Call for Abstracts

Submissions to the 2011 Congress have now closed.

Participants are welcome to submit a presentation proposal either for a 20 minute paper, 60 minute workshop, a 90 minute colloquium session, a poster, or a virtual paper. All presentations will be in English.

We invite participants to engage with the conference theme by exploring its scholarly possibilities with respect to the following topics and related ideas (alternative topics are welcomed):

  • Risky Business (e.g. corporations; risk & resilience; exhilaration)
  • Who’s Watching? Who’s Listening? (e.g. surveillance; laughter; censorship; audience; privacy; voyeurism)
  • It’s Not Easy Being Green (e.g. activism; environments & environmentalism; agency; difference)
  • Exploring the Dark Side (e.g. subversion; humour; [ethical] boundaries; moralities)
  • Temptations (e.g. consumption; pleasure; privilege; seduction; power)
  • Transformations (e.g. adaptation; translation; epiphanies; bodies; terrorism; carnivalesque)
  • Old Ghosts (e.g. corporeality; spectres; hauntings; return of the repressed; histories; exorcisms)
  • Out of Bounds (e.g. transgressions; migrations; rebellions & conformities; citizenship; playfulness; liminality)
  • Safe Spaces (e.g. nostalgia; globalisation; cyber-cultures; sanctuaries)
  • Secrets and Lies (e.g. sexual abuse; survival; trauma; recovery; truths; jokes; deceptions)
  • Memory and Forgetting (e.g. origins; nostalgia; memorials; repressions; amnesia; archives)

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts of 100 to 250 words (max) should clearly address the conference overall theme, be specific about which children’s texts are to be examined, identify a particular theoretical or methodological approach, and pose a specific question or state a specific argument. Abstracts will be printed in the conference program.

Critical Dates

Closing date for submissions December 5, 2010
Notification of outcome Before the end of 2010
Earlybird registration deadline April 1, 2011
Presenter registration deadline May 2, 2011

There will be no conference proceedings but presenters may choose to submit written papers to the fully refereed academic journal, International Research in Children’s Literature, the official journal of IRSCL. Material from the Society’s congresses will be published in the journal, subject to selection, rigorous peer review and revision. The journal will publish four issues in a biennium: three will largely consist of papers from the biennial congress with the fourth being a special issue based around a particular theme.