CFP: The Representation of Cruel Children in Popular Texts

Editors: Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes

Much has been written about the subject of cruelty against children, but this volume of collected essays seeks to focus critical attention instead on the representation of the cruel child.  As a cultural sign, the cruel child lies at the nexus of many different and competing discourses that construct the child and childhood.  By examining the cruel child in many kinds of popular texts we can sharpen our understanding of the changing nature of the representation of the child. Continue reading CFP: The Representation of Cruel Children in Popular Texts

CFP – Special Issue of *Jeunesse* on Mobility

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures invites essay submissions for a special issue addressing mobility in relation to youth texts and culture(s). We welcome essays that consider registers of race, class, gender, and disability. Essays should be between 6,000 and 9,000 words in length and prepared for blind peer-review. Continue reading CFP – Special Issue of *Jeunesse* on Mobility

New Book – Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China

9780520283503by Teresa Kuan
2015 – University of California Press

Love’s Uncertainty explores the hopes and anxieties of urban, middle-class parents in contemporary China. Combining long-term ethnographic research with analyses of popular child-rearing manuals, television dramas, and government documents, Teresa Kuan bears witness to the dilemmas of ordinary Chinese parents, who struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with the reality of limited resources.

Continue reading New Book – Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China

AAA CFP – Strange Presents and Familiar Pasts: The Anthropology of Nostalgia

Call for Papers for volunteered session at the 2015 AAA Meetings —

Strange Presents and Familiar Pasts: The Anthropology of Nostalgia 

Organizers:
Dr. Anna Fournier, Associate Professor, University of Manitoba
Dr. Amber R. Reed, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Description:

How can ethnographic engagement make sense of nostalgic longings for the past?  While previous understandings of this phenomenon have relegated it to the interior realm of the psychological, anthropologists have theorized the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of nostalgia. In their recent volume Anthropology and Nostalgia (2014), Olivia Angé and David Berliner posit that nostalgic discourses on the past can evidence perceived threats on longstanding social identities and fears of irreversible cultural loss in the face of political upheaval and revolution.

What do post-socialist nostalgias in Eastern Europe and Latin America, nostalgia for apartheid in South Africa, and for neoliberalism in post-neoliberal Venezuela tell us about the fragility of the present?  How does nostalgia as a practice manifest itself through rituals of remembrance, forms of critique or resistance, or violence and war (e.g. in Ukraine)?  And how is nostalgia, in the process, transmitted to younger generations with no firsthand experience of the memorialized past?

We also ask what unmoors nostalgia itself: how non-linear (cyclical, messianic, revolutionary) temporal regimes or chronotopes can reconfigure or refuse the notion of nostalgia.  In the register of everyday experiences, how does, for instance, the uncanny/“strangely familiar” play up and work against nostalgia?

We invite papers across the geographical spectrum that investigate nostalgia and memory as shared social experiences and raise important questions for our discipline on temporality, generation, cultural shifts, and political change. Please submit abstracts to: Amber.Reed@sas.upenn.edu and Anna.Fournier@umanitoba.ca no later than March 25, 2015.