[Comicsstudiessociety] Updated CfP: Children's Literature and Climate Change

[Lara Saguisag]

Dear colleagues,


We recently updated our CfP for The Lion and the Unicorn's special issue on Children's Literature and Climate Change. We are extending the deadline to August 20, 2020. The updated CfP (pasted below and attached as a PDF) also briefly notes the connections between our current global health crisis and the climate crisis.


We hope some folks on this list will consider submitting essays and/or help us circulate the updated CfP.


We wish you and yours peace and good health during this difficult, uncertain time.


Warmly,


Lara Saguisag
Pronouns: she, her, hers
Associate Professor
English Department | CUNY-The College of Staten Island
Author of Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2018).<https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/incorrigibles-and-innocents/9780813591766>



CALL FOR PAPERS (updated May 2020)


Children’s Literature and Climate Change

Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn


Guest Editors:

Marek Oziewicz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Lara Saguisag, College of Staten Island-City University of New York


We seek essays on how children’s literature empowers young people to productively engage with the

challenges of climate change. After decades of climate change denial and toothless mainstream

response, young people are angry. In response to climate change illiteracy and the impotence and

negligence of adult-led institutions, teenage activists such as Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Greta

Thunberg are calling for radical and immediate action. Their voices are now being amplified by

millions of adults, who discovered during the pandemic that they are expendable in a system that

considers unlivable wages, unaffordable healthcare, underfunded education, unwholesome food,

unregulated destruction of the planet, and mass sacrifice of all life to be an acceptable price for the

benefit of the few in the ecocidal “market economy.” How does children’s literature and media stoke

this transformative anger and inspire young people to address the climate crisis and fight for their

fundamental rights to life, health, and sustenance? How can educators and scholars of children’s

literature support this fight? What new concepts, approaches, and narratives are needed to

accelerate the sociopolitical revolution that will dismantle the status quo of slow violence against all

life on the planet, or what Amitav Ghosh calls “the Great Derangement”? In this issue, we intend to

bring together innovative research on children’s literature that attends to multiple facets of climate

change and advances a conversation about the planetary future we can and want to create.


Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The role of children’s literature on climate change in raising young people’s awareness about

their responsibility to the biosphere;

• Depictions of climate change across various genres and forms, including picturebooks, chapter

books, comics, short stories, and novels;

• Films, apps, music, and games that engage with climate change and seek to mobilize youth

action;

• Constructions of childhood in climate change narratives and discourses;

• Climate change and youth participation in community protests, political campaigns, nonviolent

civil disobedience, ecotage (ecosabotage), and ecorism (ecoterrorism);

• Climate change narratives about and by Indigenous youth and youth of color, who are often at

the forefront of climate justice initiatives and whose communities are disproportionately

threatened by climate change;

• Children's and YA books that link responsibility to climate change with, in the words of Kim Q.

Hall, “commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist”;

• Depictions of environmental racism and classism as facets of climate change;

• Climate change and human migrations, including stories about climate refugees;

• Comparative studies of children's and YA literature on climate change published in the global

north and the global south;

• Visions of climate futures, including discourses of hope or despair;

• Reimagining and restructuring institutions of children’s literature that depend on, profit from,

and support polluting, extractive industries;

• Intersections of critical discourse on climate change and children’s literature scholarship,

including new taxonomies and emerging genres apposite to the challenges of conceptualizing

climate change, from environmental literature and cli-fi to eco-fiction and beyond;

• Reevaluations of existing literary traditions through new theoretical concepts or approaches

such as energy humanities, environmental humanities, indigenous futurisms, the

Anthropocene, ecocritical posthumanism, and other lenses.


If you have any questions, guest editors Marek Oziewicz and Lara Saguisag can be reached at

LU.Climateissue at gmail.com . Essays are due by August 20, 2020, but if you need a few days’

extension, let us know. Submissions should be in the range of 4000 to 8000 words, although we will

also consider shorter, forum-length essays. Accepted articles will appear in The Lion and the Unicorn,

vol. 45, no. 2 (2021).

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