Disciplines and subdisciplines like children’s and young adult literature, child and youth studies, and girlhood/boyhood studies are themselves, somewhat paradoxically, undisciplined in their inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinarity; such areas of study are often perceived as the disorderly younger siblings of more established disciplines and relegated to the “children’s table” of their respective academic units. Insofar as such scholarly zones subvert or at least complicate traditional disciplinary formations, however, they might also function to discipline the work that takes place inside them.

The objects of child/youth culture—and young people themselves—are also often engaged with questions of discipline and resistance. From the wicked stepparents of folklore to Where the Wild Things Are to parenting manuals to systems of schooling and incarceration to present-day youth engaged in activism, our socio-political and cultural landscapes are rife with anxieties about how to best discipline children, as well as examples of young people actively resisting attempts to do so. The concept of “discipline” also comes entangled with the many forms of racist, colonial, and homophobic violence that discipline has frequently entailed. With such diverse and assorted interpretations of “undisciplined” in mind, we invite contributions that consider the following, among other topics:

• Questions of (inter-, trans-, multi-) disciplinarity as they relate to the study of young people

• Undisciplined genres and forms

• Historical approaches to child discipline

• Youth activism (the history of, or present-day examples)—e.g. environmental, racial justice, decolonial, 2SLGBTQI+

• Discipline and material culture

• Disciplinary violence and colonialism

• Child/youth punishment, criminality, and incarceration

• Youth and public discourses of self-discipline

• Schooling, education, and discipline

• Representations of discipline/resistance to discipline in children’s/youth media

• Participatory research involving young people

• Child/youth art and artistic practices

• Young people’s media and digital cultures

We welcome contributions from a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations, including (but not limited to) children’s and young adult literature, childhood and youth studies, education, media studies, communication, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, medical/health studies, sociology, etc.