “Sustaining Black Lives: Ecological Imaginaries in African American Books for Young Readers.” The  ChLA 2020 theme “Sustainability Through Story: Eco-Justice, Children's Literature, and Childhood” invites “an expansive array of interdisciplinary topics on the cultural, political, historical, and contemporary impact of children’s literature in relationship to the environment.” This panel seeks papers that correlates race and gender with Black sustainability issues like environmental inequity and global migration.

Guest editors: Erika Hughes, University of Portsmouth&  Angela Sweigart-Gallagher, St. Lawrence University

Contact: intergenerationalperf@gmail.com  

Childhoods and Religion - Columbia University Religion Graduate Student Conference 2020

https://columbiareligion.weebly.com/cfp.html

American and English diasporic children’s literature plays a fundamental role in unconsciously reproducing the category of Self as white and male, and the rest of humankind as “Other.” Recent attempts to shift consciousness away from this include the hashtag #ownvoices coined on Twitter in 2015 by Corinne Duyvis, to use, she explains, “for whatever marginalized/diverse identity you want…and for whatever genre, category or form of art you want. As long as the protagonist and the author share a marginalized identity.” Of course, one marginalized identity no adult can share is that of a child. Still, we speak for children from their narrative viewpoints.

Call for Papers

Book:

What’s in a Word?: Literature in Language Learning

Editors: Rogério Miguel Puga (NOVA FCSH), Ana Gonçalves Matos (NOVA FCSH) and Ana Bela Almeida (University of Liverpool).

Publishers: CTELL (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom) and CETAPS (NOVA FCSH, Portugal).

Guest Edited by Nancy D. Tolson, University of South Carolina This special issue of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora is dedicated to creative artistry for children of the African Diaspora. We invite original textual and multimedia submissions devoted to interdisciplinary and creative approaches in African Diaspora Children’s and YA Literature. Submissions must focus upon literature, visual, and audio artistry created by people of the African Diaspora.

Border Walls

San Diego State University, English Graduate Student Organization (EGSO)

Annual Symposium, April 17, 2020

San Diego State University

San Diego, California

https://www.sdsu.edu

Proposal submission deadline: January 10, 2020

Headlining Speakers: TBA

Call for Abstracts - Edited Collection on Father Figures in Children’s Animated/Cartoon TV Shows

“The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”
- Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize Winner

The trope of the “hapless dad,” clumsy and useless with his own children, appears in storytelling across several mediums—especially in animated kids’ cartoons on TV. For many contemporary kids’ shows, however, this trope appears less pronounced. These shows often showcase masculine parental figures as kind, emotionally intelligent, and nurturing to children, normalizing childrearing is more than just "women's work."

In 2018 Duke University Press reissued James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Record of Childhood. In “A James Baldwin Book, Forgotten and Overlooked for Four Decades, Gets Another Life,” New York Times writer Alexandra Alter notes that in 1976 Little Man received lukewarm reviews: “critics didn’t know what to make of an experimental, enigmatic picture book that straddled the line between children’s and adult literature.” Alter posits that because of a changed social and political climate, Baldwin’s book will now have an easier time finding an audience.

Sherwood Anderson’s 1928 Tar: A Midwest Childhood opens with the title character remembering his childhood and acknowledging that he has, within this narrative, created his childhood midwestern hometown almost entirely from his imagination, “one place all his own, the product of his own fancy” (4). “To tell the truth, Tar was trying,” the narrator promises, “to get at something it was almost impossible to get at in the reality of life,” the inevitable changes that disrupt and discount the intertwined memories of childhood and place (7-8).

In this year of the centennial of women’s suffrage in the US, the Fuller and Alcott Societies invite your participation in the Thoreau Gathering (July 8-12, 2020 in Concord, MA).  Our focus will be on gender as part of the Gathering’s larger theme of “Thoreau and Diversity: People, Principles, Politics.”  What did Thoreau’s two most famous female contemporaries in the Concord circle have to say to him, to each other, or to their larger worlds about changing the legal and human status of women?