CFP Children in World Cinema

Call for submissions to a collection that examines the child in World (non-Western) cinema. Many studies of the child character in film, or films made for children, too often focus on Western cinema and Western models of childhood. This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. The child image in non-Western cinema provides a much broader landscape of meaning to notions of the child and childhood. Images of non-Western children in film are elided from the discussion of the meaning and experience of childhood within a wide range of cultural, political, and social matrices. This collection seeks to offer a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood as depicted in film.  We seek contributions that examine the child image in cinemas from Africa, Asia, South America, India, Australia, and the Middle East. While there are numerous important, empirical, data-driven studies about real children and conditions of childhood in the Global South and other non-Western regions, we seek essays that examine the child image and its philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, or cultural meanings as they appear in cinema from non-Western regions.

Some topics may include (certainly not limited to):

children and innocence

images of child soldiers

coming of age narratives

children and geographic space

children/childhood and modernity

children and technology

local vs. global childhood

children and knowledge acquisition

children as political agents/actors

the child in war or revolution

children and sexuality

children and labor

child agency

negotiations of racial/ethnic/cultural differences

negotiations by children of social, political, economic conditions

children's relationships with adults, parents, siblings, or peers

gender and children

children as refugees

Please submit a 500 word abstract, current contact information along with brief biography (or CV) as Word attachments Debbie Olson at Debbieo@okstate.edu  by 31 July 2016.  Authors will be notified by 31 August 2016. The deadline for finished essays (in Chicago notes and bibliography style) is 31 January 2017.

Debbie Olson has a PhD in English- Screen Studies from Oklahoma State University and is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Valley College. She has edited or co-edited a number of collections on children and popular culture, including Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema (2012), Portrayals of Children in Contemporary Culture (2013) Hitchcock’s Children: The Child in the Films of Alfred and Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg.  She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Popular Culture and Series Editor for Lexington’s Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series. CV availabe at academia.edu/debbieolson