CALL FOR PAPERS – IRSCL CONGRESS 2017 (Updated September 2016)

Congress 2017
The 23rd Biennial Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature will be hosted by the Children’s Studies Program, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University in Toronto, Canada.

Congress Co-Convenors
Cheryl Cowdy & Peter Cumming

Congress Dates
Saturday, July 29 to Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Congress Venue
Keele Campus, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  The Children’s Studies Program is an Honours BA program with more than 500 majors and minors.  York University is the third-largest university in Canada.  Toronto is Canada’s largest city, the fourth-largest city in North America, and the leading Canadian destination for tourists.  The economic, transportation, and cultural hub of Canada, with direct flights to many cities around the world, Toronto is one of the safest and most multicultural cities in the world.

Congress Theme

                                                              “Possible & Impossible Children: Intersections of Children’s Literature & Childhood Studies”

At least since Jacqueline Rose’s provocative argument about the “impossibility” of children’s fiction in 1984, children’s literature scholars have been profoundly anxious about “the child” and “children” in relation to children’s literature. Richard Flynn (1997), Mary Galbraith and Karen Coats (2001), Perry Nodelman (2008), David Rudd (2013), and Marah Gubar (2013) have variously noted the dangers, difficulties, necessities, and desirability of approaching children’s texts through conceptions of “children,” “childhood,” and “adulthood.”  Thus, this Congress is grounded in ongoing debates in children’s literature scholarship about possible relationships of “the child,” “children,” and “childhood” to children’s literature; to what extent and in what ways such relationships are possible or “impossible”; and to what extent and in what ways these are necessary and/or desirable.  

Over the past three decades, the multidisciplinary fields of children’s, childhood, and youth studies have developed dramatically.  Childhood and youth studies, constantly negotiating intersections between actual young people and sociocultural constructions and representations of childhood and youth, offer compelling, if problematic, points of inquiry into the study of children’s literature, just as children’s and young adult literatures continue to challenge and inform childhood and youth studies.  

SOME POSSIBLE CONGRESS TOPICS
The Congress 2017 theme lends itself to a variety of key issues related to production, interpretation, and reception of children’s and young adult texts from different historical periods; in diverse local, regional, national, and global contexts; inflected variously by differences in gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and ability, including:

Production & Reception
•    innovative methodological approaches to children’s and young adult literatures, such as ethnographic and reader-reception studies
•    crossover literature and intergenerational reception
•    child and youth authorship, including juvenilia
•    adult-youth-child collaborations in children’s cultural productions, such as theatre for young audiences
•    children’s and young adult literatures and “affect”

Ethics & Rights
•    ethical issues in the production and reception of children’s and young adult literatures
•    children’s literature, social justice, and child and youth activism
•    children’s rights, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and children’s literature

Representation & Ideology
•    gaps between children’s and youths’ lived experience and literary representations of children’s and youths’ lives
•    representations of children’s work and child labour
•    representations of child soldiers and children’s and youths’ experiences of war and violent conflicts
•    space and place in children’s and young adult literatures

Genres & Media
•    picture books, comic books, graphic novels, film, television, video games and children’s cultures
•    manipulable and interactive children’s literature: children’s literature as toys, dolls, stuffed animals, pop-up books, hypertexts, e-books, talking books
•    children, youth, and new media: remediation, transmediation, convergence culture, transliteracy, and multimedia children’s and youth texts

CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite proposals for papers to be presented in either of Canada’s official languages: English or French (see our APPEL DE COMMUNICATIONS - CONGRÈS IRSCL 2017).

Presented papers will be 20 minutes maximum.  Suggestions for panels of 3-4 papers are also welcome.  All proposals will be blind-vetted.  We will contact all submitters as soon as possible with the results of the vetting process.

TO SUBMIT PAPER PROPOSAL
Please submit an abstract of 250-500 words by November 15, 2016, as an e-mail attachment to irscl17@yorku.ca. Include:
•    the title and detailed proposal for your paper (to enable blind vetting of proposals, please do not include any identifying information in this document)
In a separate e-mail attachment please provide:
•    a short biography of 50-100 words that includes your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and one or two recent publications
•    an indication of your audiovisual needs
•    an indication of whether you would be willing to chair a panel
•    an indication if you would appreciate advice from a colleague on preparing your paper for delivery in English or French
•    an indication of you would be willing to mentor a colleague requesting assistance in preparing his or her paper for delivery in English or French

TO SUBMIT PANEL PROPOSAL
Panel organizers are invited to consult with the Congress convenors Cheryl Cowdy and Peter Cumming at irscl17@yorku.ca well before the submission deadline of November 15, 2016 about their intention to submit a panel proposal.
•    Panel proposals can consist of either three or four papers or be in a roundtable format.
•    Panels should incorporate the "international" focus of IRSCL in the makeup of the panel.  
•    The panel organizer should invite participants and will act as the first vettor for each paper in the panel, but the panel as a whole and its individual papers will also be vetted externally.  Based on vetting reports, the IRSCL 17 organizing committee may approve the whole panel as proposed or accept some individual papers for inclusion elsewhere in the program.  
Please submit as separate attachments to a single e-mail:
•    a brief overview statement of the theme of the panel and how it relates to the Congress 2017 themes
•    an abstract for each of the papers in the panel (see details above) without identifying information
•    a separate attachment for each of the papers giving a short bio, audiovisual needs, and whether individual is willing to chair a session at Congress 2017

IRSCL Congress 2017
July 29 to August 2, 2017
Children's Studies Program, York University, Toronto, Canada

Co-Convenors: Cheryl Cowdy & Peter Cumming
E-mail: irscl17@yorku.ca
Website: http://www.yorku.ca/irscl17/
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