CFP for Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus Sponsored Panel at ASA 2020

Sponsored by the Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, this panel considers the ways children and childhood have been produced as a tactic for suppressing resistance and revolt within marginalized communities. We seek papers that explore the social, political, economic, institutional, and/or historical forces that have shaped and produced childhoods in efforts to manage, exploit, and oppress marginalized populations. Drawing on the conference theme “Creativity Within Revolt,”we are also interested in papers that examine ways that children participate in, disrupt, and respond to the conditions that shape childhood, finding ways to resist within and even revolt against systems designed to harm them. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

-incarcerated children and the juvenile justice system

-the infantilization of populations that result in the metaphorical production of childhood -childhood as a temporal category that attaches to particular bodies and communities

-historical and contemporary institutionalization of children

-how gender and sexuality are permitted to be inhabited and embodied in childhood

-how race, ability, gender, sexuality, religion, and national origin shape state-sanctioned productions of childhood

-performances of childhood

We welcome papers that approach these issues informed by indigenous, critical race, queer, feminist, ecocritical, anthropological, historical, sociological, and/or literary methods. We also welcome papers that can speak to these issues from the positions of activism and praxis.

Please send a short bio and 300 word abstract of your proposed paper to Mary Zaborskis (mez84@pitt.edu) by January 26, 2019.