The Association for Research in Cultures of Young People invites proposals from scholars and practitioners in all areas for a roundtable discussion of youth, sexuality, and technology at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Carleton University (23-31 May 2009).
Examples from both real life and fiction suggest that current laws regarding child pornography are challenged by new technologies: for example, in recent incidents in the United States (at Daphne Middle School and at a Hamilton Township, NJ, middle school), young people took nude photographs of themselves with cell phone cameras to share with friends; several episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation have focused on the ways in which technology has enabled the mass distribution of sexually-loaded images of female minors. We ask participants in the panel to consider the ways in which understandings and expressions of young people’s sexuality have been changed by technology. Does a young person shift from agent of self-expression to pornographic object in such cases, and if so, at what point does such a shift take place? What are the legal ramifications of young people’s uses of cell and internet technologies to share text or images with friends? How do legal and social responses to such cases reflect assumptions about young people, sexuality, and agency? Is technology producing new forms of sexuality?
Please send proposals (700 words maximum) by e-mail or disk, in Microsoft Word or RTF format, by 15 November 2008 to:
Mavis Reimer
Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures
Department of English
University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Ave.
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9
Canada
m.reimer@uwinnipeg.ca