CALL FOR PAPERS
Children’s Media and (Post-)Colonialism 1880-2000: Remediating the Child-Savage Analogy
International workshop, Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, August 17-19, 2011
The international and interdisciplinary research project PLACIM: Towards a Platform for a Cultural History of Children’s Media organizes an international workshop on the migration of childhood images between media through time. More specifically, this workshop focuses on the remediation of the child-savage analogy between 1880 and 2000. This network initiative is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Dutch Science Foundation, N W O).
As media historians have pointed out, new media do not supersede older media in linear fashion. Rather, media are engaged in ongoing “remediation”, mimicking and transforming each other’s material vehicles of representation, styles and content. These processes of transfer and adaptation also affect the tropes, commonplaces, icons and plots constituting childhood images. If there is continual interaction between older and newer media, then the diachronic trajectories of childhood images cannot be comprehended as rise-shine-decline sequences. More likely, these images are continually reiterated from one medium to another and from one period to another. We want to explore the non-linear dynamics of childhood images, which compels us to transcend the limits of medium-specific histories and to explore new modes of writing cultural history.
Besides the network members (affiliated to universities in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands), we would also like to invite a limited number of external participants up to a maximum of 20 presenters in all. The workshop is to prepare the way for a coherent publication on the topic. Researchers working within the fields of media studies, media history, children’s literature studies and childhood studies are invited to submit a 300 word abstract. We particularly welcome case studies that trace the trajectories of specific embodiments of the child-savage analogy in diverse media through time. This abstract is to specify the period, media and trope(s) that your paper will focus on. The abstract is to be accompanied by a short bio.
Please submit your abstract to the workshop convener before December 1, 2010:
Dr. Elisabeth Wesseling
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Maastricht University
P.O. Box 616
6200 MD Maastricht
THE NETHERLANDS
Tel.: 00-31-43-3883309
Lies.Wesseling@Maastrichtuniversity.nl