Call For Papers

UPDATE: The submission deadline has been extended till 7th June, 2022.

The very idea of childhood as a social construct in which boundaries –
legal, social, cultural – are deployed to identify, isolate, and
compartmentalise childhood as a distinct stage in human development,
implies the necessity of socialisation to facilitate the movement from
“child” to “adult”. As theorised by Chris Jenks in Childhood (Second
Edition 2005), this significantly involves the exercise of discipline
via punishment and reward through the institutions of family, schools,
social communities, who legally and socially exercise power and
control over the life of a child even as the idea of childhood changes
with time. Accordingly, what is considered appropriate punishments
mutates too, which begs the question: if the concept of punishment
exists in a state of flux, at what point can a punishment be a crime?
As children garner recognition as vocal social agents away from the
traditional places of quietness, child-protection laws undergo
amendments with changing social norms. Hence the once-recommended
methods of corporal punishment by parents, educationists, and
children’s literature authors, is now controversial and banned in
multiple countries.

Punishment, as a method of discipline, exists not just in the physical
space, but figures prominently in the literary and psychological space
too, as seen in Pankaj Butalia’s Dark Room (2013). This becomes
conspicuous in the representations of crimes which lead to severe
punishment as seen in fairy tales, or as repercussions for infractions
and perceived deviancies against recognised social and institutional
rules and norms as in school stories. They exist to encourage
socialisation into “good citizens” through didacticism and fear of the
switch. As such, the vulnerable child and child reader may momentarily
resist discipline, but must either succumb or create a new world
order. Positioned against an antagonist who might be a teacher, a
stranger, a family member, or a fellow child, they are exposed to
“crimes” which can range from extreme, like death, to the
psychologically scarring but technically legal, which calls into
question the abstract nature of crime itself. How harmful must an act
be for it to be legally and socially recognised as a crime? In the
definitions of crime, punishment and justice, who is being excluded
from seeking justice? What of the child trapped in an adult’s world?

Narratives of Criminality, Punishment and Social Justice in Children’s
Literature, a two-day online conference held by the Department of
English, Jadavpur University, in collaboration with the Association
for Children’s Literature in South Asia, invites papers which explore
the ideas, manifestations and representations of criminality,
punishment, and social justice as they intersect and define one
another in children’s and young adult literature. The conference will
take place on 5th and 6th of August, 2022. We encourage undergraduate
and graduate students and early-career researchers to apply.

Possible topics for exploration include but are not limited to:

1. Role of the law and juvenile crime
2. The gendered and/or sexual body as crime in CYA Lliterature
3. Punishment and childhood trauma
4. The investigative child
5. The psychology of crime and punishment
6. Criminalising childhoods
7. Crime and religious identity in CYA Literature
8. Cybercrime in CYA Literature
9. The child as casualty/accessory/witness in crime
10. Hegemonic power and punishment as discipline
11. Justice in mythological retellings and folklore for children
12. Justice and individual agency
13. Punitive death in Children’s Literature
14. Pedagogies of prisons and confinements

Please send in abstracts of not more than 250 words, 5 keywords and a
bio-note of 100 words in two Word documents to
jukidlitconference2022@gmail.com by 31st May 2022 with the subject
line: “Crime and Punishment in CYA abstract”. The bio-note should be
in a separate Word Document along with the abstract title and should
contain name, affiliation, and location. Please do not include your
name in the abstract. Responses will be sent out after 15th June,
2022. The time limit for every paper is 20 minutes.

--
Stephen Hayes, Author of The Year of the Dragon
Sample or purchase The Year of the Dragon:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/907935
Web site: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk