We are seeking chapters to include in an edited book with the provisional title: Storied Citizenship: Reimagining Civic Encounters Among Children and Youth in the Post-Digital Age. This text will be an interdisciplinary, open access volume that will explore existing and emerging ideas about storied citizenship among children and youth in the post-digital age. Rather than defining citizenship or civic engagement in traditional ways, we see it as a process in which young people participate in arts-based, embodied, lived, and spatialized ways across cultural contexts. That is, we also seek to challenge, (re)examine, and propose new considerations of storied citizenship as well as challenge existing limiting ideologies and frameworks that continue to circulate, particularly in education contexts. This is because young people’s awareness of being a citizen can be precarious and contingent, yet they often take up material, creative and digital resources to (re)story their experiences and claim new spaces of participation in their everyday lives, in their communities, and the larger political sphere. Our aim then, is to cultivate a capacious collection of scholarship that attends to extending analyses and conceptualizations of how storied citizenship is enacted by, for, and with young people.

Chapter topics include, but are not limited to, thinking about storied citizenship in relation to children and youth being:

‘Storied upon’

• Resisting citizenship 

• Silencing stories and grand narratives that impact citizenship

• Whiteness enacted in conscious and unconscious ways, settler colonialism, & nationhood

‘Storied with’

• Performance(s) of citizenship 

• Education, classrooms, curriculum, and pedagogy 

• Childhood and youth studies’ perspectives

• Modes of working with multimodal texts and young people in diverse settings

• Representations of citizenship in youth literature, media, and popular culture texts

• Storying, restorying, how stories travel, and how youth are storied

• Activism, social justice, resistance, and transformation  

‘Storied through’

• Embodied and sensorial experiences of citizenship 

• Migrant, newcomer, refugee and immigration stories

• Indigenous ways of knowing related to belonging, community, and citizenship

• Spatial, geographical, place-based and material analyses

• Critical and intersectional analyses and perspectives related to ability, language, gender, class, race, and sexualities

• Digital and post-digital perspectives on civic engagement 

• Imagined citizenships among youth and children

• Arts-based and creative considerations of storied citizenship 

‘Storied against’ 

• Contingent citizenship 

• How and by whom policies are created, mobilized, and standardized in relation to stories 

• Real and imagined borders and borderlands 

We welcome additional approaches that also (re)story these categories in accordance to your research interests. 

We invite contributors to submit the following by January 20th, 2025: 

• Abstract (250-500 words) that outlines their proposed chapter and how they intend to address the concept of ‘storied citizenship’

• A brief bibliography of scholarship that you intend to draw from in your work. 

• A bio (100-200 words) 

Please email your submissions to: elizabeth.nelson@glasgow.ac.uk and include “Storied Citizenship + last name(s)” in the subject line of your email. 

Authors will be notified by mid-February 2025 about whether they will be invited to submit a full chapter to the editorial team for initial review; additionally, we will also invite these selected authors to come together to an online discussion on either February 27 and/or 28, 2025 to collaboratively engage with the editorial team and fellow writers to generate understandings regarding this new approach to recognising young people’s relationship with/of/as citizens through storying. We see this approach to writing as decentring the editorial intentions and opening up the space to expand and explore the concept across multitudes and look forward to engaging with prospective authors. Accepted, full-length chapters of 6,000 words maximum (including notes and references) will be due at the end of July 2025.

Please note that we especially welcome submissions from scholars, including early-career and emerging scholars, artist-scholars, and/or graduate students, with diverse intersectional identities whose work examines storied citizenship with an attendance to non-normative experiences and global perspectives.

Editorial team bios: 

Theresa Rogers is Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include critical youth arts and media literacies, critical perspectives on children’s and YA literature, and teacher education in English language arts. She is lead author of Youth, critical literacies and civic engagement: Arts, media and literacy in the lives of adolescents (2015) and numerous chapters and journal publications, most recently in 4th International Encyclopedia of Education, Oxford Encyclopedia of Education, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, Practice, and Journal of Literacy Research. See https://ubc.academia.edu/TheresaRogers

Elizabeth L. Nelson is Lecturer of Multimodal Literacies at the University of Glasgow. Her research examines play and new technologies in the hands of children drawing on historical and literary representations of children’s play and culture to understand experiences of childhood today. She has published on young people’s relationship to digital technologies, historical accounts of play, and creative methodologies in research encounters with children and young people. Her current work focuses on children’s everyday culture, post-digital childhoods and understanding co-presence through sharing picturebooks online and off and digital play.

Amber Moore is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Library, Literacy, and Teacher Education at The University of British Columbia. Her research interests include: adolescent literacies; arts-based research; English education; feminist pedagogies; teacher and teacher librarian education; rape culture; and representations of youth in popular culture and YA literature, particularly sexual assault narratives. Her scholarship can be found across a number of publications such as English Journal, Feminist Media Studies, and New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship.

Harini Rajagopal is a listener of stories and enjoys working on collaborative and creative pedagogical designs. She is an Assistant Professor in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. Rooted in antiracist perspectives and decolonizing methodologies, her work focuses on relationally collaborating with children, families, teachers to welcome their multimodal, multilingual, artistic, and playful communicative repertoires and stories as powerful resources in classrooms.

Project consultants: Mia Perry (University of Glasgow) and Jen Scott Curwood (University of Sydney)