Panel Sponsored by Children’s Literature Association Diversity Committee

2016 Children’s Literature Association Conference

The ChLA Diversity Committee seeks paper proposals for a panel on diversity and visual representation in children’s literature. Scholarship has increasingly become invested in examining and interrogating the ways the institution of children’s literature defines and practices diversity. This panel will specifically investigate how visual elements in children’s literature have been utilized in such definitions and practices. Papers may examine how visual-verbal narratives such as picturebooks, comics, graphic novels, photographic books, cartoons, and animated films define, approach, promote, conceal and/or ignore diversity; how tensions between visual and verbal modes create possibilities and problems in representing minority groups; how children’s literature has attempted to make the marginalized and “invisible” visible; and how texts appropriate, complicate and/or repudiate visual caricatures of minority groups.

The Children’s Literature Association Conference will be held at Columbus, OH from June 9 to June 11, 2016.

For queries, please contact Mary Henderson Couzelis (mary.couzelis@morgan.edu) or

Lara Saguisag (lara.saguisag@csi.cuny.edu). Email a 500-word abstract and a 2-page CV to Mary Henderson Couzelis (mary.couzelis@morgan.edu) by September 15, 2015.