Global Studies of Childhood
ISSN 2043-6106

CALL FOR PAPERS for a special issue
Children and Young People in Times of Conflict and Change: child rights in the Middle East and North Africa –
view details <http://www.wwwords.co.uk/gsch/pdf/CALL_Children_and_Young_People_LONG.pdf>  (PDF)

Global Studies of Childhood (GSC) is a peer-reviewed, internationally focused, online research journal. The journal provides an opportunity for researchers, university and college students and professionals who are interested in issues associated with childhood in education, family, and community contexts from a global perspective to present, share and discuss their work. GSC aims to present opportunities for scholars and emerging researchers to interrogate the ways in which globalization and new global perspectives impact on children’s life experiences.

Global Studies of Childhood is a space for research and discussion about issues that pertain to children in a world context, and in contemporary times the impact of global imperatives on the lives of children has been significant. Experiences of childhood that take place within the situated spaces of geographic locales and culturally specific frames of reference are subject to global forces that complicate, disrupt and reconfigure the meanings associated with childhood/s on the local and global stage.

Here we use childhood when referring to a socially constructed category whose parameters are not necessarily fixed by factors such as biological development or chronological age. GSC is therefore interested in issues that pertain to childhood, here broadly conceived, and the challenges these pose to children’s lives and futures in an increasingly complex world. Issues around what constitutes childhood are therefore fundamental to discussions, as are ways in which we need to ensure that all children have basic human rights and are protected from exploitation.

In canvassing and promoting quality research we hope to be better able to understand the lives of children and extend our notions about the ways in which Global Studies of Childhood can make a contribution to educational, cultural and social theory in strategic and significant ways. GSC will enable the significant issues to be showcased and interrogated in a dedicated space. This will include interdisciplinary research, using various research design and methodologies.

The Editors and Editorial Advisory Board encourage the submission of a relevant high quality manuscripts that will include: reports of research and conceptual pieces; commentaries on published research articles, literature reviews; book reviews; colloquia and from time to time we will commission special editions and commentaries.

The primary audience for Global Studies in Childhood will be those in Education, Social Science and Humanities Programs, as well as professional educators and those involved in associated family and community services (for example, social welfare workers, health workers, and those working for NGOs). The journal aims to assist readers from a range of disciplinary and professional fields towards a better understanding of the substantive issues facing children globally. The multi-disciplinary focus ensures that the journal is relevant to professionals from a wide variety of inter-related disciplines that consider issues related to the lives of young children. For example, these may include social workers, allied health professionals and policy-makers as well as professionals who conduct research into the social contexts of education, literacy and numeracy, the new information technologies, the sciences and the arts. Additionally, it has a broad appeal to teachers and researchers interested in specific aspects and applications of curriculum, popular culture and social issues related to young children.
Submissions

If you wish to submit an article for our consideration should read How to Contribute <http://www.wwwords.co.uk/gsch/howtocontribute.asp> .
Global Studies of Childhood (ISSN 2043-6106) is an online-only journal published at www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH <http://www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH>  four times a year, those four issues constituting one volume. Articles are conventionally typeset and appear as familiar journal articles; proofs are sent to the authors as PDF files; the only real difference is that articles are only available for viewing online (they can then also be saved as files and printed).

*Call for Papers, Poetry and Prose*
*WSQ Special Issue, Spring 2015: CHILD*
*Guest Editors: Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane*

Children have always been fraught subjects for feminist scholarship. Women
are alternately infantilized and subsumed in service of children. Indeed,
nowhere are women’s rights more assiduously attacked than around the
question of their biological capacity to bear and raise children. Our
concerns in this issue of *WSQ*, though, are children and childhood
themselves: representations of children, children’s experiences, and
children’s place in the world.

Recent scholarship in childhood studies has taken on core assumptions
around children, especially children’s innocence and their removal from the
realm of work and financial gain. And yet children play a crucial role in
the global economy. As consumers, children represent an immense market. As
producers and workers, children manufacture goods of every kind. Children
constitute a significant stream of bodies for trafficking networks of
domestic and other kinds of labor, including sex work. And children tried
as adults populate prison systems around the world, especially in the
United States.

Children’s identification with potentiality and futurity has reached
proportions unimaginable only decades ago. Developments in prenatal imaging
technology has solidified the “fetal child” as a subject, and trends in
neuroscience have renaturalized the concept of binary gender in newborns
and young children. At the same time, children are identifying as queer and
transgender at earlier ages. How do we understand children’s gendered and
erotic desires? How is childhood gender expression made to stand in for or
retrospectively understood as sexuality, and how are childhood sexual
desires precursors to and divergences from adult sexual identities?

Finally, what is the affective work that children do? They are supposed to
give adult lives meaning and pleasure, to represent a world larger than the
one at hand, to be the source and recipients of love. How is this affective
work inflected by nation, race, class, and gender? Which children have
affective value and which ones are outside the ecology of care and love?

Some of the topics we’re interested in exploring from a feminist/gender
perspective include, but are not limited to:

– Children and the Nation
– The Child as a Consumer
– Children as Economic Actors
– The Child and Memory
– The Child and Trauma
– The Gendered Child
– The Racialization of Children
– Children in the Carceral State
– Gendering Childhood Disability
– Children and Education
– Immigration and Childhood
– Childhood and Sexuality
– Children and Social/Digital Media
– Adoption: Transnational and Domestic, Transracial
– Rights of the Child and Human Rights

Scholarly articles should be sent to guest issue editors Sarah Chinn and
Anna Mae Duane at WSQChildIssue [at] gmail.com byApril 7, 2014. P*lease
send complete articles, not abstracts*. Submissions should not exceed 6,000
words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with
the formatting guidelines at
http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines.

Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor at WSQpoetry [at]
gmail.com by April 7, 2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see
what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note
that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous
submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of
acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously
published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail
along with all contact information.

Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s
fiction/nonfiction editor at WSQCreativeProse [at] gmail.com by April 7,
2014. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions
we prefer before submitting prose.

Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified
immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been
previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of
the e-mail.

Dear ACYIG,

We are writing to solicit ideas and feedback regarding a proposal for a special issue of Social Science & Medicine. This special issue will be dedicated to the examination of masculinity and traditional male gender norms as they impact societal integration, physical and mental health, and help-seeking and utilization of healthcare within military and veteran populations. We are specifically interested in examining these topics across the lifespan in societies and communities in which government-sponsored military status or non-governmental militarism may influence male identity. In advance of submitting a formal proposal for a special issue, we are reaching out to academics and researchers such as yourself who may be interested in submitting papers on these topics.

We wish to gauge your interest in submitting a paper for this special issue. We would also welcome ideas and suggestions for tailoring this proposal in accordance with the journal’s mission to represent international and cross discipline perspectives, including work within the fields of medicine, anthropology, and social and clinical psychology. Finally, we would be very grateful for any suggestions you might have as to the names (along with contact information) of colleagues who might be interested discussing the proposed special issue and/or submitting a paper in line with these topics.  We are hopeful that, providing reference to other academics interested in participating through paper submission, our proposal for a special issue will be well received by the journal editors.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts, suggestions, and willingness to contribute to this proposal idea.

If you are interested please e-mail Samantha Solimeo at: Samantha.solimeo@va.gov

Call for Papers: Special Issue on The Rise of Developmental Science: Debates on Health and Humanity

Guest Editors
Dominique P Béhague, Vanderbilt University & King’s College London
Samuel Lézé, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/social-science-and-medicine/news/special-issue-on-the-rise-of-developmental-science/

Social Science & Medicine is soliciting papers for a Special Interdisciplinary Issue on the unique challenges arising in the creation of child/adolescent developmental expertise throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Since the Enlightenment, the child’s developmental journey to adulthood has served as a prism for philosophical and scientific formulations of what it means to be healthy, normal, and human. Relative to other subfields in psychiatry and psychology, however, the focus on child/adolescent development and mental illness is both new and increasingly contested. As clinicians begin to work with an ever younger patient-population, critics from both outside and within relevant fields have begun sounding warning bells, since much of the evidence about early intervention, “normal/abnormal” development and treatment is uncertain and prone to undue pathologisation. Thus, experts are also calling for increased interdisciplinarity to better account for the unpredictability of development and the socio-cultural, economic, and biological heterogeneity in which normal/abnormal development and mental illness unfold.

Taking child/adolescent developmental expertise as an object of socio-cultural analysis, this special issue aims to explore how normative and marginal trends in this scientific subfield evolve in diverse socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts. The call builds on an existing set of manuscripts drawn from a workshop co-sponsored by Brunel University and the Royal Anthropological Institute entitled “The Rise of Child Science and Psy-expertise” (London, May 29-30, 2012). We welcome submissions that consider the institutionalized worlds of science, medicine and education alongside the everyday lives of children and youth from historical and/or contemporary perspectives. Papers should be both empirically-based and theoretically informed. As we aim to influence core practices in science, medicine and policy, authors are also invited, though not required, to consider how the critical study of expert knowledge – and the diversity that exists therein — can inform constructive debate on how best to produce and apply this knowledge.

Paper topics may include:

• Comparative analysis of distinct ethno-psychiatric/psychological traditions and of normative and marginal research trends in child/adolescent science and clinical practice, including their institutionalized and increasingly globalized applications
• Intersection of child/adolescent science and policy-development; e.g. growing interest in prevention and early intervention; emerging work on adolescent brain plasticity and implications for public policy and juridical practice
• Implications of diverse trends in developmental science and child psychiatry for pedagogy, including psychologization of learning and school life through specific diagnoses (ADHD) and broader concepts (well-being, self-esteem, mindfulness)
• Social vulnerability, ethnicity, inequity and minority status in child development research and clinical practice; global humanitarianism and medicalization of traumatic experience in children and youth
• Popular uses and interpretations of emerging models of child development by advocacy groups, with special attention to the recent turn towards “child-centric” research and constructs of child agency
• Interaction between “child” and “adult” categories in science, e.g. the methodological and conceptual tensions that research on child/adolescent development injects into mainstream adult psychiatry/psychology
• Biologization of the child/adolescent in biopsychiatry and neuroscience, e.g. the adolescent brain; mother-infant bonding; geneticization; pharmaceuticalization

Authors can submit their papers any time after October 1st and up until the 18th February 2014. Online submission can be found at: http://ees.elsevier.com/ssm/default.asp. When asked to choose article type, please stipulate ‘Special Issue: Debates on Humanity/Child-development.’ In the ‘Enter Comments’ box, the title of the Special Issue, along with any further acknowledgements, should be inserted. All submissions should meet Social Science & Medicine author guidelines (http://ees.elsevier.com/ssm). Please contact Dominique.Behague@Vanderbilt.edu and Samuel.Leze@ens-lyon.fr for further questions.