Panel Title:
Transnational Black Childhood and Practices of Maronnage

Conference:
Rutgers University-Camden, Childhood Studies Department
“The Transnational Child Strikes Back: Transnational Desires and Childhoods of Empire ”
June 11-13th, 2026
Camden NJ

Organiser Contact Info:
Samira Abdur-Rahman, The College of New Jersey, abdurras@tcnj.edu

Panel Description:

This panel seeks papers for Rutgers University’s Childhood Studies Department’s conference “The Transnational Child Strikes Back: Transnational Desires and Childhoods of Empire” that will be held in Camden, NJ from June 11th-13th 2026. The conference seeks “to convene scholars, writers, practitioners, artists, and advocates for children interested in wrestling with the tensions around diasporas and immigrations globally, especially as we have seen a rise in nationalism(s) within the US and abroad” (CFP).

In keeping with this year's conference theme, this interdisciplinary panel seeks 3–4 presenters to deliver 15–20 minute papers engaging with the theme of marronage in historical and contemporary narratives of black childhood. Considering sites of material and imaginative marronage, the panel centers Willie Jamal Wright’s claim that “physical geographies made deficient through racialized uneven development might serve another purpose and exist as more than “landscapes of capitalism,” (6) as those spaces “deemed deficient might serve the needs of subjugated communities” (Wright 7). While noting how forces like gentrification and disaster capitalism can redesignate and lay claim to these spaces, Wright urges that we “devote resources to promoting marronage in the present.” He contends that by viewing “marronage as more than a relic of the past might help communities and scholars escape the double bind of thinking of freedom as a long-fought-for goal existing in the distant future and the belief that once acquired it is a permanent condition of being” (10).

Inspired by the work of scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Willie Jamal Wright, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Tao Leigh Goffe and the scholarly collective Electric Marronage, as well as engagements with literary childhood in the work of Edwidge Danticat, Jacqueline Woodson, Dionne Brand and Toni Cade Bambara, the panel aims to think critically about how Black young people complicate, extend and contribute to practices of historical and contemporary marronage within the African Diaspora.

Possible topics (including, but not limited to):

• Decolonial pedagogies that ground and emerge from sites/practices of marronage
• The relationship between children’s dance, play, movement and the practice of marronage
• Depictions of intergenerational relations
• Marronage as ecological practice and anti-capitalist critique
• Narratives of children and young people within historical sites of marronage within the mainland United States, Caribbean and Latin America
• Transnational and interethnic youth formations (musical, political or social)
• The importance of childhood to Diasporic subcultures such as ska, punk, hip-hop, house and other musical/political formation
• The connection between theories of Black parental protectionism, homeschooling and unschooling and the practice of marronage

To Submit:
Please send a proposed title, a 150–200 word abstract, and a brief bio by November 12th to Samira Abdur-Rahman at abdurras@tcnj.edu. Accepted abstracts will form part of a full panel submission to be submitted for review by the official deadline of November 15, 2025.