Call for Chapters

Over the past 10–15 years, children, adolescents, and youth worldwide have lived through overlapping emergencies: the COVID-19 pandemic; intensified border regimes, migration control, and detention; racialized and colonial state violence; war and occupation; environmental disaster; and the erosion of social and educational safety nets. These crises shape not only early childhood, but also adolescent identity formation, schooling, embodiment, political consciousness, and future-making. 

This interdisciplinary edited collection invites scholars and practitioners working in childhood, youth, and adolescent services across diverse global contexts to reflect on how adults can ethically and effectively support children and young people in times of sustained crisis.

In moments of crisis, adults are often told to reassure young people by helping them “find the helpers.” But what does helping actually entail when crisis is chronic, structural, and politically produced—and when young people are old enough to recognize injustice, anticipate precarity, or witness adult and institutional failure?

This volume seeks reflective, analytically grounded contributions from people engaged in child-, youth-, and adolescent-facing work. This includes but is not limited to educators, therapists, social workers, nurses, public health workers, youth advocates, and scholars of childhood, youth, and adolescence. Contributors are invited to examine care as a practice shaped by institutional constraint, moral injury, professional ethics, and unequal power, without collapsing into depoliticized narratives of resilience or purely clinical guidance.

Topics of Interest Include (but are not limited to):

• Care for children, adolescents, and youth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

• Youth and families affected by migration regimes, detention, displacement, or statelessness

• Racialized, colonial, or settler-state violence and its impacts on young people

• War, occupation, forced migration, and schooling or youth social worlds

• Disability, neurodivergence, and crisis care across developmental stages

• Indigenous, Black, Palestinian, and other structurally targeted youth communities

• Institutional limits on care within schools, clinics, welfare systems, and carceral settings

• Ethical tensions, failure, complicity, resistance, and repair in youth-facing professions

 We Welcome Contributions That Are:

• Interdisciplinary and globally or transnationally situated

• Written by scholars, practitioners, or scholar-practitioners

• Reflective, critical, and grounded in lived or professional experience

• Explicit in naming structures of power, violence, and governance

• Committed to accessibility across disciplinary and professional audiences

A range of formats is encouraged, including academic chapters, hybrid essays, reflective case studies, dialogues, and autoethnographic work. Contributors may use discipline-specific language, but should prepare to define key terms for a broad academic–practitioner readership. Each chapter will include a brief Implications for Practice reflection to support use in graduate and professional training programs across education, health, and social service fields.

Ethical Considerations

Contributors are expected to attend carefully to confidentiality, professional ethics, and the protection of children, adolescents, youth, and families, particularly in contexts of political violence, displacement, or institutional surveillance. Writing critically about institutions or systems is welcome; identifying details should be handled responsibly and in line with professional ethics of their field.

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts: 300–500 words

• Short bio: 100 words

• Please indicate the form your contribution will take

• Email Abstracts to zae.volume@gmail.com by March 1 2026.

Selected contributors will be notified following abstract review.

Timeline

1. The abstract submission deadline is March 1 2026. 

2. Contributors will be notified by mid April of their acceptance or rejection.

3. Proposals for the edited volume will be sent out to potential publishers in June. 

4. Accepted authors should plan to complete the first draft of their chapter (4000‐6000 words, not including bibliography; shorter submissions considered depending on genre/field) by early November 2026. 

5. More information on style and further deadlines will be forthcoming.

Finally, throughout the process, editorial mentorship can be provided for any contributors looking for support. Please submit all proposals and questions to zae.volume@gmail.com.

About the Editor

Zoe Antoinette Eddy, PhD, is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Teaching at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She has published on a range of topics including Indigenous rights and advocacy, trauma-informed approaches to museums, Indigenous futurity, and tabletop gaming. Her first book, Food, Diaspora, and Memory, is currently in-production with Lever Press; this edited volume brings together 25 interdisciplinary and international writers to explore how food shapes diasporic identity. In addition to her research work, she will complete her secondary Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling in August 2026 with a focus in trauma-informed care for neurodivergent youth.