ACYIG Updates

Seeking new title suggestions for ACYIG Newsletter

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In response to member feedback, we are enlisting suggestions for a new name for the ACYIG Newsletter. We are looking for a unique name that would be followed by the tagline, “A publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group.” Our intent is to professionalize the publication with a title that better reflects the peer-reviewed nature and high caliber of our authors’ work. We hope that the new name will embody the spirit and future direction of ACYIG, be indicative of our membership’s common goals, and provide name-recognition. We encourage submissions that are descriptive, memorable, and intuitive.

If your suggestion is selected, we will award you a $100 gift certificate to a local or online bookstore of your choice. Please submit your entry at https://acyig.americananthro.org/newsletter/survey-name-acyigs-newsletter/ by March 6th. The new title will be announced at the 2015 ACYIG Annual Meeting on March 12-15, and implemented in our October 2015 issue.

Calls for Papers: Conferences

CFP: The Anxious Publics of Literature for Young People

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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 →

Training/Education

Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School 2015

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The Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School (I.F.S.) is now accepting applications for the Summer 2015 sessions.

Summer 2015 Research & Training on Isla Mujeres, Mexico

The Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School specializes in community based projects and trains students on how to conduct ethnographic research. Located on a small Mexican Caribbean island, much of the student research is focused on community needs. Some of our current areas of interest: Culture & Environment, Latin America & Caribbean, Medical Anthropology, Gender & Identity, Anthropology of Education, Childhood and Youth Studies, History, Space & Meaning, and Economic Development. There is a wide variety of subjects to research. In the past, students have conducted research on teenage pregnancy, HIV and Dengue Fever prevention, Catholic and Maya religion, Economic Development and tourism, Sea Turtle and Whale Shark conservation. For more information, please see our website: http://www.AnthroFieldSchool.com/

Funding Opportunities, Training/Education

Two Fully-funded PhD Studentships at Oxford

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Funded through TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

For more information on these studentships: http://torch.ox.ac.uk/childhoodstudentships

Applicants are sought for two PhD (DPhil) studentships as part of an interdisciplinary project on ‘Childhood maltreatment and lifetime resilience’ at University of Oxford. One student will work in Faculty of History on ‘Child abuse and neglect in mid-twentieth-century Britain’. The other student will work in Department of Experimental Psychology on ‘Child maltreatment and psychopathology: an investigation of risk and resilience’.  Continue reading Two Fully-funded PhD Studentships at Oxford →

ACYIG Blog

Interrogating the Wave: Media Representations of African Migrant Youth

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by Stephanie Maher

“Images are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary status, a history that parallels and participates in the stories we tell ourselves about our own evolution”– (W. J. T. Mitchell 1984, 504)

Media representations are powerful. Not only do they embody the appealing veneer of journalistic impartiality, which seems to objectively reflect world in unadulterated ways, but also they help to generate public opinion and thus create consensus when crafting and mobilizing particular policy responses.

Such an image-policy nexus is exemplified in the hyper-mediatized phenomenon of clandestine migration out of West Africa during 2006 and 2007. While the Western route was effectively crippled by the implementation of border controls and surveillance technologies, the images we see today of boat migrants leaving North African shores bear a striking similarity to those circulated nearly a decade ago.

In order to highlight the productive relationship between image and policy, this photo essay explores some of the visual and rhetorical representations of West African boat migrants that circulated widely in the European and American press during what was called a “wave” of clandestine arrivals in the Canary Islands.   …read more on the Youth Circulations blog.

2006, Juan Medina / Reuters
2006, Juan Medina / Reuters

 

Calls for Papers: Publishing

CFP: Global Studies of Childhood

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Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Adolescence:
troubling the global/local nexus

Special Issue of Global Studies of Childhood

Guest Editors:
DAVID W. KUPFERMAN, University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu SOPHIA RODRIGUEZ, College of Charleston
MAREK TESAR, University of Auckland

Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions. What do we mean by these terms and how do we employ them? How do/did we come to know these categories? Who or what invented them? The concern of this special issue is with the ontological and epistemological knowledges in play with regard to the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence, what they do and how they perform, what they represent and how these categories and brackets are perceived by all actors, both those that are inside and those who are out-side of them. This special issue calls for a re-thinking of these concepts. The disciplines of philosophy and sociology are elevated in this call for papers, with the expectation that these perspectives will allow authors to theorize these concerns in unexpected, innovative and cutting edge ways, in relation to the complicated globalized contexts of local experiences and lives.  Continue reading CFP: Global Studies of Childhood →

New Books

New Book! System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation

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19781469622590by Lauren J. Silver
UNC Press (2015)

System Kids considers the daily lives of adolescent mothers as they negotiate the child welfare system to meet the needs of their children and themselves. Often categorized as dependent and delinquent, these young women routinely become wards of the state as they move across the legal and social borders of a fragmented urban bureaucracy. Combining critical policy study and ethnography, and drawing on current scholarship as well as her own experience as a welfare program manager, Lauren Silver demonstrates how social welfare “silos” construct the lives of youth as disconnected, reinforcing unforgiving policies and imposing demands on women the system was intended to help. As clients of a supervised independent living program, they are expected to make the transition into independent adulthood, but Silver finds a vast divide between these expectations and the young women’s lived reality. Continue reading New Book! System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation →

Calls for Papers: Publishing

CFP: “The Child in Question: Texts, Cultures, Curricula” – Special issue of Curriculum Inquiry

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Deadline: 15 August 2015

The Editors of Curriculum Inquiry in collaboration with Guest Editors Lisa Farley and Julie Garlen Maudlin are seeking manuscripts for a special issue that is scheduled for publication in late summer/early Fall of 2016.
This issue titled “The Child in Question: Texts, Cultures, Curricula,”aims to feature the work of established and emerging scholars from a variety of academic fields and disciplines who explore critical approaches to understanding childhood using a diverse range of methodological and theoretical frameworks.

We invite articles that explore childhood subjectivity, discursive constructions of and about childhood, and curricular and pedagogical issues impacting children in order to advance imaginative, critical, and situated conceptions of childhood. Contributors may take up a wide range of theoretical frameworks, including feminist, post-colonial, post-structural, psychoanalytic, historical, and autobiographical lenses to present diverse and divergent perspectives that interrogate normative conceptions of childhood, development, and curriculum designed “for” children. Some specific subjects that may be explored include: the construction of difference and otherness, the complexities of the unconscious, the making of childhood subjectivity through discursive constructs and historical contexts, the reconceptualization of developmental psychology, the relation of childhood to coloniality and nationalism, the construction of otherness within and outside indigenous cultures, fictional childhoods, gender variant children and the question of sexuality, and the racialization of childhood in history, educational research, and practice.

Manuscripts for this special issue are expected to be between 6000 and 8000 words. Guidelines for manuscript submission along with other relevant information will be available on the journal’s website. All manuscripts submitted to Curriculum Inquiry are subjected to a preliminary internal review by the editorial team, and those deemed appropriate for publication in the journal will be sent anonymously to external reviewers. Questions about the focus of the special issue can be addressed to guest editors Lisa Farleyat lfarley@edu.yorku.ca or Julie Garlen Maudlin at jmaudlin@georgiasouthern.edu.

Other questions regarding submission can be addressed directly to the Curriculum InquiryEditorial Office at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca. 

Guest Editors
Lisa Farley (lfarley@edu.yorku.ca)
Julie Garlen Maudlin (jmaudlin@georgiasouthern.edu)

 

http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ed/rcui-special-issue-cfp-the-child-in-question