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  • Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak

CFP: Children’s Culture Studies After Childhood


Children’s Culture Studies After Childhood

Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak

and Macarena García-González

Deadline: October 15, 2020

 

The nonhuman turn (Grusin 2015) has been redefining the anthropocentric epistemological and ontological assumptions across disciplines since the beginning of the twenty-first century. New materialism in particular has generated paradigms that counter the poststructuralist emphasis on language and discourse. These shifts have been very strong in childhood studies and education, which abound with analyses of children’s human and nonhuman entanglements and of complex childhood assemblages involving animals, plants, spaces, texts, toys, materials or institutions. The richness and variety of such studies can be fully appreciated for example when reading Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies: Research After the Child by Claudia Diaz Diaz and Paulina Semenec (2020), in which a number of scholars researching (with) children and childhoods reflect on their engagements with new materialism and posthumanism. In another recent contribution to new materialist childhood studies, After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children's Lives (2020), Peter Kraftl proposes to approach the materialities of children’s lives through a ‘pull focus’ and ‘arts of (not) noticing’ (4-6). As he argues, we should not begin with childhoods or the child but rather after them; that is, we should be able to move them out of focus to understand children’s positions within the given situations or phenomena. For Kraftl, the insistence on the after constitutes the acceptance that “children and childhoods are, actually, co-implicated in those ‘after-lives’ in all kinds of troubling ways, which exceed a simple recognition of children being ‘the next generation’” (7). Thinking with the after enables us to see children and childhoods as intersectional with other forms of social difference and as involving various spatial and temporal scales (20). Importantly, Kraftl substantiates his ideas by presenting examples of his interdisciplinary collaborations, including social media analyses, archaeology, and nanoscience.

We have explored possible methodological and theoretical openings of new materialism in children’s literature studies in our joint article “New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies” (2020). In it, we reflect on how an acknowledgement of materialities enables a reformulation of adult-child-book relationalities and allows us to rethink critical interpretation as moving away from representationalism, thereby prompting us to think and write diffractively. As children’s culture studies has been developing in the immediate vicinity of childhood studies and education, we hope that we can extend this introductory discussion by encouraging a cross-disciplinary dialogue about engagements with new materialism among colleagues whose research brings together perspectives of these three fields. Inspired by Kraftl’s and Diaz Diaz and Semenec’s books, Children’s Culture Studies After Childhood aims to provide a space for such a conversation. We invite contributors to share with us an effort to address a number of questions that new materialism compels us to pose about our research practices: How does children’s culture studies address the nonhuman turn, and in particular the messy childhood assemblages? What does it mean to practise a new materialist literary criticism? How can we rethink age categories and hierarchies? What childhoods are made possible when we think beyond developmentalism? What assumptions about knowledge production determine our work and how may we challenge their adult-centric nature? How can we reconceptualize children’s and adults’ agency regarding literary and cultural production and reception as striated, collective, mutually constitutive, and also beyond human capacity? How can we decenter the human in our research? How are texts and media material and agentic? How are they present in children’s and adults’ entanglements with the world? How can we conduct and represent our research in response-able and care-full ways?

We believe that those research fields that have a long tradition of working with the child, such as children’s literature and media studies, are well prepared to contribute to new materialist and posthumanist philosophies. We think that our joint attempts to answer these questions shall lead us to unprecedented theorizations and innovative methods in our field that live up to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglements.

Some possible topics we invite contributors to consider include:

— Arts-based approaches to research with children

— Intergenerational collaborations in children’s literature and arts

— Books and media as “vibrant matter”

— Cultural consumption as contagious

— Child-led research and its boundaries

— Radical imagination and posthuman utopias and dystopias

— Non-human actors and agencies in the making of the aesthetic

— Bodies and embodiments in research practices

— The body of the literary mediator

— Postdisciplinarity in research on children’s literature and media

— Care and ethics in research practices

— Speculative imagination in research

— Post-age conceptualizations of children’s literature and arts

The deadline for expressions of interest (an abstract of 300-500 words and a short biography) is October 15, 2020. The authors will be notified of preliminary acceptance by November 15, 2020. A full draft (4000-6000 words) will be required by April 15, 2021. The essays should be for original works not previously published and not under consideration for another publication.

Please submit proposals to:

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak: justyna.deszcz-tryhubczak@uwr.edu.pl

Macarena García-González: mgarciay@uc.cl

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