Call for Panelists for ASA Meetings

The focus of this panel is on how children experience state presence in their everyday lives, the meaning they attribute to it, and how they respond to and navigate these experiences.

While the focus of the papers will be on young people (“children”, locally defined), the topic will be approached through research that situates children within the immediate setting of household and proximate social relations, as well as within the political economy. Preference will be given to papers that provide a generational and/or historical context for understanding both continuity and change in children’s experiences and responses.

Together, the papers in this panel will move beyond paradigms that problematize young people on one hand, or romanticize their agency on the other. Instead, the papers will contribute to our understanding of the different ways that young people from diverse material realities experience and engage with state presence, and they will explore the significance of young people’s everyday responses and actions.

Please email statement of interest by March 5, if possible. Email abstract by March 10 to Kirsten at  kirsten.pontalti@seh.ox.ac.uk

Call for Papers – PhD Students

The University of Nottingham Postgraduate Children and Childhood Network is delighted to be hosting a research conference at the University of Nottingham on Friday the 15th of May, 2015. Reflecting the recent substantial growth in research on and involving child participation, the conference will serve as an excellent opportunity for PhD students involved in research with children to explore this critical and topical theme. The conference seeks to explore the extent to which children and young people should be involved in research that impacts on their lives, and the ethical and practical issues that arise when researchers undertake this style of research. We are interested in how these issues permeate the entire research process, from initial design to dissemination, and therefore welcome papers from PhD researchers at all stages.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
·         Procedural and situated ethical issues in researching with children
·         Methodological problems and dilemmas
·         Experiences of using participatory/innovative methods
·         Working with ‘gatekeepers’
·         The positionality of the researcher

In addition to presentations by PhD researchers, the conference will feature a keynote lecture on the conference topic by Associate Professor Ellen Townsend (Psychology, University of Nottingham).  The conference will also include an expert panel of academics with extensive track records in research on various aspects of children’s lives. The conference will be a prime opportunity to network with PhD students from across the UK.

Abstracts (up to 250 words) are invited for submission by Midday on Tuesday 17th March.
Brief proposals for poster presentations are also welcome by this date

Presentations will last for 15 minutes and will be followed by opportunities for questions and discussion.

The conference is open to all current PhD candidates working on research involving children across all academic disciplines.

Please email your abstract and the title of your paper to:
PG-CCH-Network@nottingham.ac.uk with your name, institutional affiliation and role.

For more information about the conference and the Postgraduate Children and Childhood Network, please visit our website at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/children-and-childhood-network/postgraduate-network/index.aspx 

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.

Call for Papers for a panel at the MLA 2016

The readership of children’s and young adult literature has always been diverse. Yet 2014 witnessed an explosion of anxious discourse surrounding adult interest in the genre. Ruth Graham’s polemical Slate essay “Against YA: Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children’s Books” spawned an array of meditations on children’s literature and cultural narratives of “growing up,” including pieces by A.O. Scott in The New York Times Magazine and Christopher Beha in The New Yorker. Together, these articles seem to bespeak a “cultural anxiety of immaturity,” to borrow a phrase from Beverly Lyon Clark, who has traced the prehistory of this phenomenon in her book Kiddie Lit (2004). Continue reading CFP: The Anxious Publics of Literature for Young People →

Continue reading Call for Papers Children and Childhood Network of the Social Science History Association (SSHA 2015) →

Second Call for Papers:
Domesticating geopolitics

RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Exeter, UK, 2-4 September 2015

Convened by Dr. Tara Woodyer, Dr. Diana Martin (University of Portsmouth); Dr. Sean Carter, Dr. Philip Kirby (University of Exeter)

Co-sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

From the outset, critical geopolitics has emphasised approaches that question spatial distinctions between foreign/domestic politics and political distinctions between formal/popular geopolitics. More recently, feminist contributions to critical geopolitical debates have re-articulated the necessity of including the ‘everyday’ and the ‘ordinary’ into our accounts of the geopolitical, in part to work towards the dissolution of clear-cut distinctions between public and private, and towards the increasing realisation that different scales are not separate but intertwined. Continue reading CFP: Domesticating Geopolitics →