“Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth”

American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026

The Children and Youth Studies Caucus seek panelists for a session entitled “Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth” for the American Studies Association 2026 meeting. We seek papers that consider the multiple temporalities that children are expected to inhabit: normative developmental timelines, trajectories oriented toward futures that adhere to the state-sanctioned scripts for proper adult citizenship, and culturally-accepted deviations of “sideways growth” that can ultimately be assimilated into dominant narratives of childhood presents and futures.

 We are interested in papers that explore how children are disciplined into proper time, as well as children and childhoods that deviate from these expected, mandated temporalities. Drawing on the conference theme “Improvisation,” we are interested in how childhood itself is a time of improvisation. When is improvisation punished and when is it celebrated? How does improvisation–characterized by ephemerality and imagination–brush up against the adults, institutions, and systems that work to render childhood structured and predictable? How might attending to children’s improvisations help us rethink the narratives, methods, and frameworks through which childhood is studied?

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider archives, ethnographic encounters, media forms, legal and medical discourses, and/or lived experiences to trace how improvisational temporalities of childhood take shape. We especially encourage submissions that examine how state, familial, and/or institutional efforts to regulate childhood temporalities disproportionately impact marginalized youth, as well as how children generate improvisational modes of survival, pleasure, and futurity in the face of these constraints.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

-schools and temporal discipline

-how the juvenile justice system suspends and restructures childhood

-cyclical / state time and the child welfare system

-children’s play and improvisation

-children’s improvisation during crises (e.g., ecological, political, public health)

-queer childhoods and heteronormative futurity

-trans childhoods and futurities

-crip childhoods and reconfiguring developmental timelines

-the pacing of racialized childhoods (e.g, arrested development, infantilization, adultification)

-temporalities of generations and communities in the digital age / age of social media

-methods for studying childhoods that are out of time (e.g., understudied, fragments in the archive)

Please send your 300-word proposal and a bio to Mary Zaborskis (mzz5335@psu.edu) by February 15, 2026. Please note that should your proposal be accepted, you must be a member of the ASA by March 1, 2026.