The following three paper calls are for the ARCYP Session at next year’s ACCUTE Conference. Please email your 100-word abstract and 50-word biographical statement to arcyp-admin@uwinnipeg.ca by November 15, 2009.

The Child and the City (PDF)

Close to 80% of citizens live in urban spaces in Canada, just one of many nations and regions where urbanization is a primary fact of young people’s lives and where many young people’s identities are defined by their experience of living in cities. With its complex social networks and its ethnic and cultural diversity, the city invites multiple possibilities for self-invention or refashioning. The urban environment shapes how young people, from infants to adolescents, are able to express particular identities, participate in peer culture, and engage with their families. This session aims to address questions of how young people negotiate and create urban spaces and, conversely, how urban spaces accommodate young people.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

• representations of the urban child
• the criminalization of youth cultures
• the surveillence of young people
• media literacies of the urban child
• social identities and youth
• children’s play and public space
• childhood, youth, and urban lifestyles
• urban schools
• postcolonial cities and urban youth
• cities, globalization and young people
• young people’s engagement with new technologies in the urban environments
• GBLT as urban identities
• homeless youth

Hope and Change?: Young People’s Cultures and Social Justice (PDF)

It is often claimed that young people are our future. “Hope and change” have long been associated with young people, but they have also become shimmering catchphrases in political discourses promising some brighter future. To what extent do current ideas, representations, and/or realities concerning youth and youth cultures offer possibilities for re-imagining current local and global struggles for equality, inclusion, alterity, and progress?

Some possible topics may include:

• rhetorics of reconciliation
• children’s rights
• alternative literacies and/or critical pedagogies
• discourses of nationhood, progress, security, war and/or terrorism
• struggles for human/civil rights (disability, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.)
• transnationalism and families
• mobility, space, displacement, and/or homelessness
• environmental issues
• DIY, culture jamming, youth culture and subcultures

Eco-Childhood: The Child, Ecology, and Eco-criticism (PDF)

In the new environmental movement there is a great deal of discourse around saving the environment for children. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is now a picture book intended to teach young readers about the dangers of global warming. Many environmental groups have created educational programs designed to warn children of our destructive lifestyles. This is not the first time or place in history that the child has been taught about preserving nature, nor is it the first time that a social cause has been justified in terms of an adult duty of care towards children. This panel invites papers that deal with the relationships between the concepts of “the child” and “ecology,” or papers that analyze children’s texts and culture from an eco-critical perspective.

Potential topics include:

• the role of the study of children’s texts and culture for eco-critics
• “the child” as an important critical term for ecological criticism
• the role that assumptions about “the child” play in justifying an adult duty of care towards the environment
• the ethical implications of the teachings of eco-friendly attitudes to children and youth
• environmentalism as imagined in youth culture
• young people as eco-activists