CfP Children in World Cinema

Type: Call for Papers
Date: July 31, 2016
Location: Texas, United States
Subject Fields: Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Childhood and Education, Cultural History / Studies, Film and Film History, Popular Culture Studies

CFP Children in World Cinema
Call for submissions to a collection that examines the child in World (non-Western) cinema. Many studies of the child character in film, or films made for children, too often focus on Western cinema and Western models of childhood. This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. The child image in non-Western cinema provides a broad landscape in which notions of the child and childhood take on varied meanings. This collection seeks to offer a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood as depicted in film.  We seek contributions that examine the child image in cinemas from Africa, Asia, South America, India, Australia, and the Middle East. While there are numerous important, empirical, data-driven studies about real children and conditions of childhood in non-Western regions, we seek essays that examine the child image and its philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, or cultural meanings as they appear in cinema.

Some topics include (certainly not limited to):
children and innocence
images of child soldiers
coming of age narratives
children and geographic space
children/childhood and modernity
children and technology
local vs. global childhood
children and knowledge acquisition
children as political agents/actors
the child in war or revolution
children and sexuality
children and labor
child agency
negotiations by children of racial/ethnic/cultural differences
negotiations by children of social, political, economic conditions
children's relationships with adults, parents, siblings, or peers
gender and children
children as refugees

Please submit a 500 word abstract, current contact information along with brief biography (or CV) as Word attachments Debbie Olson at Debbieo@okstate.edu  by 31 July 2016.  Authors will be notified by 31 August 2016. The deadline for finished essays (using Chicago notes and bibliography style) is 31 January 2017.

Debbie Olson, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Valley College. She has edited or co-edited a number of collections on children and popular culture, including Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema (2012), Portrayals of Children in Contemporary Culture (2013) Hitchcock’s Children: The Child in the Films of Alfred and Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg.  She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Popular Culture and Series Editor for Lexington’s Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series.