All posts by ACYIG Web Manager

Announcements, Calls for Papers: Publishing

Seeking Chapter Submissions for COVID Play Academic Volume

Two folklorists will be editing a multidisciplinary academic volume on COVID Play and are seeking submissions for chapters. We are particularly interested in a range of cultural voices that address the play of children, youth, or adults in a variety of countries during the pandemic. Topics of interest include: resilience, creativity, and resourcefulness in play during this time, COVID related themes in play, use of public playgrounds and public spaces during the pandemic, and creative uses of online play and techno mischief.  Send expressions of interest to Dr. Anna Beresin aberesin@uarts.edu, and Dr. Julia Bishop j.c.bishop@sheffield.ac.uk

Dr. Anna Beresin is professor of psychology and folklore in critical studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US. She serves as co-editor of the International Journal of Play.

Dr. Julia Bishop is research associate in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield in the UK where she studies children’s folklore, past and present. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Play.

Events

Upcoming talk by Dr. Amy Brainer April 23rd, 12pm (EST)

Intimate harm, intimate healing: Thinking more globally and intersectionally about queer youth and Covid-19

 

Impacts of Covid-19 on queer youth have been profound. We must think about these impacts in ways that are locally rooted and global in scope, as the pandemic itself has been. This talk will concentrate on three areas where harm has occurred: carceral and immigration systems; loss of basic material security; and the family as a site of care and oppression that is underserved by current models of activism. These are a small number of the many areas that require attention and healing. Thus, the talk will move quickly from presentation to dialogue so that other participants can share their work and insights.

 

Bio: Amy Brainer is associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and coordinator of LGBTQ+ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, for which she received the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology. Her current research follows queer and trans individuals and couples as they navigate marriage-based immigration to Taiwan and the United States.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAof-muqTovE9xaf1pxFDp3flhOtsiipOCP

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please feel free to share the talk
with others who may be interested.

Announcements

New Book Announcement: Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization

Dear Colleagues:

I’d like to share word of my new book: Warshel, Y. (2021). Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

You can find links below for book review copies, course inspection and purchase copies, and a description of the book below those.

The book is divided into 4 parts. If you are interested in adopting for a course, dependent on your focus, you can use one or all. The first part of the book describes the production of peacebuilding versions of Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street; the second, the reception of it by Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli citizens in-the-making; the third, an ethnography of violence of these young audience members conflict zones lives, illuminating why they interpreted the glocal hybrid television programs the way they did; and the fourth, offering recommendations to peace media practitioners interested in applying evidence to their practice. Part IV ties together the introduction, aimed at advancing a subdiscipline of peace communication, to provide scholars with methodological recommendations to critically and empirically determine the utility using media to build, make, and sustain peace in contexts of armed political conflicts.

While focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the book is framed both comparatively and globally so applicable to and includes recommendations for using communication to manage conflict worldwide and address debates surrounding structural discrimination and social justice.

A TEDx talk I gave summarizes the book and can be used together with chapters as a standalone course module for teaching (including for those in need of an asynchronous online module): https://www.ted.com/talks/yael_warshel_a_call_for_evidence_can_media_help_build_make_and_sustain_peace

purchase copies: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/experiencing-the-israelipalestinian-conflict/696329534C17D1B0BA9243FE02A7D0C8

review copies: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/request-review-copy

inspection copies: https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/textbooks/inspection-copy-information

Book Description:

“Over the last eighty years there has been a global rise in ‘peace communication’ practice, the use of interpersonal and mass communication interventions to mediate between peoples engaged in political conflict. In this study, Yael Warshel analyses Israeli and Palestinian versions of Sesame Street which targeted negative inter-group attitudes and stereotypes. Merging communication, peace and conflict studies, social psychology, anthropology, political science, education, Middle Eastern and childhood studies, this book provides a template to think about how audiences receive, interpret, use and are influenced by peace communication. By picking apart the text and subtext of the kind of media these specific audiences of children consume, Warshel examines how they interpret ‘peace communication’ interventions, are socialised into Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and Arab/Palestinian Israelis, political opinions they express, and violence they reproduce. She questions whether peace communication practices have any relevant structural impact on their audiences, why such interventions fail, and offers recommendations for improving future communication interventions into political conflict worldwide.”

Best,

Yael Warshel
Pennsylvania State University

ACYIG Blog

Children as Political Subjects in the Age of Uncertainty

by Seran Demiral (Boğaziçi University, Primary Education & at Kadir Has University, City and Children Studies)

In our contemporary world, certainty has left its place to flexibility, adaptability and willingness to change (Lee 2005:19). A new sociology of childhood addresses children’s agency to debate child ‘beings’ as both individuals for their own lives and social actors to affect the world. At that point, agency matter is discussed through other concepts, like subjectivity and/or competency. Bollig and Kelle (2016:37) claim that “the acting subject or the competent actor is replaced with a concept of participation in practices.” It is obvious that not only globalization but also digital technologies have changed our culture so that “from a global perspective childhood culture is becoming more homogenized” (Prout 2005:29). Besides, politics and childhood movements all over the world have become similar, especially during this decade.

Atlas Sarrafoğlu, Greta Thunberg, Selin Gören respectively[1]

 

Children can be aware of what happens in other places of the world and how their peers live. As it is known that Greta Thunberg has become an enormous inspiration for many children and young people from different countries, for instance, Atlas Sarrafoğlu gave a start for children’s climate activism in Turkey. Atlas was also honoured by the 2020 WWF International President’s Youth Award (BIA 2020), which is an indicator that childhood movements can be seen by institutions and authorities. After several months of children’s first universal school strike, Atlas and another young activist from Turkey, Selin Gören, attended the “Smile for Future summit” in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their meeting might have affected Greta’s sensitivity about ecologic resistance in Canakkale, so that she said, “Ida Mountains belong to us all” in Turkish (BIA 2019).